On the road again
Two days til grad school starts: time for a quick post in list form! Here are some random musings, observations, rants, and pictures from a two-week, 2,500 mile end-of-summer road trip through Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Washington:
- Packing everything you own into the backseat and trunk of a Toyota Corolla IS possible, if only for 15 miles until you get to the closest UPS store so you can pack 61 pounds of crap into a box and ship it so your car doesn’t bottom out going across every single expansion joint in the road
- A small passenger car with over 180,000 miles, power steering leaks, suspension maladies, and mysterious engine and electrical issues is nevertheless capable of successfully completing a 2,500 mile road-trip including travel up and over several 10,000 foot mountain passes, on roads through several deserts with temperatures soaring to 108 degrees, all while fully loaded with nary a squeak.
- Said road trip is also possible to complete without the aid of a GPS unit, smartphone, or other computerized mapping device.
- To anyone who claims their home town/state/country/etc has the best sunsets ever, please go to the Grand Canyon and watch the sun go down from Desert View. I’ll be expecting a formal, written retraction of your blasphemous statement in the mail any day now.
Grand Canyon from Mohave Point
- Pink Jeep Tour guides are really good at spotting Deeres.
- It is impossible to make money in Las Vegas. Even if you win a decent amount of dough, you will be tempted into spending your winnings on drinks served in three-foot-tall brightly-colored souvenir “cups” and $7 slices of crappy pizza in the casino food court at 2am. But you won’t know its 2am because there are no clocks anywhere.
- When traveling through particularly desolate stretches of Nevada, it is amazing how quickly your mind begins voluntarily generating thoughts such as “I wonder how many hours it’s been since I’ve seen another car…” and “I bet I could take my hands off the steering wheel for 10 whole minutes and not hit anything.”
Tufa towers on the shores of Mono Lake, CA
- If you never thought you encounter a situation in which you would consider $4.89 a screaming good deal on a gallon of gasoline, go visit Lee Vining, California (and look at what the Chevron is charging first…)
- Americans like Yosemite more than they dislike getting hantavirus.
Tenaya Lake, Yosemite National Park
- Tropical plants will die if you leave them in the backseat of a hot car for a week with no access to food or water.
- Camping in bear country is a pain in the ass. A typical night terror in Yosemite consists of waking in the middle of the night in a panicked and frantic state wondering if you remembered to take that tube of mildly scented chapstick out of your pocket and put it in the bear box.
Bumpass Hell thermal area, Lassen Volcanic National Park
- Even if people say they aren’t buying you something from your Amazon wish-list, never buy anything from your Amazon wishlist.
- Eugene, Portland, and Bellingham should secede and create a new autonomous state called Hippie-gon-ton. Seriously, these are the kind of places where I deeply wish I had the courage to take pictures of random people I encounter on the street; I’d have a collection to rival People of Wal-Mart in no time, albeit in a very, very different way. Also, on a related note, Portland is the perfect city to arrive in when you haven’t showered for 3 days.
Yosemite Valley and Half Dome
- The awesomeness of Powell’s bookstore in Portland, OR is still difficult for me to comprehend…I could spend WEEKS there. One’s need for a smartphone with navigational capabilities is greater WITHIN THIS STORE than it is in perhaps any major metropolitan area in the country, with the possible exception of:
- Seattle, which has quite possibly the worst maintained and most confusing street network of ANY CITY ANYWHERE. Someone should probably go rescue the pothole crew because they clearly have been being held hostage somewhere…since the Eisenhower administration. Also, let’s stop it with the whole “Wouldn’t it be cool to make this street randomly dead-end and then reappear 5 blocks later?” thing. If I’m driving down a numbered street, it should be a thru-street and not be broken into 8 billion separate sections.
- On the plus side, if you can somehow manage to navigate Seattle streets without blowing a tire, breaking an axle, or needing to pull over somewhere and cry, there are a lot of good eats to be had, including the 3rd best Philly cheese steak restaurant this side of Philadelphia and some seriously good pizza.
- Sea anemones shrivel up when you poke them. Also, it is possible to be surrounded by so many fat purple starfish that you feel afraid.
- Randomly arriving in a new city where you know nobody and finding a place to live using Craigslist is way easier than it sounds. And no, I’m not living with a convicted felon.
- The Pacific Northwest is really nice and sunny in the summer…which is conveniently when I am never there.
- Finding that a “Vegan Revolution” bumper sticker has been pasted onto your car over a pro-meat sticker instantly turns you into a card-carrying vegan drives you to east as much meat as humanly possible the next day (such as a Philly cheese steak and a delicious bacon cheeseburger perhaps).
- On another related note, a maple long john topped with strips of bacon is just about the best thing e…….. (Zach has heart attack)
Sunset over the San Francisco Peaks, Flagstaff, AZ
el Cañón del Colorado
According to my calculations, it has been 865 days since I last visited the Grand Canyon. Having grown up about an hour away from the Big Ditch, this seems sort of, well, unnatural. It’s been even longer since I’ve visited in the winter, which is sad because winter tends to be the only that that a visit to the Grand Canyon doesn’t make you feel like you’re fighting your way through your friendly local neighborhood Super Wal-Mart.
One of the things that has always amazed me about the Grand Canyon is the fact that you can literally be standing 20 feet from the edge and have no idea that it even exists. Unlike many of our other semi-urbanized natural wonders, you can’t really see it that well, if at all, from the parking lot. The Canyon was “discovered” by European settlers with horrendous depth perception in 1540 . A soldier named Cárdenas was searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola under the command of his boss, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado when he and his small regiment stumbled upon the canyon. Cárdenas were either inherently godawful at judging distance and depth or they were really really drunk at the time because they thought that the river at the bottom was only 6 feet wide. Dangerously low on water, Cárdenas sent several soldiers down into the canyon, thinking that they could reach the river, obtain water, and return to the rim within a few hours. The erroneous nature of that estimate soon became clear and whatever horror stories Cárdenas’ men told the rest of their party were apparently bad enough to keep any other Europeans from visiting the canyon for more than 200 years.
The hordes gather at Mather Point
A raven surveys the canyon from Hermit's Rest
Looking west from Desert View, the last rays of sunlight stream into the canyon
People watching at the Grand Canyon is always a fun little activity this time of year. On one side of the spectrum you’ve got people in shorts who are flabbergasted at the fact that the canyon rim is covered in a foot of snow and are then forced to purchase very overpriced souvenir sweaters from the gift shop. On the other side we find the individuals (read: Phoenecians) who are dressed down like Randy from A Christmas Story (I can’t put my arms down!) even though it’s actually like 40 degrees outside.
Due to the snow, trails down into the canyon are notoriously treacherous this time of year so we stuck to the rim for the day. One of my favorite places on the South Rim is a little-known overlook called Shoshone Point. It’s unsigned and doesn’t appear on any park service maps yet can be rented out for weddings and other special events during the summer. It’s about a one-mile walk from the main park highway on a dirt road. Since the park service pretty much refuses to acknowledge that it exists this time of year, not only is it one of the most spectacular viewpoints, but you basically get it all to yourself as well. Unless other people see you parked on the side of the road in an entirely non-descript patch of forest and decide to check things out for themselves. Then you might have a bit of company. But hey, still better than dealing with 8 billion tour buses!
Mid-afternoon panorama from Shoshone Point
Watchtower at Desert View
Red Tank Draw Petroglyphs
Out of all of the numerous ruin and rock art sites in the Sedona area, Red Tank Draw is one of the least known, most remote, and difficult to find sites. Red Tank Draw is a tributary canyon of Wet Beaver Creek about a half hour’s drive south of Sedona. The wash that runs along the bottom of Red Tank Draw, which is bone dry for probably 90% or more out of any given year, today looked like this:
Unseasonably warm temperatures combines with lots of snowpack to the north near Flagstaff meant that the normally dry stream bed was a veritable raging river today. Given that the petroglyphs are located along both the east and west sides of the draw, the high water level made things difficult to say the least. Several dirt roads lead right up to the western rim of the draw but we were unable to find a single crossing point along about a 2 mile stretch of the draw. We briefly considered simply wading across the stream but given that the water was moving surprisingly swiftly and any crossing would have involved wading through waist deep water, we decided this was probably a bad idea.
Fortunately for us, the largest and most spectacular panel is located on the side of the creek that was accessible to us. After several hours of bushwhacking our way in and out of the draw, we came across a finally found a fairly well defined path that led us on a short scramble down into the draw and spit us out right in front of the petroglyphs. The main panel is located at the base of a large and impressive rockfall. The rockfall must have occurred relatively recently since many of the petroglyphs are actually located on huge blocks of sandstone that have clearly fallen from the cliffs above. Several additional Volkswagen sized angular boulders are precariously perched on the cliffs above the petroglyph panel and look as though a strong breeze would send them crashing down as well.
Overall, the petroglyphs are extremely well preserved. Unfortunately, there have been problem with vandalism at this site in the past, but surprisingly there is actually a Forest Service register at the base of the cliff. The sheer size of some of the carvings is what impressed me most. At the upper left of the main panel is an enormous elk petroglyph, more than two feet from tail to antler tip. Supposedly there are a number of other panels scattered along the draw nearby but we were not able to access any others due to the high water level in the creek.
Zach Schierl Photography 