New River Gorge National Park and Preserve: The Vistas

Posted on April 6, 2023 by admin

Late morning on our first full day in West Virginia, we found ourselves at the Endless Wall Trail. It’s not only a place for horizontal walking motion across the landscape, but the vertical motion of rock climbing too, as the park sign points out.

How we got there (that is, besides driving in our car to the trail head) is best characterized as a misreading or misunderstanding of a map on my part. So the trail wasn’t the one we’d been looking for, but it seemed like a good trail, so we headed in, with a place called Diamond Point as the goal.

Not a particularly difficult trail, for the most part, though there were roots and rocks and mud patches, but they never rose past the level of sometime annoyance. Nowhere was it steep, but the trail rose slowly in elevation much of the time.

It takes a fairly healthy old man about 30 minutes to get to Diamond Head. I mean, Diamond Point. Odd the things you think about sometimes, such as a land form in the tropics while tramping through some temperate zone mud, just because of a coincidental name.

Close to the destination.

Some of the glories that were Diamond Point.

There isn’t agreement on the exact age of New River among scientists, but it is measured in the hundreds of millions of years. Guess it was worth climbing a slope to take a look into deep time.

But you don’t need to walk that far to see a sweeping vista at Grandview, in a part of the park that’s some miles south-southeast of Diamond Point. We went there toward the end of the same pleasantly warm day, driving on local roads through Beckley, as well as short stretches of I-64 and West Virginia 9, to get to a large NPS parking lot, playground and ball field, occupied that day by small groups of parents and kids.

A walk of five minutes or so led from the play area to Grandview overlook. It is.

Nothing like a horseshoe bend, large or small.

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve: The Bridges

Posted on April 5, 2023 by admin

I didn’t appreciate the New River Gorge Bridge in West Virginia until I’d driven across it more than once, and more importantly, seen it from a distance.

A handsome design for a magnificent setting. Elegant. Sturdy. Spanning the gorge spider-web like. Imagine a species of large, intelligent arachnids that can extrude metal and spin webs of steel across the many gorges on their forested planet. Artful shapes like the New Gorge River Bridge, maybe.

Even better, such an artful shape was made by us clever apes here on Earth. Within my lifetime, completed in October 1977. If I’d been in that part of West Virginia then, I could have driven across the newly minted bridge carrying my newly minted drivers license, obtained in some haste that summer to take a girl I’d recently met on dates. But I wasn’t anywhere near the bridge in my South Texas adolescent driving days, and never heard of it till much later.

“The bridge reduced a 40-minute drive down narrow mountain roads and across one of North America’s oldest rivers to less than a minute,” the park service says. “When it comes to road construction, mountains do pose a challenge. In the case of the New River Gorge Bridge, challenge was transformed into a work of structural art — the longest steel span in the Western Hemisphere and the third-highest in the United States.

“The West Virginia Division of Highways chose the Michael Baker Co. as the designer, and the construction contract was awarded to the American Bridge Division of U.S. Steel. In June 1974, the first steel was positioned over the gorge by trolleys running on three-inch diameter cables. The cables were strung 3,500 feet between two matching towers. Cor-ten steel, with a rust-like appearance that never needs painting, was used in construction.”

Good to know, but if anything, the experience of driving across the bridge is too detached from the sense that you’re passing over an 800-foot void. The opaque fences along the edges of the bridge obscure the drop, though you do get a glimpse of the far-away cliffs of the gorge.

The bridge transits New River Gorge National Park and Preserve land on either side. A few minutes walk from the park’s visitor center takes you to a view of the bridge, which we saw on the morning of March 23, the brightest, warmest day of the trip.

The gorge, looking away from the bridge.

The old way to cross the gorge by vehicle involved spending 40 minutes or more on small roads that switchbacked their way down into the gorge, to just a few feet above the river, where there’s a much shorter bridge.

Stop there and you see the postcard-Instagram view of the New River Gorge Bridge in all its glory.

We drove down to the river the morning of March 24, the day after we’d seen the bridge from near the visitors center. Cold rain fell periodically and clouds clung to the side of the gorge.

A small aside. I saw that a number of things are named after Sen. Byrd in West Virginia, and I’m sure if I’d stayed longer, I’d have seen more. Why not this grandest of Mountaineer State bridges? Than again, maybe the thought of it being the “Byrd Bridge” has given policymakers second thoughts on a renaming.

The bridge down near the banks, where a few generations of West Virginians before 1977 made the crossing, does have a name: Tunny Hunsaker Bridge.

I had to look him up. I thought, local politico? A local man who didn’t return from a war? No, he was a prizefighter who later was police chief of nearby Fayetteville, West Virginia (d. 2005). I’m not up on the history of boxing. Now I’ve read that Muhammad Ali’s first professional win, in 1960, was against Hunsaker.

The current bridge dates from 1997, built to replace an earlier iteration. You can’t walk across the New River Gorge Bridge (except on Bridge Day), but you can walk across Tunny Hunsaker any time. So we did in turn. When you can cross an interesting bridge in an epic setting, you should.

Tri-State Appalachian Equinox Road Trip

Posted on March 26, 2023 by admin

Old Chinese proverb, I’ve heard: even a journey of 1,000 leagues begins by backing out of the driveway. That we did on Friday, March 17. We pulled back into the driveway on Saturday, March 25. In between we traveled 2,219 miles, using the ragged marvel that is the system of roads in the United States.

My fanciful name for the trip refers to three states that were the focus: Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. We actually passed through seven states, also including Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and very briefly, Maryland.

We saw a lot of places, but two in particular motivated the trip as a whole. One was Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright sculpture – I mean, house – perched over an irregular drop on Bear Run, a creek in rural Pennsylvania. Visiting Fallingwater had long been an ambition of Yuriko’s, maybe since before she lived in this country, since FLW is known far and wide; but I needed no persuasion to go myself.

The other was New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in eastern-ish West Virginia. This was my suggestion, since I keep up on national parks. But I’ve wanted to go there a good while, long before Congress promoted it to national park, which only happened in 2020. Besides, it was high time I spent a little more than a few minutes in West Virginia which, for whatever else it has, is known for its surpassing scenery. This reputation, I can confirm, is deserved.

Weather-wise, spring travel is a crap shoot. The day we left a cold, unpleasant wind blew in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, and it followed us under the same gray skies and at temps barely above freezing the next day, into central Ohio.

By last Monday, in southwest Pennsylvania, temps had moderated with the appearance of the sun, and each day was more pleasant than the last as we headed south into West Virginia, where the grass had greened and some bushes had too, though most trees were at the barely budding stage. Thursday, March 23 proved best of all, with sunny skies and temps in the 70s, allowing us to enjoy the best meal of our trip — ricebowl meals — at a picnic table in Fayetteville, W.Va.

A cold rain came calling on Friday as we headed from West Virginia back to Ohio. On Saturday, again in central Ohio, it wasn’t bitterly cold, but the wind was so strong at times that it jostled my car as I drove and my body as I walked. Rain squalls came and went, with a spell of sleet I actually enjoyed, sitting in our parked car listening, knowing that the ice was too small to do any damage. Returning home yesterday, Illinois was pretty much as we’d left it, chilly and not-quite-spring.

The upshot of it all is to pack for the weather variety you’re going to encounter, and I was more than glad – as I returned to the car in a stiff wind, crossing a green field in small-town Ohio, feeling wind chill that must have been around zero (and I mean Fahrenheit) – that I’d brought the coat I use most of the winter.

We brought the dog. We don’t want to leave her at a kennel any more, and no one was at home to mind her. Having your dog along is something like traveling with a small child you can’t take into restaurants or a lot of other places, but we don’t regret a bit of it. Long drives in the car don’t faze her at all, since after the first few minutes, that’s like lying around the house and, as the comedian said, a dog’s job is lying around the house.

She had her energetic moments too, more than you’d think for an ancient dog, such as walking the trail to Diamond Point overlooking the New River Gorge, with its smooth straightaways through forests giving way to patches of mud, large rocks or tightly packed tree roots underfoot, sometimes all of those in a single stretch. Our reward for the sometime-slog was a vista of rare beauty. Her reward? I don’t think it was anything so visual. Maybe following the pack is its own reward for her.

Companion dogs also mean you acquaint yourself with the look and feel of the front office and main entrance of limited-service hotels during the empty early a.m. hours, well lit as a Broadway stage but without any players. Except maybe for the night clerk, just outside the door, who is peering into his phone, cigarette in other hand. Probably our dog, as any dog, could be trained to pee on a disposable rug in the room during the small hours, but somehow we’ve never wanted to do that. There’s something appealing somehow about the ritual of dressing as simply as possible a few minutes after waking at 2:30 or 3, or 25 or 6 to 4, hitching a leash to the dog’s collar and repairing to the first patch of green, or pebbles ringed by a curb, outside the hotel door

Take me home, country roads. I’ll say this for West Virginia, it’s got some crazy-ass serpentine roads through its ancient and forested mountains. The Laurel Highlands in southwest Pennsylvania was no piker in that regard, either. You need to keep an intense focus on the road as it winds this way and that, rises and falls, and passes ever so close to boulder walls, massive trees and wicked ditches. If you don’t mind thinking about your mortality every now and then, that’s some good driving.

Mostly good driving. There are moments when a red sedan, or a black pickup truck, decides that tailgating you at roughly the speed limit as you wind around and navigate switchbacks, is a good idea, and blasts around you at the first marginal opportunity, double solid stripes be damned.

Yet I only got the smallest sampling of the twisty roads. No roads without pavement this trip, though plenty enough didn’t bother with details such as guardrails. Another, entirely unpaved and mostly unregulated network of roads and tracks, many perhaps pre-New Deal, must exist in West Virginia. Out away from the nearest town, while we were parked a national park site on a small paved road, three ATVs buzzed past, each with two people. They were headed toward town after emerging from the woods, their vehicles streaked with mud. I was just close enough to see in their faces they’d had a fine time out in the unpaved network.

Also, if you really wanted to get home to West Virginia, wouldn’t you take the Interstate?

We made stops in Ohio going and coming.

On Saturday, March 18 we made our way south from Ann Arbor, where we’d spent the first night, to Columbus, Ohio, to spent the second. On the way is the Basilica and National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, a Byzantine edifice rising in a small town, which we visited, but also sites associated with Warren G. Harding: his memorial and burial site, and also his home, in the large town of Marion, Ohio.

Our return home, beginning on Friday, March 24, took us back through Ohio, to Columbus for the last night of the trip. Saturday morning, after takeout breakfast at Tim Horton’s – for that part of Ohio is in the Tim Horton’s orb, we were glad to learn – we visited downtown Columbus and the Ohio Statehouse in a howling cool wind. Ate lunch, Korean-style chicken and salad, sitting in the car in a clearly gentrified neighborhood, the bricked-streeted German Village. We spent the rest of Saturday driving back, via Indianapolis.

On the morning of Sunday, March 19, we left Columbus and made our way east through the remarkable town of Newark, Ohio, then Wheeling and Moundsville, West Virginia and from there to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized far outer suburb of Pittsburgh. Or at least it will be in a few years.

On Monday, we paid our visit to Fallingwater, taking turns on tours, after which we had lunch in a low-season tourist town and took an impediment-rich hike in Ohiopyle State Park, along the rocky shore of the Youghiogheny River, at that point boasting a highly picturesque waterfall. That was enough for one day for Yuriko, who napped in the car (along with the dog) as I walked the much shorter and smoother path to Fort Necessity National Battlefield late that afternoon.

On Tuesday, we made our way back west a short distance, to visit the Palace of Gold in rural West Virginia, in the peculiar north panhandle of the state (which I’ve long thought of as a conning tower). We returned that day to Uniontown by way of Moundsville, W. Va., home of an ancient mound of remarkable height, a former penitentiary of remarkable solidity, and a bridge across the Ohio River of remarkable elegance. Those things, and some tasty if not remarkable barbecue.

The next day, we left for West Virginia, but not by the most direct route, because I wanted to see the Flight 93 National Memorial in deep rural Pennsylvania. Progressively smaller roads lead there, including – as we traveled it, which I figured would be the quickest route – a short stretch of I-68 through the oddity that is the Maryland panhandle. Late that day, Wednesday, we arrived in Beckley, W. Va.

We spent almost all of Thursday at the national park, at one sight or another, driving and hiking and pondering historic and sometimes crumbled structures. But that wasn’t quite enough. On Friday morning, before we left for Ohio, we went back to the park. Around noon, we headed west, passing through Charleston long enough to visit the West Virginia State Capitol and eat Chinese takeout, though not at the same time. A little north of Charleston, we crossed back into Ohio after gassing up near the small town of Ripley, West Virginia. Believe it or not.

One other thing: this was a vacation from the news, which following is part of my job. Except for the briefest snippets on the radio, when sometimes I didn’t change stations out of habit for some seconds, I ignored the news of the world, or even smaller parts of it. I think that’s a good thing to do.

But of course, a few things got through. I heard the opening bars of The Dick Van Dyke Show theme on a news program one day, and I jumped to the conclusion that he had died. That isn’t a big jump, since he’s 97. But no, merely a one-car accident.

Image being that well regarded, that your minor auto accident as a nonagenarian is national news. Anyway, glad not to say, RIP, Dick Van Dyke.

Buckhead From on High

Posted on November 7, 2022 by admin

Two days after I returned from the West last month, I went to Atlanta for a work conference for most of week. Atlanta and I go back a ways; I first went there by bus in ’82, but also later. Still, my most recent visit was in 1999, so it’s been a while.

This time, there was work to do, of course, and events to attend, and I got to spend time with colleagues I hadn’t seen in a number of years, or ever, except for Zoom. That was good.

I also had a few excellent meals not at my expense, especially one at The Consulate, a restaurant in Midtown that rates its own Atlas Obscura page.

I stayed in an upper floor of the conference hotel in Buckhead, which is like a second downtown for Atlanta, something like the Galleria district in Houston. I enjoyed some good views from the room.

Including much of the rooftop of a major regional mall. Not something you see every day.

Sure, the property’s mechanicals need to be up there. But isn’t there also the opportunity to use at least part of the roof for games that might attract hipsters and their always at-hand cameras — to promote the mall on social media — such as ax throwing, bocce and shuffleboard?

Lake Tahoe

Posted on October 18, 2022 by admin

Lake Tahoe has long fascinated. Not necessarily for being a large alpine lake in the Sierra Nevada, elevation more than 6,200 feet above sea level, or as a relic of the last Ice Age, or for having the largest volume of any North American lake except for the five Great Lakes, though those interesting facts are surely of geographic importance. Or even for its reputation for scenic vistas which, I discovered myself in early October, is well deserved.

Rather, what fascinated me at a young age was the fact that the California-Nevada border cuts right across it (that border, incidentally, has a convoluted history otherwise). Even better, the bend in the line that contributes to both states’ distinctive shapes happens at a point in the middle of the lake. Do boats ever go out on Tahoe with their GPS, looking to float right on that imaginary geographical point? I like to think they do.

I took U.S. 50 west up into the mountains that day. Sacramento, where I started, is 30 feet above sea level. Eventually I reached Echo Summit, elevation 7,382 feet, where you can catch just the briefest glimpse of Lake Tahoe ahead and down more than a 1,000 feet – a perfect alpine blue like lakes in the Canadian Rockies.

But only glimpses, because if you’re driving U.S. 50 at that point, you’re snaking along a fairly busy two-lane highway with curves and drop-offs that demand your attention. Not a road for the easily spooked, but I liked it. There would be other mountain-meandering roads on this trip, cutting through thick forests or arid scrub and letting you dwell on your mortality if you’re so inclined.

First stop: Taylor Creek, and some nearby places, such as Tallac Point and Keva Beach.

The wayfinding could not be more straightforward.

The wide expanse of Tahoe. I’ll call it an honorary Great Lake. Crater Lake is deeper, so maybe it is, too. But I’ll have to see it first.

I’d have put my feet in the lake, except at that point — not really visible in my images — were some algae blooms: green, blobby and insalubrious looking. I wasn’t wrong to keep my distance.

“Nearshore algae blooms are a growing ecological threat to the lake – they seriously degrade water quality, make large areas of beach unpleasant with mats of decomposing algae, and for particular types of algae, can pose toxicity issues,” says the Tahoe Environmental Research Center of UC Davis.

A bit further north, at Inspiration Point on Emerald Bay, and up some feet from the shoreline.

The island in Emerald Bay: Fannett Island, apparently the only island in the entire 191 square miles of lake.

” A sparsely timbered, brush covered upthrust of granite that rises 150 feet above the water, Fannette Island was not always known by that name. During the past 100 years it has been known as Coquette, Fannette, Baranoff, Dead Man’s, Hermit’s, and Emerald Isle,” notes the California Dept. of Parks & Recreation.

The day’s best vista required a short climb. Really very short, and entirely worth the effort. Near Rubicon Point in D.L. Bliss State Park.

California 89 runs along the western shore of the lake, and I followed its winding, often scenic route to Tahoe City, then north to Truckee. Sometimes so scenic that the state neglected to include guardrails along some particularly steep stretches. Keep in your lane, or meet your maker. Obviously I kept to my lane.

At my last stop at the lake this time, I decided to put my feet in the clearer-looking water, at a pebble beach toward the northwestern shore.

Pebble and pine cones, that is.

In Indiana, You Take Vistas Where You Can Get Them

Posted on July 13, 2022 by admin

Our first back yard hibiscus of the summer. There will be many more for weeks to come, since the plants thrive with scarcely any effort on our part.

Before we went to Indiana this month, I got wind of the Hanson Ardmore Quarry Observation Tower in Fort Wayne. Turned out it wasn’t far from where we stayed, so after my jaunt to Lindenwood Cemetery, we took a look.

Tower might not quite be the word. It’s more of a fenced-in observation deck. But Hanson — a part of HeidelbergCement, a German building materials conglomerate no doubt controlled by shadowy billionaires — calls it a tower on the sign. The structure is at the end of a small parking lot that’s open to the public.

Regardless of the nomenclature, quite a view.

It was a Sunday, so the place was quiet. Still, Hanson has been digging limestone at this site for 80 years, and it is a big hole in the ground. Various sources, such as Roadside America, claim the quarry is 1,000 feet deep, but I don’t think so.

I’d say maybe 300 or 400 feet. Horseshoe Bend is 1,000 feet deep, and this is no Horseshoe Bend. Still, it isn’t something you see very often, a vista into a working quarry.

Colorado Plateau ’22 Leftovers

Posted on June 9, 2022 by admin

I’ve changed the name of this trip. What, doesn’t everyone name their trips? No? Anyway, Colorado Plateau ’22 is better than the ridiculous NV-AZ-UT 22, which looks like a part number in a tool-and-die factory.

But not quite all on the Colorado Plateau. Just outside Las Vegas, maybe five or so miles from where that city finally peters out on I-15 toward Los Angeles, is Seven Magic Mountains.

Magic, maybe, mountains no, at least not in any literal sense. An art installation by Ugo Rondinone, a Swiss artist.

We only passed through Zion NP, stopping only for a few minutes on the side of the road.

Near the entrance.

At the entrance.

A different entrance: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. A small bit of the vastness of the place, more than 1.8 million acres.

I knew that was a road I wanted to drive a little ways at least, to check out the views. My instincts were right.

When we were nearly in Page, Arizona, we stopped for a few minutes at a viewpoint over Lake Powell. I was flabbergasted by how low the lake looks.

And so it is. The lowest level since the lake was built. Lake Mead is low as well, so much so that (possible) mob hit victims have been discovered. Apparently the idea of draining Lake Powell to fill Lake Mead is being entertained by officialdom, I read, though it’s hard to know how seriously.

The cookers at Big John’s Texas Barbecue in Page.

Man, Big John made some mean ‘cue in those cookers.

The Lake Powell Motel, also in Page, where we stayed. For the second time. We were there in 1997. A one-minute walk to Big John’s.

When we stayed there 25 years ago, the property was called Bashful Bob’s Motel. Sometime in the 2010s, new ownership changed the name and spent a fair amount renovating the interiors so that they are pretty nice two-bedroom apartments. Back in the late ’90s, the rooms were old, but pleasant. I wonder if I have the ’97 bill somewhere to compare rates. Maybe.

Also, it’s clear that the owners had to renovate to compete with the numerous chain hotels in the town. Bashful Bob didn’t a lot of that kind of competition in the old days, just smaller properties, a few of which linger still in Page.

The Red Rock started as housing for workers building Glen Canyon Dam, built in 1958 by the Bureau of Reclamation. Actually, I suspect Bashful Bob’s started out that way as well.

In Moab, Utah, we stayed at the Apache Motel. We found it a most pleasant place to stay, and with a touch of movie history to it.

Clean, comfortable, not particularly cheap or expensive, feeling very much like a ’50s motel, though with a few modifications. The motel doesn’t let you forget that the Duke stayed there when filming movies nearby. Other stars did too.

One more feature at Temple Square in Salt Lake City: the Handcart Pioneer Monument.

More Mormons in metal: The centerpiece of the This is the Place Heritage Park, which is on a hill at the edge of the city, where B. Young reportedly told his followers This is the Place, as in, to settle. We dropped by for a short look.

At the base of the memorial are six figures depicting important in the history of this part of Utah who weren’t Mormons, such as a couple of fur trappers, a chief of the Shoshone, plus adventurers and explorers.

Including this fellow, John C. Fremont.

That’s my presidential site for the trip. Ran for president in ’56, after all.

Canyonlands National Park

Posted on June 3, 2022 by admin

In 2021, Arches NP had more than 1.8 million visitors, making it the 16th-most popular U.S. national park among the 63, while Canyonlands National Park had about half as many, 911,000, or the 28th-most popular park. It’s an interesting example of the beaten-path phenomenon.

That’s because it’s a five-minute drive to Arches from Moab, the sizable town where people stay to visit the park, and indeed where we stayed. The closest entrance to Canyonlands, on the other hand, is about 40 minutes away from Moab. Not a long drive, but not nearly as close as Arches, so that’s where people go.

So many, in fact, that this year the NPS is trying out a timed-entry system to Arches, to avoid huge lines at the park’s single vehicle entrance early in the morning. To space visitors out, that is. I reserved a time months ago, 9 a.m., so it was no problem getting in, and the park didn’t seem too crowded as the day went on, though certainly a fair number of people were around. Maybe the system is working.

In any case, I wasn’t about to miss Canyonlands, at least part of it. Two weeks ago, we left Moab for Salt Lake City, spending the morning of May 20 at Canyonlands. Or rather, at the Island in the Sky District of the park, a poetic naming choice that sums up the region nicely.

The day was overcast, and about 20 degrees cooler — the 60s F. rather than the 80s — than the day before in Arches. A front had blown through the night before.

Unlike Arches NP, Canyonlands is fairly large (more than 337,000 acres), and like Gaul, divided into three parts. Island in the Sky, but also The Maze and The Needles, separated mostly by the courses of the mighty Colorado and its almost as mighty tributary, the Green River.

Soon after entering Island in the Sky, you’re at the Shafer Canyon overlook.

Way down in the canyon is the unpaved Shafer Trail Road, which leads to the equally unpaved White Rim Road, a wide loop around Island in the Sky. We’d see that road later, from a different vantage. We’d also see, looking rice-grain small, a handful of vehicles on White Rim, including motorcycles kicking up pinpricks of colored dust and no doubt fulfilling a desert riding dream or two of their riders.

Further down the paved road is the short trail to Mesa Arch.

Eventually, the arch is easy to spot.

Quite a view under the arch.

It was here that the awesomeness of Canyonlands began to dawn on me. I was looking into a canyon — marked by its own, deeper complex of canyons.

Awesomeness was really hammered home when we got to a spot called Grand View Point Overlook. With a name like that, it’d better be good.

The territory near the Grand View. Nice, and a bit more reddish here, but little hint of things to come.

The overlook itself. We walked a quarter-mile or more along the edge of the canyon — the wide canyon complex, reaching miles into the distance, created by the Colorado and the Green.

Wow. The atmosphere was a little hazy that day, but that hardly mattered. My images really don’t do the place justice, but that was a persistent theme on all of this trip.

Arches National Park

Posted on June 2, 2022 by admin

When you visit a place like southern Utah, you run through all the superlatives. In the moment, the wordless feeling as you stand in awe is enough. Later, you turn the bucket over, hoping that one extra-special word that fits what you’ve just seen will tumble out. But even the jewel cave that is English — to shift the metaphor — sometimes comes up short.

What would a Spanish speaker, whose linguistic predecessors have come here for centuries, say? Magnífico, espléndido, maravilloso? What do Germans, so many of whom seek out the desert Southwest in our time, use in such a situation? Großartig, herrlich, prachtig? What of the native tongues of the region? I’m mostly ignorant of those European languages, but vastly ignorant of those spoken on the Colorado Plateau for millennia, so I do not know.

All that is a long-winded intro to the vista we saw at Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park, where we spent most of the day on May 19.

“The Fiery Furnace is a natural labyrinth of narrow passages between towering sandstone walls called fins,” says a postcard I bought in the park. “The La Sal Mountains rise in the distance to nearly 13,000 feet…”

That isn’t a bad image, but it barely conveys the sweeping grandeur of the vista. Though different in most details — color, formation shape, vegetation — I instantly thought of Polychrome Pass in Alaska.

“The view toward the Alaska Range at Polychrome Pass is, I believe, the grandest vista I’ve ever seen,” I wrote last year.

At Fiery Furnace, I found its equal. Just like that. All the time, money and effort to reach this point seemed, all at once, entirely worth it, just to see what we saw. Of course, I had no doubt of that before, and not a vast amount of resources actually went into the trip, since travel is easy in our time, but still.

The marvels of Arches are many. By U.S. national park standards, it isn’t a large one, at about 76,600 acres (44th largest out of 63), but somehow more than 2,000 natural sandstone arches are packed into park. We saw a tiny but impressive fraction of these, and a lot else besides.

Perhaps the best known feature in the park is Delicate Arch, which is depicted on Utah license plates and a postage stamp commemorating the centennial of Utah statehood.

We didn’t get that close. We didn’t care to spend the energy to get there (increasingly with age, I’m learning to ration my energy). An easier trail takes you to a good if long-distance view of the arch, however.

I’ve centered the arch in this picture. If you look carefully, you’ll see people who did make the hike up to it.

Broken Arch, on the other hand, we were willing to make the mile or so round trip on foot to see. But first, we popped in for a look at Sand Dune Arch. It’s in a slot canyon just off the way to Broken Arch.

Which eventually tightens up considerably.

The arch itself is off in a wider place in the canyon.

Note the sand. The color of Mars, but the exact texture of warm beach sand on Earth. My shoes had to come off for a while.

But they were back on for the hike to Broken Arch, along this path.

Eventually, you arrive at the arch, which is cracked if not broken.

I looked at that view of the arch, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was going to say: A question. Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question. That only goes to show the absurd conditioning I’ve submitted myself to in the form of entertainment, but never mind.

Another view.

Under the arch. Erosion didn’t take its ultimate toll while we were there, fortunately.

Elsewhere in the park: long views of the La Sal Mountains and other vistas.

Except for lizards, wildlife was a little hard to spot, but not impossible.

Balanced Rock. Apt name, I’d say.

Mushroom cloud rock, I’d say about that view. The rock stayed balanced while we were there. One of these days, though — tomorrow, 100 years from now — down it will come. Our still images and even our eyes deceive us: the landscape is always in motion.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Posted on May 27, 2022 by admin

Back to posting on the last day of May. Memorial Day and Decoration Day coincide this year, which won’t happen again until 2033.

“Throughout the 19th century, white settlers considered the Monument Valley region — like the desert terrain of the Southwest in general — to be hostile and ugly,” notes Smithsonian magazine. “The first U.S. soldiers to explore the area called ‘as desolate and repulsive looking a country as can be imagined,’ as Capt. John G. Walker put it in 1849, the year after the area was annexed from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. ‘As far as the eye can reach… is a mass of sand stone hills without any covering or vegetation except a scanty growth of cedar.’ ”

Tastes change. I imagine Capt. Walker’s reaction was entirely reasonable for his time, considering he and his men came by horse and mule, carrying everything they needed, living meagerly and fully aware that their surroundings could kill them all too easily, or at least make for days of uncomfortable misery, whatever season it was. Monument Valley was a vivid ordeal for them, not a notion fostered by cinematic entertainment.

We have it a good deal easier here in the 21st century, and am I glad. All it took for us to reach Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park on May 18 was a roughly two-hour drive from Page, Arizona, by Toyota horseless carriage along paved two-lane roads through the Navajo Nation.

My main concern that morning — and we got up fairly early — was that I didn’t know for sure we’d get in. The park’s policy for visitors is, first come, first served, and there’s a limit to the number of people who can enter each day. Even on a weekday, I imagined joining a long line of cars waiting, only to be turned away.

Nothing of the kind happened. We got to the entrance booth with no one ahead, paid $8 a head, and got in to the place known as Tse’Bii’Ndzisgaii in Navajo. First stop, a fully modern visitor center.

The wind whipped the four flags in full motion: Utah, the Navajo Nation, the United States and Arizona. I wasn’t familiar with the Navajo flag, but I am now.

Something I didn’t know until we entered the park and saw a number of private roads leading off to residences in the distance: people live in Monument Valley, unlike in a national park or monument. I expect ranching and running tours are their main occupations, along with selling the products of Navajo craftsmanship to visitors.

For $8 a head — an absolute bargain, if you asked me — you get to drive around a 17-mile unpaved loop road in the park, dusty and red as Mars, but only occasionally bumpy. The road doesn’t venture that deep into the park, which measures nearly 91,700 acres. Longer treks by foot or horse or jeep are possible, available only with Navajo guides, and no doubt offer rich rewards to those undertake them.

Even so, the drive is incredible, passing formations of astounding size and shape and contour and color. It’s easy to see what enamored John Ford about the place.
Speaking of the director, the park honors him with a spot called John Ford Point.

As well it should, since he put Monument Valley on the map, as far as the more receptive imagination of the 20th century was concerned, though naturally he wasn’t the first outsider of that period to visit — the likes of Zane Grey and (of course) Theodore Roosevelt came earlier. Harsh terrain, still, but the material progress of later years allowed later visitors the leisure to appreciate the place in a way that Capt. Walker could not.

Ford must have known he had a cinematic treasure in view when he had the cameras first deployed here for Stagecoach. The world clearly agreed.

Of Ford’s many forays into the valley, Smithsonian has this to say: “The shoots were usually festive, with hundreds of Navajo gathering in tents… singing, watching stuntmen perform tricks and playing cards late into the night. Ford, often called ‘One Eye’ because of his patch, was accepted by the Navajo, and he returned the favor: after heavy snows cut off many families in the valley in 1949, he arranged for food and supplies to be parachuted to them.”

Though it wasn’t the first place we visited on the drive — in fact, it was nearly the last — the instantly recognizable view from John Ford Point is going to go first here.

Because later movies and commercials returned to this particular view so often, the other marvels on the road aren’t as famed or recognizable. But they’re equally worth a good look. Just a sampling below; there was something remarkable just about everywhere you look.

Aside from the rock giants, the terrain itself fascinates, its colors so unusual to those of us from greener places.

Color that the road itself shares.

Without color, the contours emerge vividly; Ford must have appreciated that, too.

We left the park that afternoon, but even as you drive north from Monument Valley on U.S. 163, it has one more gift to give, if you’re paying attention. I almost wasn’t. As we drove along, we noticed people ahead, standing in the road, taking pictures. They got out of the way before we reached them, but I wondered, what are they doing there?

Then it hit me, and we stopped at the next pullout in the road, maybe a fifth of a mile away, and looked back. A view almost as famed as that at John Ford Point, and certainly as arresting.

That isn’t quite the “Forrest Gump Stopped Here” place, but I wasn’t about to go back where those yahoos had been standing in the road just for that (unlike Stagecoach, it isn’t a movie I like very much). In fact, I wouldn’t have remembered the view was made famous in that movie, either, but some other people had stopped where we were, and I overheard them talking in German about Forrest Gump.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Tag Archives: vistas