Tag Archives: National Park

Travel Guide

Travel Guide: Arizona Road Trip (and a Moment in Nevada)

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We’d been in Arizona since early afternoon, had seen sights, eaten at a diner where we heard a local band, and were getting ready to call it a day when we realized that we’d crossed, hours earlier, into a different time zone.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US-Timezones.svg#/media/File:US-Timezones.svg

The shaded parts of Arizona and Nevada on the above map do not observe Daylight Saving Time, remaining instead on Mountain time. This means that Arizona follows Pacific time in the summer. The parts of Arizona that are not shaded are Navajo territory, where they do observe Daylight Saving Time. (Thanks to Wikipedia for helping us out once we noticed that our phones and my wristwatch were keeping different time. Figuring out how to change the time on the GPS took us another day.)

Our drive from southeastern Utah took us through Kaibab National Forest where we saw the effects of forest fire, sometimes stopped only by the road itself. We didn’t know when the fires were, or how many there had been. There were patches where tree trunks were fully blackened, leaves burned away, and patches where black tree trunks were topped with fresh green leaves. We had already seen warnings of fire risk in each of the national parks we visited, and this theme only became more prominent as we drove deeper into the desert.

What is desert? Desert is yellow sand, red and purple rock, vast blue sky, and the straightest roads I’ve ever seen. Roads that stretched beyond the horizon, already impossibly far away, and further than that. The lazy tumbleweeds of the movies actually exist, as do dust devils that you can see in the air long before you reach them, assuming a sudden shift in atmosphere doesn’t blown them away by then. We spent many hours driving through a desert of nowhere, of now here.

It was extraordinary to watch the flatness of this scrubby landscape, populated with yellow grasses and green shrubs, suddenly sprout canyon walls and huge red mesas that stayed with us along the road.

Several times a day, as we passed sign of human activity ranging from clusters of trailers to tiny towns built along the oases created by rivers, my partner commented, “You’re on a journey looking for a new place to live, and you stop here and you look around and you say, ‘Yep, looks great. We’ll stay.’ There’s nothing here. How do people live here?” My contributing comment in response: “And why do they still live here?”

Knowing what I know about the history of American treatment of Native people, it’s entirely plausible that living here was never a choice. And that means it’s also possible that the people who have stayed are here for reasons beyond eking out an income. The reasons the Navajo consider this land holy ground were all around us.

We stopped at Horseshoe Bend in the late afternoon, just outside of Page, Arizona, where we would spend the night. We looked down at the mighty Colorado River, which we had encountered multiple times on our journey, and we watched the clouds move and the sky change.

Although there is a great deal of beauty around Page, we didn’t linger. Instead, we drove in the direction of the Grand Canyon, which is indeed a sight to behold. It is so massive, so huge, and stretches to somewhere very far away. It is unfathomably deep, cavernous, and abutted by mountains in one direction and forest in the other. At lookout after lookout, we exclaimed over the scale, the vastness, and the majesty of sand, wind, water, and time, this wonder called nature.

After a while I stopped taking photos and just looked. There was really nothing to say, no words that could capture the privilege of being there.

Late in the afternoon, following our trip motto of, “Always take the scenic route,” we turned off the main highway to follow:

On Route 66 we found the town of Seligman, with preserved shades of former glory and local people used to welcoming tourists. My partner’s dream of being called “sweetheart” by a diner server was fulfilled, I finally had a veggie burger, and the man in the kitsch/second-hand/antique store gave us markers to sign the wall, like many hundreds of travellers before us. Liebe Grüße aus Weimar!

It took us fully by surprise that the diner where we ate was German-themed, the walls full of license plates, stickers, and other memorabilia. In addition to typical diner offerings (refillable coffee, breakfast all day, pie in a glass fridge by the door) bratwurst was on the menu at Westside Lilo’s Cafe. Based on the reactions of people who walked in the doors, we were the only ones who had just stumbled in, but not the only ones who could read the German and English newspaper clippings on the walls.

After a night in Kingman, Arizona, we drove to the other side of the Grand Canyon to experience the skywalk, which I really wanted to do despite having already paid once for access to nature. But, as with Horseshoe Bend, this was the way in. Here was our opportunity, picture-taking prohibition notwithstanding, to be high up on the rock and look down. Also enjoyable was the obligatory bus stop at another lookout where we scrambled up rocks to the highest point. The sheer size of the Grand Canyon was awesome, in the original sense of the word.

Our next overnight stop was Las Vegas, Nevada, and on the border between Arizona and Nevada, where our car registered 122°F (50°C), we pulled over to walk across the bridge at the Hoover Dam. Not interested in the engineering feat, I was mostly in shock at the heat against the backs of my legs and the fact that my greenstone necklace burned against my skin. No one needs to live in a place that is that hot.

And why people do so is the question we asked ourselves, and later the friend who hosted us in Vegas, as we continued our drive.

I never had any intention of visiting Vegas, but there we were, and having a local tour guide was a lovely experience. We visited the Strip in the afternoon to gawk at the buildings and the people, and returned at night to see the lights and a show, continue gawking at buildings and people, lose a gambling budget of $50 in under two minutes, and take a drive to the “old Vegas” of Freemont Street, glitzy yet cozy under even more lights.

There was so much to look at and it was impossible to stop looking. I’ve lived in big cities and have plenty of experience with glitz, glam, and mazes of shopping malls. After a week of the relative solitude of the desert and intense contact with nature, however, we found the scope and scale of it all a little stressful and overwhelming. I was glad to get back on the road and looking forward to the final part of our trip – California. Coming soon!

Travel Guide

Travel Guide: Utah National Parks (and a Moment in Colorado)

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In the end, we drove 2,716 miles (approximately 4,443 kilometres) in two weeks. While our trip earned negative points in the Environmental Friendliness category, we earned positive points in Support for Local Communities, often eating in the one diner or Mexican restaurant in the only town on endlessly straight roads that knifed through the desert.

The journey started in Denver, Colorado, where we visited old friends of mine. On our way out of town, they gave us directions to Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge where, from the safety of our vehicle, we saw prairie dogs . . .

. . . and bison, first alone and then with the herd.

Knowing only of Colorado’s mountains, I was not expecting the endless prairie that was Denver, nor how big the sky felt when the land went on forever, with no groves of trees obstructing the view. The landscape changed as we drove, lush greenery and mountainous by the time we reached Vail, and then the rocks and red dirt, and tunnels that opened into canyons, that opened into more rock, until there was nothing. Just mountains and desert, which is to say everything.

We spent our first real night on the road in Silt, Colorado and then took our time getting to Moab, Utah. Our motto on the road became, “Always take the scenic route”, regardless of the amount of time added to the journey. After all, this trip was about the journey. And we were always, always glad for our choice.

Canyonlands National Park was our first real experience in the desert and it taught us very quickly that summer desert heat is to be respected and adhered to. And we recognized that while we were prepared for the rock, we could never be prepared for how hard it would be to not touch the rock.

My partner and I are climbers and we marvelled at the deep red, the layers of colours, the formations created by sand and wind and endless time.

The caverns, canyons, and shapes were otherworldly, and the fact that trees and plants grew there was a testament to the incomprehensible magic of nature.

We couldn’t help it, and we wanted to be part of that rock. We didn’t build the cairn, but we appreciated whoever did.

The following morning we had the earliest timed entry slot available for Arches National Park, allowing us to watch the sun move across an extraordinary landscape. My journal, sitting beside me as usual as I write this post, says, “Today is difficult to describe because it was overwhelming. Overwhelmingly beautiful, in the most diverse landscape I’ve ever seen.”

We hiked Devil’s Garden and found ourselves on what could have been another planet. We were in awe of the rock . . .

. . . of the landscape (Landscape Arch is indeed appropriately named). . .

. . . and of the greenery despite the harsh desert climate.

At my partner’s encouragement, we scrambled up the path under punishing sun to reach the famous Delicate Arch, which was every bit worth the discomfort.

It was on the way there that we saw our first petroglyphs, signs that real people had lived here, beginning thousands upon thousands of years ago.

Later in the day, again choosing the scenic route, we saw more of the same in Capitol Reef National Park.

The landscape had changed along the way, with stark rock formations gradually giving way to mesas and plateaus. Unlike Arches, which was so bright and so hot it was difficult to imagine the people who had sheltered in the occasional spots of shade, Capitol Reef was an oasis with fruit orchards, a welcome breeze, and rolling hills.

Later on, we drove through Dixie National Forest, in which we would find ourselves multiple times throughout the trip. From lookouts there, we could see Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, also part of our route, in the distance.

We spent the night in Cannonville, Utah, sleeping under the brightest, clearest stars that I’ve seen in North America. As is my habit, I first found the Big Dipper, and Polaris followed from there. The Milky Way winked hello and we lay on our backs pointing out constellations that we recognized and looking for others we thought we knew. It was a warm night that grew shockingly cool, and I was grateful for the heavy blanket in our cozy tent.

We left early the following morning to reach Bryce Canyon as the sun made its way across the rock formations that belonged, again, somewhere other than Earth.

And then we made our way down into the canyon, deliciously cool, and stared up at a storybook sky as we walked along pillars of red rock and shockingly green trees. The heat got to us again, but our attention was on the rocks made of chalky sand, with formations that could have been stalagmites had they been located elsewhere. And they towered over us.

Just based on what we saw in Bryce Canyon at the height of summer, I can almost imagine what it might be like to see a desert in bloom.

We spent the night in Springdale, Utah, at the foothills of Zion National Park. Zion is beloved among climbers, and it was no surprise as to why. This is real big wall climbing, and it is impressive in scope.

That being said, we found Zion underwhelming at first. Perhaps this is because of its similarity (cliffs and greenery) to what we’re familiar with from home, or perhaps because it came after the wonders of Canyonlands, Arches, and Bryce. We didn’t follow the crowds into the river to explore the famed Narrows, and we weren’t there at the right time of year to hike Angel’s Landing. But by choosing the scenic route on our drive out, we saw a part of Zion that raised its esteem in our eyes, and left us, as usual, glad for our choice.

Of the five states that comprised our road trip, Utah was by far the most impressive. The landscape was diverse in a way that I’ve never seen before, and each tiny settlement or small town was set in a beauty that we were privileged to merely pass through. I’ve previously been in Utah to ski, but this was the first time I’d actually seen it, the first time I’d eaten pie with ice cream at the only diner in the only town on the only road in the middle of wherever we were. We kept early hours and correspondingly early bedtimes. We were out exploring when it was comparatively cool enough and back in the air-conditioning of our car by early afternoon. Dusk brought not a respite from the heat, but a respite from burning the backs of our legs upon getting back inside the car after stopping at yet another lookout. (The newspapers provided by many national parks were put to great use.)

After two nights in Colorado and three in Utah, we had found a rhythm on the road, one helped along by a good supply of snacks, a discerning ear for religious radio, and a classic license plate game. With camera, hat, and waterbottle within reach and sunglasses always perched on the nose, we headed towards our next state – Arizona. Stay tuned!