Holbrook, AZ – Escalante, UT
5/21 – 5/26/16
5-21
I left Holbrook just before dawn. As I drove down a lonely two-lane highway, the moon, massive and golden, dissolved into the western horizon. At the same moment, the eastern sky grew bright; and then, after an expectant pause, the first rays of the sun raced over the desert, kindling a long line of crimson mesas. Driving through this silent drama, I felt like a witness to creation, when substance became form.
I was driving through the Navajo Nation, the massive reservation that covers much of Arizona’s northeast corner. Technically, this land is outside the jurisdiction of the United States government. The road I drove on was labelled an “Indian Route”; and when I turned on the radio, I was treated to a talk show in Navajo, interspersed with long jam sessions of traditional chanting.
My first destination was Canyon de Chelley (pronounced d’ shay), near the market town of Chinle. The Canyon is deep and winding, with brilliant sandstone walls. What sets it apart from the many other eroded watercourses of Colorado Plateau is the population of Navajo farmers that cultivates the fertile canyon floor. On either side of a meandering and cottonwood-lined stream, houses and barns sat amid fields of freshly-planted corn and beans. Ancient cliff dwellings, perched high above the modern farms, attest to the longstanding appeal of this place.
I hiked down into the canyon to see the so-called White House, an exceptionally well-preserved cliff dwelling near a bend in the stream. The striated sandstone of the cliffs was interesting; but the little farms along the canyon floor made the hike. After climbing back out of the canyon, I drove along its south and north rims, pulling over occasionally to admire a cliff dwelling or confluence.
Leaving the Canyon rim, I drove through the heart of the Navajo Nation. For nearly an hour, distant lines of rosy cliffs hemmed the horizons, hovering over fields of low brown grass. Then, as the strengthening wind sent tumbleweeds rolling across the road, the cliffs disintegrated into buttes, and the iconic red towers of Monument Valley appeared in the distance. A few minutes later, I was among them. Monument Valley, used by John Ford and dozens of other directors as a shorthand for the American west, is at once intimately familiar and wholly new. The buttes themselves have appeared in dozens of movies; but I was unprepared for the sheer visual impact of their size and color.
Repeatedly pulling off to the ill-paved shoulder, I tried to photograph the buttes from every angle. My favorite view, however, was from the north. Pulling off at mile 13 on the Utah side of 163, I walked to the middle of the highway (there were no other cars in sight) and snapped a few pictures of the newly-paved strip of blacktop bisecting a crimson horizon of butte and desert. This stretch of highway, featured in movies as diverse as Easy Rider and Forrest Gump, is the kind of road that makes you want to buy a motorcycle just to cruise on it. I opened the windows of my rental Camry, stubbly hair doing its best to stream in the burning desert air.
After a series of sharp turns and steep slopes, I rolled through the town of Mexican Hat (named for a nearby rock formation), and turned off into Goosenecks State Park. The park consists of little more than a viewpoint and adjacent trail, which command a spectacular view of the “goosenecks” of the San Juan River, three hairpin turns eroded into 1500 feet of brilliant sandstone. The buttes of Monument Valley were visible in the red distance above the contorted canyon, their shapes blurred by suspended sand.
Driving north from the Goosenecks, I decided, in a moment of perversity, to attempt the Moki Dugway. This series of unpaved switchbacks, which follows an ancient Native American route, ascends nearly 2000 feet in less than two miles. Wheels spinning on unpaved grades of up to 15%, pressing anxiously against the canyon wall to avoid unfenced drop-offs, I white-knuckled my way up to the plateau. I paused to take a photo at the top – red desert, red buttes, red canyons – and the incredible gray ribbon of the road, snaking its way up toward my perch.
Just past the top of the Dugway, I turned down a loose sand track toward Muley’s Point, the awesome overlook that surveys the whole of NE Arizona and SE Utah. The gale-force wind whipped sheets of sand along the road and bent the dwarf junipers nearly double. It was even stronger at the point itself, a barren stone peninsula projecting nearly a half-mile over the canyon of the San Juan River. The view incorporated everything I had seen since leaving Canyon de Chelley. Monument Valley, hazy from windborne sand, glowed on the northern horizon. A vast arc of crimson desert, stretching from the Garden of the Gods in the east to Canyonlands in the west, filled the middle distance. The San Juan River coursed just below, its channel lost amid a network of canyons, washes and gullies. To the northeast, on the edge of sight, a range of snowcapped mountains emerged from the red stone sea. The gritty wind swept over me, howling among the rocks.
I nearly hit a cow on the way back to the road, an occurrence that has become something of a leitmotif in this country of open range grazing. On the highway, I was stuck in a fullscale cow-jam, as dozens of bovines ambled across the road in search of greener pastures. Other highlights of my drive to Moab were scenic. At one point, the highway mounted through a five hundred foot wall of red rock that stretched to the horizon in either direction. As I neared my destination, the La Sale Mountains reared up beside the highway, peaks glistening over a wilderness of red rock kindled by the sunset.
5-22
I devoted today to Canyonlands National Park. Unlike its compact neighbor Arches, the park incorporates three massive units of sandstone canyons, buttes, mesas, and pinnacles, spread over a hundred-mile stretch of remote desert. The size and isolation of the park, in combination with the difficulty of most of its hikes, keeps visitor density blessedly low. This is a national park for connoisseurs.
I began with Island in the Sky, the most accessible unit. Leaving just after dawn, I reached the loop road when the sun was still low enough to drive spears of crimson through a landscape of latent rose. I scurried up the Mesa Arch Trail to try to catch dawn from that spectacular overlook, where the opening of a natural arch frames a vast panorama of canyons and buttes. I missed dawn; but the sun-washed landscape was still as impressive a testament to the power of erosion as anything else I have seen in this endlessly-gullied region.
Moving on the Grand View overlook, I was treated to the same view, expanded and multiplied. The sea-green Colorado snaked away to the west, centering an endlessly ramified network of canyons. As I walked along the short trail by the overlook, I was struck by the infinite variety and essential unity of the view. The canyons and buttes, torn from the same rock formations by the same forces, were variations on a single theme – but so various, molded to so many shapes and shades, as to each seem unique.
After strolling a while through the vastness of this view, I returned to my car and drove the seventy miles to Canyonland’s Needles Unit. This part of the park, lightly visited on account of its remoteness, allows tourists to experience firsthand the otherworldly landscape glimpsed from above at Island in the Sky. The trailhead for the longer hikes is located at the end of rough one-lane road beaten through the buttes by uranium prospectors in the fifties.
I decided on an ambitious thirteen mile hike through the park’s heart. Leaving the dusty parking lot, I plunged into a vast and empty landscape, draped by the shadows of passing clouds. Normally, taking a day hike is like auditing a class: as long as you don’t do anything really stupid, you cannot fail. Day hiking Canyonlands was a little more intense. The path was meandering and poorly-marked. Within twenty minutes of leaving my car, I managed to lose the track multiple times; and since I only passed another hiker about once every half-hour, I had little help in orientating myself.
My frequent deviations from the trail were exacerbated by frequent detours for photo-ops. Within a few minutes, I emerged into an otherworldly vista of deep canyons, whose walls were banded with alternating formations of sandstone and limestone. Beyond the distant mouths of these canyons hovered a line of tall red cliffs, which were themselves overseen by the bluish, snowcapped peaks of the La Sale mountains.
Pressing farther, I passed among a field of the sandstone spires for which this unit of the park is named. Protected by caps of durable limestone, these pinnacles stand in surreal ranks and clusters, rearing like fangs around the dusty meandering paths. The effect of hiking among them is difficult to describe –almost a theological problem, a matter of finding apt metaphors for the ineffable. In lieu of analysis, description will have to do.
A few impressions. Walking through a broad valley ringed with crimson pinnacles, windblown grass brushing my fingertips. Standing on a sand track in the backcountry, wind murmuring in the hollowed buttes on both sides. Looking down a long canyon of banded white and red stone toward a line of cliffs vermillion in the evening light, the snowcapped La Sale Mountains purple behind.
Tired but satisfied, I drove the forty miles back to the highway with the windows down, drinking in the scenery. Five hundred foot cliffs, bloodred in the sunset hour, rose on both sides of the road, the peaks of the La Sale Mountains just visible over the cliff rims. About halfway down the road, I was stopped by a large herd of cows. To my surprise and alarm, an enormous bull separated from the herd and advanced on my car, head down. I beeped. The bull snorted and pawed. Our eyes locked. I wondered vaguely whether my car insurance would cover a cow attack. Finally, after a long moment, the bull mooed and shook his head. At this signal, the rest of the herd began to clatter across the road. The bull slowly moved with them, looking back at me defiantly. I guess they don’t neuter cattle out here…
5-23
If Canyonlands is a connoisseur’s park, Arches is for the masses. A few easy miles from Moab, graced with an accessible scenic drive and a few easy trails, Arches National Park receives something like two million visitors a year. By mid-morning on a spring day, all parking lots are full, the more accessible trails swarm with slow-moving lines of visitors, and gridlock develops around the entrance gate. Having no desire to be caught up in this madness, I left my campsite well before dawn, and was in the park by 6.
I was immediately enchanted. In the soft and sourceless light of early morning, the park landscape took on a dreamlike quality. Gravity-defying arches and pinnacles of red rock, impossibly delicate, floated insubstantial before the misty La Sale Mountains. The centerpiece of the first turn-out, an enormous boulder balanced on a slender pillar of sandstone, reinforced the surreal atmosphere.
After taking a few short hikes along the scenic drive, I made for the park’s, and indeed Utah’s, most famous landmark: the Delicate Arch. After surveying the arch from an overlook trail, I drove to the already crowded parking lot for the arch itself. The path up was only about a mile and a half long, but steep and unimproved, with long stretches routed straight up pitted slickrock. Weaving through groups of panting tourists, I hurried to the top – and then stopped dead at the first sight of my destination. There’s a reason Delicate Arch appears on Utah license plates. Most stone arches are ragged windows in fins of stone, remarkable only from directly below. Delicate Arch is a freestanding formation, poised dramatically atop a tapering base of sculpted sandstone. The La Sale Mountains, purple and white, provide a dramatic backdrop.
As I was savoring this spectacle, an enormous tour group crested the ridge. Chattering and posing for selfies, they clustered around the base of the arch, shattering my peace and ruining my pictures. Tour groups, which transform courteous and intelligent tourists into blundering sheep, are a longstanding pet peeve of mine. As I pushed through the herd back down toward the parking lot, I found myself missing the eerie solitude of Canyonlands.
The last trail I did before leaving the park incorporated no less than four arches. After Delicate Arch, these specimens were relatively unimpressive – with the partial exception of the massive Landscape Arch, a broad banner of stone that promises to collapse in the near future. The desert setting and the distant mountains, however, made even the most meager arches endlessly photogenic.
I was tempted to stay longer; but the crowds on the trail were thickening quickly, and I left for Moab in early afternoon.
5-24
Like so many two-lane roads in this part of the country, Utah Highway 24 is isolated and empty. Winding first over low sagebrush-covered hills, and then through a glorious panorama of sculpted red sandstone hills, shot with streaks of milky limestone. As I approached Capitol Reef National Park, the sandstone hills began to heel wildly, strata warped and contorted by the ancient fault that forced them from the earth.
I claimed a site in the park’s idyllic campground, located among the orchards of the old Mormon town of Fruita. Crimson cliffs hovered over the rustling treetops; a horse grazed peacefully in an adjacent paddock; a brook babbled just out of sight. It was almost a pleasure to pitch my tent in such a place.
Once I was set up, I hopped into my car and onto the aptly-named Scenic Drive, which meanders through a valley bounded by tall crimson cliffs. Following this to a dirt track, I set out on a two-mile trail along a wagon route used by the Mormon pioneers in the late nineteenth century. Many of these men carved their names and the date of their passage into the sandstone walls of a twisting sandstone canyon. The resultant tracery of names and dates provides fascinating testimony to the bands of settlers who first explored this remote region.
Next, I set off on a more ambitious five-mile hike with nearly a thousand feet of elevation gain. The winding track provided an intimate look at the geology of Capitol Reef. Thinly-bedded sandstone, upended and folded, crunched and flaked under my feet. It was curious to think that my every step was bridging millennia, and that the sand kicked free by my feet had been imprisoned for a hundred million years. Nothing is so humbling as geologic time.
Well, almost nothing. Capitol Reef is refreshingly untouristed, and I had the trail to myself for the first half-hour. Advancing with a broad and forceful stride, heels clicking confidently on stone, I thought I was making good time. Then, with a rush of lycra, a woman passed me at a brisk run, waving cheerfully as she flew up a sandstone slope. About fifteen minutes later, with not a drop of sweat on her face, she was back, flying like a gazelle down the ledges. I asked her how many trails she was doing that day. “Oh, just three” she said breezily, naming a series of long and difficult paths. “It’s really addicting, running up mountains. Do you jog?” I half-consciously sucked in my gut. “Sure” I replied, sniffing manfully, “though mostly on level ground.” “You should try running on mountain trails – it’s so much better for your joints.” “I do leave the incline on my treadmill sometimes.”
Returning on the Scenic Drive, I turned off to photograph a broad side canyon. As I drove through the canyon, I noticed that a thin stratum of gray-green shale running through the sandstone was pockmarked with mine shafts. Parking and walking up to cliff face, I saw that the openings were blocked with metal grates, and festooned with signs warning of radiation danger. The shafts, as it turned out, opened onto disused uranium mines. I was not tempted to explore further.
After visiting the only store in the tiny village of Torey to buy my dinner (Ramen), I pulled off at a viewpoint along the road back into Capitol Reef to watch the sandstone bluffs grow incandescent in the late afternoon sun. Unable to resist, I hiked up a two-mile trail to the top of one of the bluffs, and sat down to watch a cloudburst pass just south of my vantage point. The sun reemerged as I made my way back to the road, making feldspar flakes in the sandstone wall sparkle.
5-25
I followed the picturesque and winding Hwy 12 out of Capitol Reef, which climbed through leafless stands of quaking aspen and spruce before dipping back into a rolling landscape of juniper and scrub oak. On an impulse, I turned off the highway to take the famously precarious “Hell’s Backbone” route between Boulder and Escalante. I soon had cause to regret this decision. The road, only one lane wide, was unpaved and pocked with bottomless potholes. The scenery was pleasant enough – first open-range ranches, then dense stands of spruce – but I was too worried about popping a tire to enjoy it much. After about an hour of rattling, I came to Hell’s Backbone itself – a narrow ridge between two plunging canyons, over which the ten-foot wide road ran blithely, attended by rusty guardrails.
I gulped, looked straight ahead, and managed to drive over without dying. Parking on the far side, I left my car to take a few photos of the inimitably named Box Death Hollow Wilderness, a trackless region of tortuous ravines that is considered Utah’s most challenging hiking terrain. Then I rattled again over dirt and rock, emerging in Escalante two hours after leaving Boulder. In that time, I passed only four cars. Good thing I didn’t break down.
After claiming one of the last available campsites at Bryce Canyon National Park, I drove to a few of the overlooks to get a sense of the landscape. Bryce is famous for its hoodoos, uncanny spires of rock formed by the rapid erosion of variously permeable sedimentary rock formations. A modest host rose from a sandstone amphitheater below the first overlook I visited, scattering uneven shadows in the late morning sun. Before exploring further – and to escape the overcrowding of the overlooks –I drove to the edge of the park to see a trail that led to a small grove of Bristlecone Pines. This tree, the longest-lived on earth, has always fascinated me. Growing in extreme conditions – the tree prefers arid climates and high elevations –it never attains the size of a redwood or sequoia, its only rivals in longevity. It is in fact striking, almost endearingly, ugly. A gnarled and low-slung trunk twists up from the rock, sending out stubby and twisted branches, most long dead. A few reluctant sprays of dark green needles emerge from the bleached wood, waving incongruously over an apparently petrified trunk. There were only a few bristlecones along the trail in Bryce, and these only about 1700 years old. Yet I’m glad I made the trip to see them. Someone has to appreciate this least prepossessing of trees.
It was now mid-afternoon, and the crowds had thinned enough for me to attempt the park’s best and most popular trail, a three mile loop through the heart of the hoodoos in Bryce amphitheater. Not even Canyonlands was so surreal.
I walked past endless ranks and arrays of pinnacles, dyed every shade of red. Grasping for analogies, my first thought was that this landscape was stone become mortal. There was something suggestive of protruding ribs about the hoodoos, something of bone pulling from decayed tendons. As I continued to walk and the hoodoos became denser, I was increasingly struck by the architectural qualities of the landscape. Particularly from above, the formations seemed like the fallen spires and buttresses of a world-high cathedral, or pieces of an artistic composition just beyond human comprehension.
Besides a hoodoo supposed to resemble a portly Queen Victoria (it didn’t), the highlight of my hike was Wall Street, a slot canyon cut through skyscraper-like lines of hoodoos. Emerging on the canyon lip, I was treated to a gorgeous panorama of Bryce Amphitheater, glowing in the evening sunlight. I hiked for nearly two miles along the clifftop trail, entranced by the effects of the sinking sun, dappling clouds, and changing viewpoints. Inspired as only a mediocre photographer can be, I took an inordinate number of virtually identical pictures.
5-26
I drove east along Hwy 12 this morning beneath a fractured ceiling of dark clouds. Here and there, shafts of sunlight slanted through, interspersed with dragging curtains of rain. A few miles from the park gate, I drove through one of these cloudbursts. For a few moments, rain thundered down on my car, falling with a ferocity to fill every canyon and beat the mesas flat. Then the storm passed, and uncertain sunlight began to glance off the slickened rock.
A little past Escalante, I turned off onto the Calf Creek trailhead in the Escalante – Grand Staircase National Monument, where I hiked about three miles to a tall waterfall. The walk was among the most scenic of my trip to date. The trail kept to the fertile bottom of a deep sandstone canyon. As it meandered alongside a chuckling brook, the gorgeously patterned cliff walls seemed to float on the lacy branches of freshly-budding trees. Surrounded by the gnarled branches of gambrel oaks, I felt like I was walking through a Hudson River School painting. The waterfall, which swept in a single elegant plume to a sculpted pool, confirmed this impression.
After a pleasant three hours, I returned to Hwy 12. Pausing on a overlook to take a few photos of the road’s endlessly convoluted track, blasted through solid rock by the CCC in the 30’s, I was hurried along to my next stop by the first drops of another cloudburst.
A few miles short of Escalante, I turned down a rough sand and gravel track – the famous Hole in the Rock Road –to see the Devil’s Garden, a small field of hoodoos that visitors are allowed to freely explore. I took full advantage of this policy, scrambling up slopes of wildly eroded sandstone, crawling thorough natural windows, and even balanced on a precarious natural arch. This would be a wonderful place for a (rather negligent) parent to bring children.
Chased away by another approaching storm, I decided to pick up some groceries in Escalante, a faded ranching town of a few hundred people. I regretted my choice the moment I set foot in the single store, which may be the saddest market in Utah. Lights flickered over half-empty displays; off-brand products crowded dusty shelves; a few bruised apples comprised the fruit display. I decided to hold off on my shopping spree.