On the cusp of September and October, Alex and I went down to the desert for a few days. We flew into Vegas, where it was at once obvious there was a major heat differential with Seattle.
Vegas was almost as bizarre as advertised, with lots of lights and architecture. Slot machines make lots of little electronic singing noises, birbling and chiping as people feed them.
We stayed at Binions, an older casino on Fremont Street. Fremont Street, I think, was the most interesting. It is covered and the roof is one gigantic screen. It spoke, adopting a sexualized female persona — “hold onto your remotes boys, plasma screens ain’t got nothing on me!” About what you’d expect.
There seemed to be a lot of personalized things for sale – rings, street signs, other signs, mugs, keychains. I failed to get my picture taken with two members of the Chippendales, and we forgot to go back to the place advertising free admission & topless girls. Instead we wandered about Fremont Street, then had dinner at Tony Roma’s, which name sounded familiar to me for no reason I could place. Steak and lobster and chicken. I spent most of the trip eating meat, my last big fling before making an honest attempt to return to vegetarianism.
After dinner we were both overstuffed, but took a cab to the Bellagio, on the Strip. We wandered through it, saw much sumptuous decor, expensive things, strange fountains and a reconstructed banyan tree by the main lobby. Next we walked down to the Monte Carlo, and discovered that it was midnight, we were tired, not feeling so well, and thus abandoned plans of a drink in every casino on the strip in favor of a return to the our hotel room.
In the morning we could not get out of the city fast enough for Alex. We found a random bulk grocery store and stocked up on food for camping, then hit the highway. Finally finally we made it to Nevada’s oldest state park — the Valley of Fire, which fulfilled the main objective of pretty colored rocks in every way.
Red, to begin with, and paler stripes of white, such finely layered sandstone you would not believe. I hardly believe, and I was there looking at it.
We found a campsite in a little inlet, surrounded on three sides by red rocked, briefly checked the visitor’s center and went to a spot called Rainbow Vista. We were following a trail but lost it quickly in the red sands. Yellow rocks here, layered with the red. We climbed up a place and found ourselves in the wind, surrounded by excellent views.
Such shapes, swirled and cracked out of the sandstone! So many lovely little hollows and niches. It seemed like there should be a Virgin Mary figurine in each one of them, like in a church. “Sure,” said Alex, “that’s what the first settlers thought, too.”
After realizing we had nothing in the way of survival – cameras and sandals in place of water, food & sturdy shoes, we headed back to the car.
The next place we stopped was called White Domes, and added pink to the red-yellow-white spectrum, as well as some places that were almost purple.
It took us 1 1/2 hours to do a 1 1/4 mile loop, we took so many photos.
The sun went down without fanfare or much color in a partly cloudy sky as we returned to our campsite. The stars came out, silohetting the rocks. Everything was beautiful, all day.
Critters seen in Valley of Fire:
Jack Rabbit, Hawks (floating on drafts), Small birds, Geckos, Huskies (2, leashed), Black Beetle, Raven, Bat, small, noisy children from next campsite, small moths at night, attracted to headlamp, Ground Squirrel, Numerous Ants, Bighorn Sheep (2)
In the morning we woke up only slightly earlier than the annoying children. We were out of the campsite by 8:30. A quick stop to check out petrified logs — encaged, with signs reading, “Petrified logs. Do not disturb.” They’re, you know — sleeping.
Next we went out to a spot called Mouse’s Tank, where there were lots of petroglyphs, both ancient, and a few modern additions. It clouded over, keeping it a bit cooler, but not such good light for photos.
At the beginning of the trail Alex spotted a pair of bighorn sheep — the biggest animal we saw. We walked in, this trail winding in and out between rock formations. Mouse’s Tank is a large bowl, which apparently holds water for a while, should it chance to rain. Mouse was a Native American who was working for some white guy, killed a couple co-workers, and hid in the sandstone for several months before he was ultimately captured.
After leaving the Valley of Fire we took a detour to Overton Beach, which was actually a marina, and dipped our feet in Lake Mead. Next stop — small town America, for ice cream. We continued on for lunch in Utah, at a little cafe featuring very odd art, cowboys playing golf and Native Americans painted with red and white warpaint, who reminded me of Kiss, which probably wasn’t the intended effect.
More time in the car and we crossed the border into Arizona. he landscape spread out around us, long buttes pushing up their striped sides.
We moved into some grey mountains and reached Kaibab National Forest. Suddenly there were trees. We stopped at a scenic viewpoint. It is nigh on impossible to describe the views we saw on this trip. Arizona is big sky country. The sky stretched out, gray clouds pulling apart like taffy while underneath the landscape lazily spread itself in long plains speckled with sparse vegetation, the Vermillion Cliffs in a bloody line, and behind them further buttes caught the sun from a few glory holes in the clouds, lit up pale yellow.
Further on and we entered the Grand Canyon National Park, North Rim. The forest continued, the road falling into a meadow lined fold. We almost ran over a flock of wild turkeys, then a hawk of some sort burst into flight, right beside the car, narrowly missing the windshield, the radio antenna.
Signs warned against tossing cigarettes out the window, advised next 10 miles cows, next 20 miles deer, and various other important messages.
The cows were in the meadows, as were the deer, all of them peacefully grazing and looking edible but protected.
We arrived at the North Rim lodge, headed out to Bright Angel Point, which is right there (.5 mi, maybe) and right on the rim. Turns out we were on a side canyon of a side canyon, which didn’t prevent it from being huge and hugely amazing.
I imagined it would be all brown, but it wasn’t. It was striped, geological strata heaped in red and white, some yellow, some shale seeming freenish but really multicolored. I also thought it would drop straight down, imagined it deep, yes, but narrow, a fault line crack — it is wide, it yawns open, slopes down, miles wide, gradually narrowing as the walls cascade down three or four thousand feet.
Bright Angel Point is an outcropping of white rock with a paved trail along it. There were numerous photographers staked out with tripods, stalking the sunset. Alex, having left his camera in the car, suffered accordingly.
After it was dark we headed back to the campground to pitch the tent, take showers and have smores over a campfire before passing out, only to get up somewhat before 5 am for a hike into the canyon labelled “strenuous.”
At five to six we were on the trail, after a seriously unique breakfast of applesauce, red beans and rice, and some tortilla chips. It seems highly unlikely that anyone else has eaten applesauce with sporks on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at 5:30 in the morning.
On the trail there was a yellow streak int he east, just below the clouds. It began to lighten rapidly as we moved downhill. We started in forest, evergreens and small deciduous trees in yellow and red fall colors. All the fast, goal oriented people passed us while we stopped every 10 yards for photos.
We went downward through various geological layers — white, red, greenish shale. The guide books all said to allow twice as much time to return as to descend into the canyon. Due to excessive picture taking on descent and us being in more than decent shape, we went down 3.5 hours, up 4. Time up included lunch and two long rest stops.
I’d try and go into detail about what we saw, but words don’t describe it. Photography hardly captures it because the scenery is simple too large, too grand. We went down the North Kaibab trail, the beginning of a Rim to Rim route we can now salivate over doing in the future. There were a good many other hikers. There were cliffs which stretched above and below as we walked along ledges which had been dynamited out, and far curves which promised a view of the main canyon but delivered only more curves. It was cloudy, and then it was sunny. Red cliffs, blue sky, remnants of white clouds.
On returning to the top, about one-thirty in the afternoon, we headed back to the campground for a nap. The very best kind of nap is falling asleep because your body is tired out, on a sunny afternoon; you pass out, suddenly hours have passed and you have no idea.
Around five we headed back to the lodge to see the sun go down, this time with all camera equipment in hand. It was beautiful. There was a colorful, slowly fading glow, and then the underbelly of the clouds all turned pink. Another shower (not the roughest camping in the world, but I’m not complaining) and we went back to the Lodge, this time for dinner in the dining room, where the huge windows, at 8:45, showed only black. We got pasta and it was delicious, and chocolate fudge lava cake, which was also delicious. Dinner was otherwise uneventful, as was our last night in the Grand Canyon National Park. It did rain, though, we woke up briefly to hear it.
In the morning we walked part of the Transept Trail to the west of the Lodge, then headed to Zion, Utah, passing much of the same scenery as entering the Park, then more flat desert before driving into mountainous buttes of sandstone, and a number of lodges/resorts before we entered Zion National Park.
The formations in Zion were huge. Great smooth swatches of pale orange stone, delicately lined, brough to mind the hard, windswept snowpack on the slopes of Mt. Rainier in February. One tall formation was cracked both horizontally and vertically, the resulting patterns earning it the name Checkerboard Mesa.
We passed through a long tunnel blasted into a mountainside and punctuated with the occasional window onto a grand view, and came out high up on the wall of an immense canyon (though not so immense as the Grand Canyon). The highway switchbacked down to the floor and followed the Virgin River north-south.
We headed south, secured a campsite, and took a shuttle (only Parks’ shuttles go north into the depths of the canyon, unless you come in the seriously off-season) to climb a little trail called Emerald Pools.
A short bit of switchbacking later we arrived at the middle Emerald pool, apparently thus called because it was filled with abundant brilliantly green algae. I spent some time trying to get close enough to any of the pond skater bugs to super macro them, but failed.
We continued on up to the High Emeral Pool, bigger and deeper, the water seeping out from the massive sheet cliff above. The sun was sinking, and we were already deep in shadow, so the green of the pool was not readily evident. This did not make it less beautiful, however.
I climbed up on a rock for a photo op and noticed a tree where dragonflies were going to sleep — landing, then pulling up their rear ends almost to their heads, bending their bodies like inchworms. They were quite still and the rocks around the tree provided good access for super-macro opportunities.
We reached the road again as it grew quite dark and caught the shuttle back down, then into town for some excellent pizza next door to a photo gallery touting No color filters! No digital enhancement! Only God’s light! Nice photos, odd philosophy.
We pitched the tent under a bright half moon, fell asleep, woke up early to see a bit of sunrise, break camp, and take the shuttle again, this time for a trial called Angel’s Landing. It was named by a missionary, and is the most amazing feat of trail construction I’ve ever seen. It is a climb up a cliff, much dynamiting in evidence, and then along a narrow ridge to a point high above the canyon floor.
The climb along the ridge is not for the faint of heart or those afraid of heights. It was uncomfortable, but fortunately not to the point of paralyzing for me. Did I mention there are metal posts pounded into the stone with chain attached so you have something to hold onto, and the drop off on either side goes down down down a thousand feet or more?
I’m glad I’m not afraid of heights too much, because the view of the canyon was incredible.
We headed down slowly, taking the footing carefully, and then with the inevitable photo stops. About halfway down on the trail we passed a pair of rangers with a loud motorized cart carrying a shovel, cement bags, water, and a brand new warning sign about being careful not to slip and fall to your death on the cliffs.
Back to the road, shuttle to visitor’s center, car to a place with a shower for $3. Goodbye to several layers of dust and sand, not that we didn’t shower both nights at the Grand Canyon, it just wasn’t with soap. We had some lunch and headed back to Vegas, the airport and Seattle, which welcomed us back with all the humidity we hadn’t had in the desert.
