Utah, Part One

It looks like Utah is just TOO MUCH, already, to combine into one long post, so I guess I will have to write a bit at a time. There are so many national parks here, and so far we have only been to two, but it feels like there is a lot to share already.

We have been in Moab for a few days. Moab is an interesting little town. It exists primarily to serve the people who come here for the spectacular hiking and mountain biking in this area, and to serve the people who are visiting the two national parks here, Arches and Canyonlands. There is a school and a library, and all the rest, but it still feels like almost everyone you see must be just passing through in a jeep or an ATV, or in hiking boots or a mountain bike. I wonder what it is like in the dead of winter and the intense heat of summer. I'm sure there are a lot of visitors then too. It is surely worth visiting at any time.


Arches is just amazing. I won't even pretend to understand the geologic forces at work, although I keep hearing about it and I ought to understand it by now.  This entire area is just so spectacularly beautiful, and weird and interesting, that it just seems like one more bizarre thing that in this particular place, the erosion has caused these amazing sandstone arches. The rocks here look like all kinds of things: buildings, animals, people, objects, anything you can imagine. Some of the formations have names that reflect that: jug handle, parade of elephants, three gossips, courthouse. It's like the experience of lying on your back on a summer day and staring at clouds: first it looks like one thing, and then a minute later it has changed again, and you walk or drive farther and it looks like something else. It is incredible.

This one is called "the windows"

This one looks like a hand making the "ok" sign

This is under an arch, looking up

My favorite of the arches is one that you can't even recognize when you see it. It's called Landscape Arch. I think it's called that because the arch blends into the landscape and you can't even see it when you look at it! Then you get closer and your perspective changes. And there it is.

Can you see the arch here?

Here it is, revealed

Canyonlands National Park, which we hadn't  been to before, just defies description. The canyons are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, but it also has tall formations above the rim, so it is spectacular both above and below. It is  the largest national park in Utah, and it just goes on and on and on. It is divided into four separate areas, and it can take up to six hours to drive from one area to another. So you have to pick one or two. The area that is most commonly visited, and closest to Moab, is called Island in the Sky. Unlike some of the other national parks, much of Canyonlands is largely only accessible when you leave your car. There are some roads, of course, and you can see a lot by driving the rim. It is spectacular. But it is easier to see it by doing some hiking. A lot of people do back country hiking and camping here, which I am sure is amazing. But even just the hikes that leave from and come back to the road on the rim are nothing short of amazing. It is one of the most spectacular places I have been in my life.

Canyonlands also has amazing arches

This is a view of the white rimmed canyon, one of many

Also looking at the white-rim canyon. You can see a four wheel drive road going across the lower rim

The sky indicates what has happened every day we have been here

We had a truly amazing experience yesterday. To really see more of the area, you need to either hike extensively, or take a car with four wheel drive onto some of the primitive roads. Since we are driving this mammoth car, which we need in order to pull the trailer, we thought, gee, we have four wheel drive, let's try it! So we got some advice from a ranger about where to go, and set off. We didn't go across the lower rim, but on a side road that leads into the park.

Here is a bit of size perspective. This is beginning our drive.

Even the regular highways here are breathtaking.

At this point I should say something about the weather. The temperatures have been delightful since we have been here. Not too hot, and not too cold. And this area only gets about nine inches of rain per year. Doesn't seem like rain should be much of a factor, right? Wrong. When it rains here, it comes suddenly, and it rains like Noah better get busy. These have been the most intense lightning storms we have ever seen. And then, suddenly, there is just a DELUGE. This has happened at least once in each of the days we have been here.

So, we set off on our four wheel drive excursion. Yes, there are rocks to drive over. Yes, there is mud to go through. At least once we started to give up and turn around, because what was allegedly a road just looked like a bunch of rocks. We kept having to get out of the car, scope out the best approach to a certain rut in the road, and then give it a whirl.

Yes, this is a road. We are looking at it. And thinking.

Sometimes we were just driving on rock.

A close up view of the "road"

This is "the side of the road"

Eventual success, high five, and go on. Then after about forty five minutes, and most of the way between the beginning of the four wheel drive road and the paved road, we meet up with.....a lake. Not just some water. A LAKE. There is no way to tell how deep it is. If it is deeper than it looks, we might get stuck in the mud. And what would we do then? No cell phone service, nobody around. To turn around isn't good either, because we are in the mud, and repeating the whole drive we just did doesn't sound great. Can't go through it, can't avoid it, don't want to turn around. To try it and make it means getting to a paved road not far ahead. To try it, and get stuck, means big trouble. To turn around means repeating the forty five minute muddy rut-filled road. Then...guess what? IT STARTS TO RAIN!!!!!

After a friendly little chat about what to do next, we decided that the car is not just a fun thing to drive around in, but needs to pull the trailer for the rest of this trip. If we bottom out and scrape the underside of the car on rocks that we can't see in the lake, we are done for. So......we turned around. And in the end, we repeated the forty five minute ride with only some mud-slinging and sliding and heart palpitations. Hooray!

When we got back to the paved road, we discovered something extraordinary. There were waterfalls EVERYWHERE. When you look at this red rock, you see the black desert varnish on the rocks, which comes from water, and and you see crevices in the rock, which are created by water. It seems impossible to imagine that in a place with so little rain, so much erosion could occur. And then it rains....and you think: oh, I get it!  You wouldn't imagine a flash flood could occur in a few minutes. But yes, it can. There were waterfalls rushing over the sides of the rocks, and muddy water rushing
downstream in the previously green, but now brown, Colorado River. It was just an astonishing sight.

Little trickles going down the rocks

A deluge goes down the rock

Mostly we saw the new waterfalls from far away

Today we will bicycle along the Colorado again. Tomorrow we will travel to another, even more remote, part of Canyonlands, and then begin to make our way towards Capitol Reef National Park, which is another one of Utah's many spectacular national parks, and another one we will visit for the first time. Utah, you are quite something to see.

Colorado

Tomorrow when we wake up, we are leaving Colorado. I have to admit, I'm a little heartbroken. What a place! From the moment we entered it, coming from the north in Wyoming, and stopping first in Steamboat Springs, to now, after our second day at Mesa Verde National Park, it has been nothing short of spectacular. I always think that California has it all over every place else in terms of scenery, but boy, Colorado is something. From the ski towns, like Steamboat Springs, Aspen, and Telluride, to the gorgeous red rock scenery and hot springs of areas like Glenwood Springs, to the silver mining towns like Durango, Silverton, Ouray, to the fabulous National Parks Rocky Mountain and Mesa Verde, it has been a stunning two weeks. The scenery! The foliage! The mountains! The towns with the architecture and personality of the Old West! It has been truly amazing. Each of these towns has been a place I would happily return to and stay longer. Each drive has been one I would repeat.

Among the things I will remember best are the lovely red rocks of Glenwood Canyon, where we had terrific bike rides on parts of two trails: one which goes along the Colorado River, and one which goes between Glenwood Springs and Aspen;

Along the bike path in Glenwood Canyon. This is the Colorado River 

the spectacular foliage, which lacks the wider color spectrum of the New England autumn, but which makes up for it with spectacular mountains;

Aspen trees in all their glory

The Maroon Bells in Aspen

The sky in Colorado has been a stunning blue

a gondola ride in Telluride which takes you to the top of the mountain, and the sight of the town below;

Looking down at Telluride

Telluride

the incredible and beautiful ride on the old narrow gauge railway between Silverton and Durango, which hugs the side of the mountain in apparent denial of physics, and which goes over the narrowest of spaces between rock canyon and river; and the beautiful cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. What
variety!



The narrow gauge railroad ride was pretty delightful. The train goes VERY slow, so it gives you plenty of opportunity to see the scenery. It also climbs or descends in each direction about 3,000 feet between Durango and Silverton, and it is a bit of a rickety ride. But it's a steam engine locomotive, and you can hear it say "I think I can I think I can " as it moves, and it goes "whoo whoo" and blows off steam. It's all really just a blast. And you get fabulous scenery as well.

Hanging out the window to take a picture of the train

I was thinking a lot about the men who laid these tracks in Rocky ground, next to sheer rock walls and along the River

Sometimes the train is pretty near the edge. Lots of times (not here) it is also very far above the ground. Sometimes there is a rock wall on one side and a cliff on the other! I didn't hang out the window to take a picture during those times!

I was just in love with how old fashioned it is

Whoo whoo, blowing off steam, making a rainbow

Mesa Verde is incredible as well, and representing history of a whole different sort.

One of the cliff dwellings

Another one, with the late day sun on the rocks

The cliff dwellings there are just astonishing to see, and we learned a lot of interesting stuff about the ancestral pueblo people. First off, when we were here with our kids in 1995, these ancestral people were referred to as Anasazi. But that is a Navajo word, and the Navajo people aren't descended from these cliff dwellers. So their descendants, about 20 different tribes, didn't want that word used. Of course they have about 20 different languages.  So now they are referred to as "ancestral pueblo people." (But wait, isn't "pueblo" a Spanish word?)  Anyway, we learned about their way of life, and  what the bones and pottery and baskets they left behind have told scientists about them. And even though all that was so interesting, the coolest part was that to go  up to the cliff dwellings with a ranger, you have to climb up really high ladders (pretty scary), go through tight tunnels, and hike up and down at  the 7000 foot altitude,  which is hard on the lungs! Gives a person a sense of incredible respect for how these people lived. Just awesome.

Sometimes you just have to walk from rung to rung and not think about it

This is what the Mesa top looks like

Can you see the cliff dwelling just under the Mesa top?

(Apologies to the man in front of me. I couldn't resist. If I just say it was a tight squeeze, you wouldn't really get it. And people were waiting behind me, so I couldn't stand there until he was all the way through.)

Tomorrow it is on to Utah, for about a month of National Park overload. What a spectacle that will be, with one park after another. But Colorado, we hardly knew ye. Thanks for the jaw-dropping pleasure.

The Mountain West

We have been back on the road for seven weeks, and almost all of that without an internet connection. Much of what we have seen and done will have to go along unremarked upon by me, which I'm sure will not leave the world any worse off.  Maybe it increases my ability to be present in my life if I'm not thinking too much about what to share.

I've been thinking about the Wilderness Act of 1964, which has its 50th anniversary this year. I have thought quite a bit about the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, but never gave any thought at all to the Act that has made much of what we have been doing for the last two months as amazing as it has been. We are all very lucky that so much land was set aside without development for future generations to enjoy. It is one of the things that makes traveling in the Mountain West so incredible.

The big chunk of the country that the Rocky Mountains are in seems quite different from the rest of the US. I've been trying to figure it out. The different feel clearly has something to do with how rugged the terrain is, and how big a presence Nature has here. All the people we meet in these places seem to be very actively engaged in spending time in the open outdoors, and this seems to be a bigger part of the culture of these states than it is in the other places we have been.

I have often thought about the difference between New England and California cultures as coming partly from the motivations of the people who settled there. Of course the early white settlers of  New England were escaping something, but they still were more or less interested in preserving their own culture in a new place. The pioneers who made it out to the west were people who were looking to leave it all behind, which I think partly accounts for California's smaller interest in preservation and larger interest in innovation of culture. Perhaps the people who settled in the mountain west were rugged types who brought their love of the outdoors and of adventure with them. They also had to be hardy people who wanted less of a feeling of "civilized society," and more of a feeling of freedom to be left alone. Whatever it is, to me it feels like there is a different connection to the land in these places.

At Flaming Gorge

In Flaming Gorge

As for our own adventure, after our time in Idaho, we headed to the Salt Lake City area to visit with friends, which was lovely. Then we visited a place I had certainly never heard of, but will certainly remember, which is called Flaming Gorge. It is in both Utah and Wyoming. It is amazingly beautiful, and very unpopulated. Well worth a trip off the more-traveled path if you are ever on the border of Utah and Wyoming! Speaking of  the roads less traveled, I can't emphasize enough how profoundly our experience has been influenced by staying off the big interstate highways. You can get from one place to another faster on them, but you get much less of a feeling for the places you travel through. The old state highways are just so much more interesting--if occasionally quite a bit more challenging.

We had the wonderful and unusual opportunity to visit a friend in central Wyoming, who lives in a cabin on wide open cattle ranching land. She lives four miles down a dirt road from the county highway, and the closest town is about forty miles away.  Part of the path to her cabin is on the Oregon Trail. It was extraordinary to visit her there, and to see a way of life we certainly would never encounter otherwise. Bob had the chance to accompany her,  and then her son, on some ranch "chores," and we both had the opportunity to learn more about the way of life of people who raise cattle on the sagebrush desert of Wyoming. We are both so grateful for the opportunity. It was terrific. It gave us also a lot of opportunity to think about the pioneers who went across this terrain on the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the California Trail, which are mostly the same trails in that area. How brave they were! How tough they were! How resilient they must have been.  In that part of Wyoming there is also a part of the Mormon hand cart trail, where people actually traveled on foot, pushing a hand cart. Incredible.

In some places the old trail is marked with a monument

We visited an old mining ghost town in Wyoming that is in the historic South Pass of the Mormon, Oregon and California Trails, between the Wind River Range and the Oregon Buttes

We are following our friend as she leads us to her house

This is our car pulling our trailer on the dirt road, on the Oregon Trail. Amazing!

We are now in Rocky Mountain National Park. It is incredibly beautiful here, and particularly so because the aspen trees are turning yellow and orange against the green pine trees.  The altitude has been surprisingly difficult to adjust to. We have been higher than 6,000 feet for six weeks, but the higher elevations here (from 8,000 to 12,000 in various areas of the park) have meant a kind of light-headed shortness of breath for both of us. Even walking up a slight incline makes for some real huffing and puffing. Our hikes are of necessity quite a bit shorter. It makes us feel like old guys.

Aspens on display

Dead trees (all the gray ones) due to mountain pine bark beetles. So sad!

In some areas it seems more gray than green. The beetles destroy both lodge pole and ponderosa pine

This picture was taken at 12,000 feet! When you're that high up, the mountains don't look that tall! The low plants at the front are alpine tundra. This is above the timber line.

We had the opportunity to have lunch and go for one of these short walks in the Park with someone who lives here that I have known since the seventh grade. That, too, was such a wonderful addition to our trip. Bob and I get along quite well and do fine as one another's primary contact, but it is also deeply satisfying to see a familiar face, as we have done three times in these last weeks.

We have seen in each of these states, but particularly in Colorado, the devastation brought on by the pine bark beetle. In The Montana and Wyoming Rockies, a quarter or even close to a half of the trees were dead in many places. Here it seems like more than half, and almost everywhere we go. Apparently climate change has meant the winters are not as deeply cold as they were previously, and this has kept the beetles from completely dying off. So sad! How strange it will be to go to the woods and find mostly dead trees.

This guy was actually in Yellowstone. But you get the idea.

We happen to be visiting Rocky Mountain during elk rutting season. There are elk all over the park in the early evening, and there is quite a show of the boys trying to show off for the girls, and the boys trying to one-up each other.  The bugling sound the bulls make is incredible, and can be heard from quite a distance. We have been told that the bulls will herd about 20 cows into a harem, and after the girls agree, with him as the Big Man on Campus, he will mate with and impregnate all of them. Wow, what a guy. We also heard that after he has done the hard work of getting the harem together, a bigger bull might come along and get rid of him and take over. Doesn't seem fair, does it? At one of the visitors centers we saw an amazing sight, the locked antlers and skulls of  two bulls. Apparently a few years ago someone came upon their remains. They had gotten their antlers completely entangled, which is part of how they determine who the real BMOC will be. But one of these bulls had a piece of antler stuck under a tree root, and couldn't get it out. They stayed intertwined, and they both starved to death. Amazing. In the meantime, some other lucky guy probably just walked along and found big boy number one and big boy number two out of the picture, and I assume, just became BMOC without much work. Also not fair.

My take away from these last weeks: the Mountain West is spectacularly beautiful. The people who live here seem to feel a deep and abiding connection to the land, and make use of that to spend time outside. Many of the places that seem "empty" in this part of the country are interesting and beautiful, if you take the time to get off the interstate, get out of your car and experience it. We are lucky that in a previous time, those who represent us in government cared enough about the country and its future, and the extraordinary beauty of the West,  to set aside enormous chunks of land to be preserved as National Parks, or as protected wilderness, in spite of the possible commercial and profit-making uses of that land. High altitude is a bear when you are not used to it. It is mighty cold in this part of the country overnight, even when it is warm during the afternoons. Aspen trees are beautiful in the Fall. An epidemic of bark beetles is killing trees here faster than you can feel sorry to see them go. The western  pioneers were brave and strong. A friendly face is a welcome sight.  The Rocky Mountains are a mighty thing. I am a lucky woman. That is all. So far.

Idaho

Although we have driven through it briefly a couple of times, this is our first extended stay in Idaho. It feels like a bit of a mystery to me, but the picture is filling in a little. When you travel you can sometimes get something of a sense of the "personality" of each state. Often states that are next to each other seem similar. So far, Idaho seems somewhat different from its neighbors, but I may not have been here long enough to get my finger on it. What makes Idaho Idaho? It is subtle, and I think I'm not there yet.

One of the things I have gotten so far is that Idaho's identity seems intensely about the land. For starters, Idaho seems to be mostly protected land. The Forest Service seems to own quite a lot of the whole state, and a lot of the state is just EMPTY and unspoiled. Much  of the center of the state is protected wilderness, and there are parts you can't even drive through.  You have to drive around it or go through it on foot or on a boat. So the open land and rivers are wilder than comparable areas in other places, and that seems to be a big part of Idaho's identity. It is an outdoors life.  The areas near the wilderness don't seem to be very organized around tourists, either, in comparison to other "resort" parts of the country we have been to. We just spent a week in the Sawtooth Mountains, and it was remarkable how relatively little is going on there in terms of tourist services. People are just living their lives in beautiful empty places. (This is not true of course in the beautiful Ketchum/Sun Valley
area, which is stunning and beautiful, and obviously quite ready for company.)

 Our lovely camping spot in Salmon. Hardly a soul around to share this view with us! On the Salmon River.

At Craters of the Moon National Park

One of the  places we visited in Idaho is a place you might not have heard about.  I certainly hadn't. It's a National Park called Craters of the Moon. It's a very large area, acres and acres, of what was left after a big volcano eruption. I haven't been to Hawaii, and we stupidly didn't visit Mt St Helens
when we went from Oregon into Washington, so much of what we saw there is new to me. We went on a hike led by a Park Ranger, and there are many self guided hikes there as well. Every possible kind of volcanic rock is there, and although they will happily tell you that this one is this kind, and this one is that kind, the truth is that when we see it in a huge field, it just looks like every kind of pile of mud. Or rock. Or worse, piles of excrement. But it is very interesting up close, and even better when genuinely explored. We found out that when lava is flowing under the surface like a river, there are sometimes "tubes" created that are like tunnels for the lava to flow through,  like a hose. When the river finishes passing through, or the flowing stops, sometimes it leaves a tunnel under the
ground. These are called "lava tubes."

This is how one gets down in the hole. See the ladder? Then there is a lot of scrambling over rocks

Lava fields

More and different lava fields

They are really like underground caves. You have to get permission to go into them, and to do that you have to have not been in a cave somewhere else in the last few years, because this white nose disease is killing off all the bats, and they are afraid you will bring some equipment or tools with you that have been in a cave where bats are sick, and then bring the disease to a new place. Anyway, we went with a Ranger inside one of these caves, and it was really interesting. One of the coolest parts is that sometimes after the cave, or tube, is created, the ceiling collapses. Sometimes it does it when the whole thing is still hot. That looks just like a fallen soufflé. If it happens after it's all cool, big chunks of the ceiling are on the ground, and when you look at them, you can see how they used to be ceiling. (One man's ceiling is another man's floor.)   Really cool. I think it is one of  our favorite places that we have visited, and we could have easily driven right past.

You can't really see it here but that big wedge on the ground exactly matches a hole in the ceiling

You climb over a million rocks and then suddenly there is a hole and there is the sky again!

Miles of this. From the road it looks like nothing. Up close.....amazing.

Everything in central Idaho relates to Lewis and Clark. Staying on the Salmon River, you hear about them everywhere. We followed a piece of their actual trail, which is a pretty rutted and winding road. But it was wonderful, and at the top you are rewarded with standing on top of the Continental Divide, where you can have one foot in Idaho and one in Montana, and you can see what they saw. When they got to the top of the pass, they were expecting to see the Columbia River valley, and the path to the Pacific. What they saw instead was the Sawtooth range of the Rockies. Wow.

On the Lewis and Clark Trail

Sawtooth Wilderness

We have now been in many parts of Idaho. Earlier, we went through the very top corner of Idaho, the panhandle, which has a quite wonderful, artsy sort of  town called Sandpoint, but which otherwise has been described to us as redneck to a maximum degree. (Idaho is a red state through and through, but somehow that part of the state stands out, I guess.) We have seen the Craters of the Moon;  spent a few days in Salmon, which is a very nice small town, where we saw Shakespeare in the park, learned about Sacajawea (she was from the Salmon River valley),  took a day-long float trip on the Salmon River, and stood on the Continental Divide. We spent a few days in Stanley, which has only 63 people but is at the edge of the Sawtooth Wilderness, and where Bob did a lot of fishing, we had amazing barbecue, and  which is frequently the coldest spot in the US. Tonight we are in Twin Falls, where we were told to be sure to stop and see a waterfall deeper than Niagara, but which is mostly dry now, at the end of summer, because it is a regulated dam.

Not sure I totally got a feel for Idaho, but I can say the scenery is spectacular, the people were warm and friendly, and there is a lot of true wilderness. Three cheers for Idaho Senator Frank Church, who spent his life making sure this would be true.

Tomorrow we head into Utah briefly, and then east to Wyoming.   20,000 miles in, and still going.