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Our road trip has finally come to an end. We have done a little over 6000 miles in seven weeks, and in a couple of days we will be driving the last forty miles from Boulder to Denver airport and our flight home.
In the last seven weeks our lives took on a new pattern. Driving into endless small towns looking for the motel, diner, visitors centre, supermarket, bookshop or just the junction with the next highway. Making tea and porridge using a coffee percolator. Watching the seemingly infinite yellow line that runs down the centre of the two lane black top disappear beneath the front wheels of our car. What next to play on the iPod? Countless conversations with friendly strangers. Flicking through the TV channels desperately trying to find something to watch that isn’t an advert. Plotting routes on maps and googling for information. Filling our water container for the next desert leg. Tracking up trails, eating our packed lunch and gazing at stunning natural beauty. The non-stop click of my camera. Tiring, demanding but wonderful.
This is the biggest cliche of them all – but America really is a very big place. Seven weeks and 6000 miles and all we have done is wander around parts of of six states. There are another forty four to explore.
At the end of my last post we had just arrived in California, this is what happened after that.
Having driven 560 miles across the Nevada desert from Escalante we arrived in an area of Northern California that has a special place in our hearts, the Owens valley and Highway 395. The Sierra Nevada mountains run north south in California dividing the busy and populated western coastal side from the eastern strip which is high desert. Running down the length of the eastern Sierra Nevada is the Owens Valley and Highway 395. Isabel and I have spent a lot of time in the Owens Valley on previous trips and this time we headed for the northern end around the entrance to the Yosemite National Park.
We decided to stay in June Lake, one of the many lake filled canyons that cut into the Sierra Nevada. We booked a really nice suite in a lodge with a sitting room, kitchen and a balcony overlooking the lake although there was a glitch with our reservation which meant we had to swap suites after two days.
Isabel paddles in June Lake
As soon as we arrived in Owens Valley we felt a huge boost in our morale, it’s just so beautiful and the sun was shining in the special blue skies you only get in in the Californian high desert. We were initially tired from our long drive and spent the first day recovering and doing some shopping. By the second day we were starting to get stuck into some walks, and we started with the rather scary chair lift up the local mountains and a summit hike to a high lake, the hike was great but the lake a bit of a disappointment.
Isabel walking above June Lake
Then we hiked to Rainbow Falls and the Lower Rainbow Falls in Mammoth Lake canyon. The waterfall at Rainbow Falls is really spectacular but since a forest fire in 1992 burned off the forest cover over a big chunk of the trail the going was very hot and dusty, but the falls made it all worthwhile.
Rainbow Falls
Next we decided to visit Yosemite National Park, the oldest in America. The park is a huge area of mountainous wilderness set amongst an even vaster area of mountainous wilderness. We have been there before several times and it is a very impressive and fantastically beautiful place, its central valley has 3000 foot, almost vertical, cliffs towering above it and it has many waterfalls. The drive in to Yosemite from its eastern portal through the Tioga Pass is the most dramatic entrance to any National park I have seen, you drive many miles up and up a snaking and steeply rising road cut into the vertical face of huge cliffs.
Unfortunately this was peak tourist season (our previous visits had been towards the end of the season) and the park was packed with visitors. The National Parks try to keep most of their parks as true wilderness so they limit the number of roads and in Yosemite there is just one road that coils its way across the Sierra Nevada, in fact this road is the only road that passes across the mountains in their entire length. There are lots of nice hikes off of this road (we have done some in the past) but these were now clogged with visitors and the car parks at the trailheads were packed. It is possible to hike over several days into true wilderness but those sorts of walks are sadly beyond us.
Luckily on the way into the park and just before the entry point we had seen a signpost to somewhere called Saddlebag Lake and the ranger in the park said it was worth a visit so we backtracked out of the park and drove several miles up a dirt road to Saddlebag Lake. We were very glad we did. Unlike the park there were very few visitors and the whole place has a very peaceful feel. The lake itself is about three miles long and you can get a water taxi to the far end where there is a loop trail out amongst several glacial lakes amongst snow capped mountains. Although it was getting a bit late in the day by now we hopped onto the water taxi and did one part of the loop and we were immediately in stunningly beautiful country. We decided to come back the next day and do the whole loop.
Crossing snow in the sunshine
By two of the beautiful lakes on the Saddlebag lake trail
The next day proved to be a bit more dramatic than we expected. When we arrived for the water taxi at the head of the lake we discovered it had broken down and there was now an improvised shuttle running using smaller boats. As we waited a helicopter came over very low and flew up the valley towards the area we planned to hike. We discovered that a sixty year old experienced and fit walker had been lost since the previous day, and he had spent the night on the mountain in only a shirt and shorts. It had been cold the night before and up in these high mountains the temperature had dropped to below freezing, the thought of spending a night up here in just a shirt and shorts didn’t bear thinking about.
Isabel descends a scree slope towards Lake Helen
Isabel crosses a snow pocket above Saddlebag Lake
We crossed the lake and started our walk from the other end of the loop going in the opposite direction to the day before and as we worked our way past lakes and up into the canyon we realised that this part of the walk was considerably harder. Lots of scree slopes to traverse and the wind was stronger and colder than the day before. And all the time we could hear, and sometimes see, the rescue helicopter as it circled looking for the lost walker.
After a couple of hours we had reached the furthest point of the loop walk where the trail turns back towards Saddlebag Lake, here the trail was very rough as it went over and through boulder fields so the path was only marked by occasional stone cairns. At some point we lost track of where the trail was, there was a large snow pocket in front of us and no foot prints across it so that didn’t seem the way to go. Just then a couple of guys came along the trail and they started to look for the way forward and soon they had found a boulder path across the snow pocket and seen a cairn and they set of confidently and briskly, we followed them and soon lost sight of them. We found more stone cairns but the going got very, very rough and we found ourselves on exposed high rock and we just could not see any more track markers. The wind was very strong by this time, we could see no other people and the distant noise of the rescue helicopter only seemed to add to our sense of unease. After trying a variety of directions and routes we began to feel a bit anxious. Eventually we decided to find a sheltered spot, eat some lunch and then back track. When we got back to the last known bit of good trail we bumped into another couple of confused hikers and between us we found the real trail and eventually got around the loop and after five hours back to the boat home. God knows where the markers we had followed earlier led but it wasn’t the trail. We passed and briefly chatted with the search and rescue team hiking up the trail to look for the missing man.
Other than the bit of drama when we were briefly lost we had had a fantastic day walking through the most gorgeous landscape. Sadly just as we were leaving the lake word came through that the missing man had been found dead.
Here is a short video Isabel shot of me of me falling over whilst crossing a snow pocket during our hike above Saddlebag Lake.
Next day, our last in California, we decided to take it easy as we had to drive a 1000 miles back to Denver over the next four days. We did some shopping and bought a much needed extra suitcase for all the books we had bought whilst travelling (we are such bookies). Then visited the interesting ghost town of Bodie up in the mountains, the town was abandoned in the 1930s and is amazingly well preserved.
Bodie Ghost Town
One of the photographers who has inspired my attempts at landscape photography is Ansel Adams who from the 1930s pioneered landscape photography through his beautiful black and white photos, the most famous of which were shot in Yosemite. If you want to find out more about Ansel Adams and see some of his work click here and here. I decided to render some of my photos as black and white in the style of Ansel Adams, here are some of them.
Rainbow Falls
Arches National Park – Utah
Sedona – Arizona
Some dead roots in the desert
Shooting the black and white waterfall shot above required a lot of fiddly camera work involving a long exposure, a special filter, balancing the camera on a rock etc, and Isabel shot a short video of me at work showing how undignified the work of a photographer can be
We left the Owens Valley and set off on our long haul to Denver. The first stage involved a 400 mile drive across the Nevada desert (again!) to the town of Wendover. The route took us through yet more big emptiness, at one point while Isabel dozed beside me I drove for nearly an hour without seeing another car, encountering a bend in the road or seeing any evidence of human activity in the desolate empty landscape around me. With the car’s speed controlled automatically all I had to was minutely adjust the steering wheel every so often. I felt like I was in some sort of car simulator. I was travelling at eighty miles an hour but I had no sense of speed and seemed to be doing five mph. I had spent so long in the car by this point that I felt that I was merging genetically with it to form a new life form called “carseatarse”
We broke the long drive in the town of Ely which we had passed through once before on another trip when we drove Highway 50, across another chunk of Nevada desert, the official Loneliest Highway in America, you can even apply for a certificate if you drive the whole length of it, which I did and my certificate is pinned up in my room at home. When we on Highway 50 during our previous trip we had suddenly spotted coming towards us out of the heat haze an old fashioned horse-drawn covered wagon. It was being driven across the desert by two young hippies dressed in a cross between pioneer clothes and gypsy outfits. Before we had barely registered them we had sped past. We wandered who they were and what their story was.
In Ely we discovered a vintage car competition and people had brought in a wonderful variety of beautifully restored old cars to show. The cars, with evocative names like Oldsmobile, Chevy Bel Air, Chevy Corvette, Impala, were so gorgeous, so perfectly curved, that I just wanted to caress them, unfortunately there was a strict no touch rule. Oh for the days when you could drive around with no seatbelts, smoking and drinking without a care on America’s big empty highways.
Some of the glorious vintage cars on show in the town of Ely
We arrived at Wendover by early evening. The town has two points of interest.The first is that it straddles the Utah Nevada border and so gambling is legal in one half of the town and that half looks like a mini Las Vegas. We wandered into one of the casinos but gambling is not our scene and the windowless interior of casinos are a sensory overload, especially after the stark simplicity of the desert, with countless coloured and flashing lights, chrome and shiny plastic surfaces, big screen video displays. We didn’t stay long.
The other claim to fame at Wendover is the Great Salt Flats, that start on the edge of town, and the Bonneville Speedway which is out on the Flats.
To get an impression of the salt flats imagine a car park bigger than London and as flat as a billiard table. Paint it brilliant white. Then wander out into the middle of it on the hottest and sunniest day you can imagine. I have never been anywhere like it.
Isabel on the astonishing Salt Flats
Much of the salt flats are firm enough to drive on and there are no speed limits or traffic controls. There is a short paved road that takes you about four miles out then a further drive across the flats gets you to the Bonneville Speedway, the place where many land speed records have been set. The day we drove out was the day of a big meet. On the edge of the flats was a vast collection of hundreds and hundreds of RV vehicles, mobile homes, caravans and tents. It looked like a big and affluent refugee camp. Further out on the flats near the speedway were thousands of people and vehicles all focussed on the same thing – driving very fast. There were old cars, ancient cars, sports cars, cars that looked like rockets, rockets that looked like cars, dune buggies, endlessly varied motorbikes, three wheeled motorbikes, microlight aircraft, vintage and custom cars of all kinds, powered skate boarders, cyclists. Like in the rest of the west people dressed in the most eccentric fashion with much facial hair, lots of ZZTop lookalikes. It was Glastonbury for the internal combustion engine. We walked and drove around for a bit before we had to leave to continue our journey east.
Some of the many vehicles out on the Salt Flats
Isabel chats to two kilt wearing cyclists (and why not!) on the Salt Flats. The guy on the left is called Phil Strong and is very proud of his Scottish ancestry, he regularly competes in Highland Games across the western states. The Kilts they are wearing are not regular kilts but are utility kilts with many pockets – Isabel wants to get me into one.
We broke our journey in the pleasant Utah town of Vernal and then pushed on the next day to our next stop at the small town of Hot Sulphur Springs in Colorado in the foothills of the Rockies, where we had a good long soak in the mineral springs. We needed it as we were now both getting really road weary.
After a night at Hot Sulphur Springs we drove the final leg of our journey back through the high pass over the Rockies, through the Rocky Mountains National Park, and into the small and very sweet town of Boulder. We are staying in Boulder for a couple of nights, partly to see the city which is very attractive, and mostly because it will take us that long to sort out and pack all the crap we have collected on the road. It doesn’t help that we are staying in an eco-hotel where you have to sort and grade all your garbage, on the other hand it does have a pool and a hot tub which is where I am off to shortly.
Then tomorrow the drive to the airport and the flight home. It will be nice to be home again but I will miss the blue skies, the bookshops and the wonderful endless highway.
We have driven 4200 miles in the last five weeks and we are begining to get a little road weary. I am posting this from northern California which was not on our original itinerary, the reason we ended up here I will recount below.
We arrived in Sedona after our two day journey from Taos in New Mexico, we had spent a very lovely few days in Sedona back in 2004 and thought we would stay a bit longer this time. Sedona is a weird, wonderful and at times wacky place. It is located in a long canyon amongst superb red rock mesa formations that tower and twist above the town so that as you drive and walk around the place you are constantly confronted by the most amazing vistas. Amongst the rock formations are areas where the rocks appear to twist around each other in odd spirals known as vortices. These vortices were believed to have special healing powers by the native Americans and since the sixties Sedona has been attracting all sort of healers, shamans and new age believers of all hues. When you enter the town you pass the metaphysical department store and everywhere you go there are healers, energy channellers, shamanistic practitioners, chiropractors, massage parlours, healing sanctuaries, spirit mediums and crystal energy centres. It’s actually a really fun sort of place.
Some of the courses offered by the University of Sedona
Both the times I have visited I have been a bit road weary with a few aches and pains from too many miles in the car and both times I have visited a Chiropractor but actually encountered a slightly unnerving blend of bone manipulation, energy channelling, and total shamanistic healing. I am bit sceptical about all this sort of stuff but after both my healing encounters in Sedona I have felt much, much better so who am I to scoff?
Walking near Sedona
To give you a taste of the place I will tell you about the first person we encountered as we entered the town (actually the village of Old Creek which is a sort of satellite town to Sedona, both are small places). As we drove into town after a long day spent driving we were looking for our motel and spotted a visitors’ centre so we decided to pop in for directions and to pick up a local map and various bits of information such as whether there was a Safeways in town, where the bookshops were etc.
Inside we encountered Mark its sole occupant. Within seconds of starting to ask Mark our questions we knew we would be there for a while. Mark spoke and acted like a supremely relaxed person who had just smoked a strong joint which had completely scrambled his brain. As we posed our questions what we got back were long rambling stream of consciousness monologues that wandered all over the place and which, with a bit of luck and some nudging from us, ended up occasionally containing some of the information we were after. Once as Isabel gently tried to steer the conversation back on topic he said “you are a very focussed person aren’t you!”, then he rambled off on another tangent.
For all our desire to get to our motel after our long journey it was hard to get impatient with Mark as he invited you into a universe in which there was no need to hurry and everything was connected to everything else. The conversation took many turns, once we wandered off into a discussion about Winston Churchill and how Londoners had coped with the Blitz. The most surreal moment came when in mid monologue Mark suddenly and without pausing looked at me and exclaimed “you have really nice teeth”. This naturally led to a longish digression into a discussion about my teeth, his teeth and teeth in general.
In the days that followed if Isabel and I ever encountered a difficult situation I would simply point at my exposed gnashers and exclaim “Nice Teeth!”
Although we enjoyed our week in Sedona the big problem remained the weather, we had a couple of days when it was sunny for a while during the middle of the day but every evening thunder storms would brew up killing the usual wonderful evening light on the red rock cliffs (something I had been much looking forward to) and a couple of days it really pissed down with low grey cloud. In the end I just accepted that the swirling clouds amongst the rock mesa and spires offered its own beauty and tried to stop fretting about the rain.
Wet weather in Sedona
We had a few really nice walks including two long walks up the West Fork of Old Creek which a local described as the best trail in Arizona. The route up the canyon, which several times crossed Oak Creek, was truly beautiful with towering canyon walls, amazing riparian flora, gigantic butterflies and the most heavenly scents. Once at the far end of the walk we were caught in a tremendous thunderstorm and got truly drenched but it didn’t really matter. On another occasion we walked out to, and onto, the imposing Devil’s Arch, a huge rock arch jutting out from vertical cliffs, as well as visiting some of the vortices. The locals stress how important it is to visit both the masculine and feminine vortices otherwise all sort of bad energy can result, so we did, better safe than sorry
Tony on Devil’s Arch
Isabel on the way to Devil’s Arch
Isabel on the cliffs by Devil’s Arch
Isabel walking in the West Fork of Oak Creek
After a week it was time to move on. We had originally planned to go next to Page in northern Arizona up near Lake Powell and we intended to visit a series of slot canyons including the famous Antelope Canyon. I had been researching slot canyons for weeks before our trip and I had a long list of places to visit around Page and further north in Utah, many of the canyons I hoped to get to were a bit remote up dirt roads but we had a high clearance SUV and lots of time so I thought it would be no problem.
However we found that all the motels in Page were fully booked so we had to think again about where to go. Also the bad weather that had dogged us seemed to be affecting a large part of the southwest so we thought we would drive the 400 miles north up to the town of Escalante hoping to get out from under the weather system. The town of Escalante is located in the large rugged Escalante Staircase, so named because of the many parallel and huge canyons which bisect the wilderness. The area is very difficult to access but we had found some dirt roads which we thought we could use to get in to the main canyon area and I had a list of slot canyons and trails we could visit.
Whilst passing through Page we decided to try to squeeze in a trip into Antelope Canyon but when we got to the canyon, which is administered by native Americans and only admits visitors in organised groups, we found a great deal of anxiety about the thunderstorms brewing on the horizon which had postponed that day’s visits so we couldn’t get in. Later we read in a local paper that the previous day Antelope Canyon had been hit by a flash flood that had sent a wall of water four feet high crashing through the canyon and sweeping away a group of visitors. Luckily they had all been rescued, some by being pulled out of the canyon on ropes. If we had stuck to our original itinerary as we planned it we would have been in the canyon that day.
We also spent a while driving beside and admiring the beauty of Lake Powell, one day I would love to take one of the local houseboats (which are for hire) out onto the lake to explore the hundreds of flooded canyons dotted around the shore of the 200 mile long lake. The highway we took north from Sedona almost the whole way to Escalante is the wonderful Highway 89. If you ever want to do a US road trip you should consider this highway that snakes its way through some of the most spectacular and interesting landscapes from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. On our various road trips we have driven several large chunks of 89 including the stretch up near the Canadian border in Montana.
The beautiful Lake Powell – it really is these colours
Near Page we checked with the local visitors’ centre and discovered that the 50 mile long dirt road known as the Cottonwood Canyon Road, which we had hoped to drive along across the Esclanate Staircase towards Escalante itself, was closed because of bad weather. So we took the long way round and managed a short visit to the see the colourful rock formations at Kodachrome State Park before arriving at Escalante.
Some of the rock formations at Kodochrome State Park as seen through our windscreen in the evening light
As we crossed the border into Utah we saw the usual sign welcoming visitors to the state with my favourite state slogan “Welcome to Utah – Life Elevated!”
As we had approached Escalante we could see storm clouds brewing up yet again. That night the motel was rocked by a huge thunderstorm, I managed to sleep through it with the help of ear plugs but Isabel said the motel actually shook as it was engulfed by the torrential down pour and continouis sheet lightening.
Storm clouds build in the evening sky near Escalante
The next day we yet again awoke to leaden grey skies and constant rain. It was getting a bit dispiriting. A trip to the local rangers station confirmed that all the dirt roads we had hoped to drive were washed out and the slot canyons we had hoped to hike were all flooded. We sat in the local diner and decided that enough was enough and the we were going to drive to the only place in the western US which seemed to be sunny – which was California, even though this would involve a drive of 550 miles mostly across desert. This also meant we would have to drive a 1000 miles to get back to Denver and our flight home but we would deal with that when we came to it.
Later that day the sun came out and our spirits lifted and we decided to do the hike to the nearby famous Calf Creek Falls, one of the few trails still open in the area. The hike was hot and a bit more strenuous than we expected, not helped by residual stiffness from the previous day’s drive. When we got to Calf Creek falls we were not disappointed. The falls tumble a hundred foot or more down a vertical sand stone cliff in a natural canyon amphitheatre into a large pool. Really stunning. Even better there was no one else there when visited which was lucky given that this was one of the few trails still open.
Isabel crests a hill on the hike to Calf Creek Falls
Isabel is dwarfed by the sublime Calf Creek Falls
Later that evening yet another huge thunderstorm brewed up and we watched it grow and then unleash a torrent of rain and hailstones onto our little motel.
The thunder storm is about to burst upon our motel
The thunderstorm over our motel dies with great beauty
The next day we got away for our long drive to California. The drive went very well and the route took us across the oddly pleasing big nothingness that is the Nevada desert. Part of the route was across the special nothingness which is Highway 375 or the Extraterrestrial Highway that runs along side Area 51 and the scene of many claimed encounters with alien visitors. We have driven this highway once before and on both occasions rather disappointingly we have had no alien encounters. The driving was hypnotically pleasing. The roads are pencil straight for many, many miles and almost empty of traffic. Sometimes you can see thirty or forty miles down a straight section of highway as it gently rises to crest a line of hills in the distance. As you stare at the road ahead out in the far distance a small black dot will appear dancing and morphing in the mirage haze. Over a period of ten or fifteen minutes the dot slowly grows bigger and eventually you can make out a car, or biker or truck. After another ten minutes or so with a gentle thump of air you pass each other on the two lane highway both doing seventy miles an hour. Then its back to an empty road ahead until the next little black dot appears.
The Extraterrestrial Highway stretches away across the Nevada desert, the road is visible for more than forty miles until it crests a hill on the horizon. In the middle distance on the left is the tiny settlement of Rachel, the UFO capital of America, which is the only inhabited spot for 100 miles in either direction.
We had finally worked out how to operate the cruise control (the instructions were cunningly hidden in the glove compartment and we had failed to notice them for the best part of a month) so with the speed controlled automatically there was little to do as one drove except minutely adjust the steering wheel with the gentlest of touches every so often using just your thumb and index finger. I toyed with tying the steering wheel to door so I could take a short nap but thought perhaps not.
After 567 miles we finally arrived in California near the tiny hamlet of Lee Vining at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains, a place we have visited several times before, on the way into town we stopped off to look at the unique landscape at Mono Lake in the evening sunshine.
At the border with Nevada the fruit police stop you and ask if you are carrying any citrus fruit. I am not sure what the penalty is for smuggling citrus fruit in to California. We had none so we were home free and into the sunshine state.
We left the martian landscapes of Mexican Hat with relief and drove the 350 plus miles to Taos in New Mexico. We were very excited about Taos, we had read a lot about the town and New Mexico was a new state which neither of us had visited before. Unfortunately Taos was a wash out – literally.
As we approached Taos we crossed a broad flat plain and could see the small town nestling at the foot of a range of mountains, we crossed the high bridge across the gobsmackingly deep canyon of the Rio Grande river and drove past the collection of very weird eco dwellings known as the Earth Ship community. Things were looking good even if it seemed a bit cloudy.
The bridge across the Rio Grande Gorge. Taos is on the horizon at the foot of the mountains.
Taos town was bigger, busier and there was more traffic than we had anticipated but there seemed to be a lot of quirky interesting looking shops and when we went for a stroll we found a great place to eat next to a fairly good bookshop so we felt pretty happy.
The next day we decided to drive out to the state park which straddled the Rio Grande Gorge and find a good walk, and we planned to drive the Enchanted Highway loop through the mountains the next day to try more mountain walks. After a fair bit of confusion when seeking advice on walks from the slightly deaf and very confused volunteer at the local visitors centre we set out on the trail to Arsenic Springs (enticing name). We expected this trail to descend some way into the gorge and then we planned to pick up the rim trail running parallel to the river as we didn’t fancy the 950 foot plus descent and ascent of a return trip to bottom of the gorge given the high temperatures and altitude. Because it was so hot we didn’t bother packing any water-proofs and just took a packed lunch, lots of water and some camera kit. In the end we decided to push on to the bottom of the gorge and spent a lovely couple of hours on the banks of the Rio Grande pottering about in the deep canyon.
Isabel descending into the Rio Grande Gorge
The Gorge of the Rio Grande
Isabel by the Rio Grande
By the time we started back up the very steep path up to the rim the clouds had started to gather which was at first a relief from the sun but then they rapidly darkened and we could hear thunder in the distance. As we slowly plodded upwards we decided that as Isabel’s ankle was playing up I would take both the backpacks and head up to the car and she would follow at her own pace. As I drew further and further ahead of her I could feel the first drops of rain from the very dark clouds now pressing in above us. The rain got steadily worse and Isabel disappeared from view below me. By the time I got to the car it was pissing down and the thunder and lightening was getting a bit intense. I dried off as best i could, slipped on a waterproof top and grabbing Isabel’s waterproofs I set of back down the gorge to find her.
Coming up had been very tiring, it was about as steep and hard as climbing a hundred flights of stairs continuously on rough ground, so I didn’t fancy going back down in the downpour but I thought I would meet up with Isabel pretty quickly before going too deep. As I negotiated each switch back and got further and further down into the gorge in the pouring rain I began to get more and more concerned that I could not see Isabel below. Maybe she had twisted an ankle and was now stuck down the gorge in the storm. I shouted her name but the noise of the storm just drowned my voice. Eventually after getting about halfway back down I reluctantly decided to head back up, but by now I was very keen to find her. Finally right at the top I heard her calling me from above. I finally reached her right at the rim by which time I was completely winded from my forced march back up the path driven by anxiety.
It turned out that isabel had been passed by a couple also coming up who were concerned about her being on her own in the storm and with no proper kit, so they had loaned her a waterproof top and kindly stayed with as they ascended. Unfortunately they had convinced her to strike off on a small side path not far from the top which led to their camp site and not the trail head we had started from. So Isabel and I had missed each other.
By the time we were reunited we were very wet and pretty pooped from the walk and the excitement and we were deeply irritated with ourselves for breaking just about every rule, no proper kit, separating etc.
The rain that arrived that day was unfortunately not a transitory phenomenon. The wet weather over Taos, and as we later realised over this whole part of the US, was a big static system and the day after our adventure in the Gorge it rained a fair bit and was overcast with low clouds so the mountain hikes were out. The weather continued to deteriorate and by our last day it settled in and we had over 24 hours of heavy rain falling from low and grey clouds. All a bit dispiriting, no hikes, no lovely vistas, and nothing much to do. The fiesta in the town was a wash out. In the end we visited the grave of Kit Carson and went to the movies to break up the tedium. We saw the film Inception which was really excellent – go and see it (in Crested Butte we went to see another movie “Day and Knight” – don’t see this movie, its so bad it will make your head hurt and your soul ache).
Wet weather in Taos New Mexico
Finally it was time to leave Taos and move onto Sedona in Arizona but on the way out of town we stopped off at the eco house community spread out across the plateau and collectively known as the Earth Ship Community. Lots of strange and oddly beautiful dwellings made from tires, bottles, tin cans and all completely self sufficient in terms of energy, water etc. It was very entertaining but I find green ideology tedious in the extreme and feel the Earth Ship community is little more than a novelty. I think that in 50 years if the community is still there it will be a just tourist attraction showing an odd turn of the century folly.
Part of the water recycling system in an Eco House
The Eco houses are partially made from old tires and tin cans embedded in cement
The journey to Sedona was a longish 450 miles on the Interstate, equivalent to our motorways, which meant fast speed but we knew it would be tedious and a bit stressful with more traffic and more big trucks than our usual two lane blacktop highways. We decided to break our journey overnight in the town of Gallup which is a sort of capital city for native americans, mostly Navajo but also Ute and Apache. The Interstate we were taking for almost the whole journey to Sedona was I40 which replaced and mostly obliterated the old famous Route 66 which linked Chicago to Los Angeles.
Route 66
We tried driving some of the way on the remaining parts of Route 66 that run parallel to the Interstate but they are just fragments of this once great highway lined with poor little settlements and derelict buildings that once made a living from the passing traffic. Gallup itself was a bit depressing, both the highway and passenger traffic on the railroad line passing through town from the east to west coast have all but vanished and its was just an ugly strip town full of motels and native american craft shops. If you have ever seen Robert Crumb’s cartoon critiques of the ugliness of much of american highway urban sprawl you will get a fair idea of what Gallup looked like. We did manage to visit the native american museum but managed to miss the evening medicine man dance.
The next day we pushed on to Sedona but with two great stops en route. The first was at the beautiful Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park where we managed a short walk out into the badlands of the painted Desert itself. At times the texture of the landscape reminded me of the film of astronauts walking on the surface of the moon. It was very hot.
Isabel walking in the painted desert
Isabel finds some shade in the Painted Desert
The beautiful petrified wood in the Painted Desert
Tony walking across the lunar landscape
Later we stopped at Meteor Crater which is somewhere I have always wanted to visit. The impact crater is huge and the best preserved large meteor crater on earth. In the middle it is deeper than the Eiffel Tower. We walked a bit of the rim, gawped, visited the museum and then pushed on arriving in the wonderfully weird and wacky Sedona by early evening
We arrived in Moab in Utah after our eventful journey from Crested Butte in Colorado during which we had managed to shred a tire deep in the Gunnison Canyon.
We had visited Moab once before for a few days back in 2005 and liked the place and the stunning landscape surrounding it. Moab lies at the heart of red rock canyon lands and there are two nearby National Parks, Arches and Canyonlands itself, both reasonably close to the town. The problem with the landscape here is that you can go and look at a lot of lovely vistas but the actual hiking is very limited by both the very hot 100+ degree daytime temperatures and the sheer scale and roughness of the terrain.
Moab itself is an OK sort of place, it’s dominated by outdoor activities of one sort or another: rafting, mountain biking, off-road jeeping, climbing. It’s full of tanned and fit looking young people. Both Isabel and I agreed we wished we had done more of that sort of stuff when we were young instead of taking so many drugs and and spending our youth trying to overthrow the state.
Moab had a reasonably good bookshop, the really nice one we remembered from our last trip had unfortunately closed and the range of the new bookshop was a bit limited. I did manage to buy the recently published autobiography of Mark Rudd who was an SDS student leader at Columbia in 1968 who then helped found the Weathermen and spent many years underground before surfacing and eventually becoming a maths teacher in Albuquerque. I thought his memoir was a very worth while read full of what felt like honesty and it offered a fascinating insight to how a small bunch of radicals could end up going so crazy. It stirred a lot of feelings within about my own past and I had lots of interesting dreams each night as I read it.
We did a couple of visits to Arches and I took the ranger tour of a closed part of the park called Fiery Furnace on my birthday which was pretty fantastic but did involve a fair bit of scrabbling and manoeuvring through narrow rock slots etc.
The Balanced Rock in Arches – its over 200 feet tall
We also visited the Island in the Sky in Canyonlands a couple of times. This is a large mesa uplifted plateau that juts out into and above the extraordinary complex of canyons carved by the confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers. We did a really great short walk at the end of the Island right along the rim and out to the point of the Island (we had done this walk once before in 2005). The evening light on the strange rocks and plants of the high mesa was often very beautiful but during the whole visit to Moab I was a bit frustrated because on several evenings the clouds gathered and shut out the evening light and this really frustrated my photographic ambitions.
Trees along the canyon rim on the Island in the Sky
Isabel on the canyon rim walk on the Island in the Sky
At the end of the Rim walk
Our days were punctuated by our visits to see Mr Chip at Chips Tires to see if our replacement tire had arrived: it never did and we left town without it but with a temporary spare which meant we were less likely to be stranded in the event of a blow out in some isolated back country spot.
We found a few things we had missed on our first trip, a really nice waterfall and a lovely walk up a fantastic canyon called Negro Bills Canyon which criss-crossed a small stream and ended at the third larger rock arch in the US, it was such a nice trail that we did it twice. Both times we got to the huge rock arch at the end of the trail and watched people doing the terrifying abseiling and descents by rope from the arch 200 feet above.
The waterfall outside Moab
Isabel resting under the huge rock arch at the end of Negro Bills Canyon
The only near adventure we had was when we decided to try to drive up onto Island in Sky via Pucker Pass. The name should have been a bit of a giveaway. We knew it was going to be a dirt road and that it would switchback up a big altitude gain onto the mesa but the road turned out to be of poorer quality than we expected and like a lot of land in this neck of the woods as soon as you go off the beaten track you begin to feel very isolated in a very harsh and unforgiving landscape. We worked our way many miles up the road higher and higher and then we hit the “Pucker” that gives the road its name. This turned out to be a stretch of road where the road becomes single track and is enclosed between two steep and high rock walls and the upward incline steepens alarmingly, at the same time the road surface turned to a mixture of very soft deep sand intermixed with some large sharp boulders. As we entered the Pucker I could feel the jeeps wheels beginning to spin and lose grip and then smashing into the large boulders, and after our previous shredded tire I really didn’t want to lose another, certainly not this far from civilisation. We stopped and discussed the situation and decided to turn back. At that point we thought we had just enough room to turn around but we could see the slot of the pucker getting steadily tighter ahead and thought a few more yards and we may not be able to turn around. I wasn’t even really sure we could turn around where had stopped given how tightly we were caught between the canyon walls but eventually I managed a sort of thirty point turn, inch by inch with Isabel outside telling when to stop. We managed to turn around and get home. The next day we drove into the Island in the Sky via the regular route and then then onto the top half of Pucker Pass road and drove in the other way, we stopped where the road suddenly descended and deteriorated and walked down to an overlook over the Pucker itself and discovered that if we had only gone on for another 150 yards or so the previous day we would have been out of the worse of it. But we could have got stuck.
On the Pucker Pass drive – shortly after this we nearly got stuck and turned back
After Moab it was onto the minute settlement of Mexican Hat. We had passed through Mexican Hat, named after a nearby giant sombrero shaped rock atop a large rock pinnacle, once before on a trip in 2005 so were knew what to expect. Not a lot – in terms of civilization that is. This part of southern Utah looks a bit like the surface of Mars and seems almost as empty and harsh. But it does feature some stunning landscape, so the plan was to go out early in the morning and in the evening towards sunset to catch the best of the light and avoid the oven like midday temperatures, and spend the middle part of the day snoozing in our air-conditioned motel room. Our plan was frustrated by the weather. The days were as hot as expected but each morning and evening clouds gathered ruining the light so the two days and three nights we spent in Mexican Hat turned out to be mostly boring with a few moments of terror (see below).
We drove out to the Goosnecks State Park the first night and got some good light on the overlook gazing into the vast twisting canyons (known as entrenched meanders) of the San Juan River. The next day we drove to high and fairly remote Muley Point, we which had been told offered a fantastic view out across this strange landscape. Unfortunately the drive there from Mexican Hat involved driving up a stretch of road called the Moki Dugway (Google it). This is a a narrow and rough dirt road that winds up a series of very steep switchbacks across the face of a very high cliff for several miles before cresting the plateau. For some reason I find driving such narrow roads with no guard rails alongside precipitous drop offs very terrifying. As I drove further and further up and kept glimpsing the view over the edge which looked more and more like the view you get from an airplane as it descends to land I could feel the sweat trickling, my heart pounding and my breathing getting pretty intense. Finally we got to the top where the inevitable native American jewellery seller was waiting to try to flog us some necklaces. As I drove I kept thinking how much my friend Ilse would love to drive this road
Muley Point turned out to be as spectacular as we had hoped as well as being empty and peaceful and a bit cooler than the canyon floors below.
Gazing out from Muley point
Unfortunately I never got any decent light to photograph the nearby Valley of the Gods which we visited twice, once just after dawn and once just before sunset to be met with grey cloud cover both times.
A few moments of good light in the Valley of the Gods
Generally being in Mexican Hat felt a bit tedious and tiring. The land there is so empty and hot that I sometimes felt like a space traveller visiting Mars. We would open the pod door from our air-conditioned motel room to be met with a heat that felt like the heat you get when you open the door to check a roast, stumble to our car the inside of which was too hot to touch and sit panting while the cars air-conditioning struggled to bring its interior temperature down. Once when I went out on my own during the midday heat to photograph the actual Mexican Hat rock I drove up a deserted dirt track and climbed a small nearby hill for a better view. The land felt lifeless and baked and I could feel the moisture leaving my body. Without being too melodramatic I could sense that this landscape could kill you real quick.
Eventually with relief we left Mexican Hat and drove the three hundred miles plus to Taos in New Mexico. On the way we finally got our replacement wheel which was relief. We also stopped at the Four Corners, which is the only point in the US where four states (Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico) all touch at single point. We were quite excited about walking around the pole marking the four corner’s point (we had been cooped pin the car for hours) but as we pulled up we saw the sign saying “Fours Corners closed due to building work”. There was a small crowd of other disappointed tourists clustered outside the locked gates so we consoled ourselves by taking each others photos and then we pushed on towards Taos.
2500 miles and 20+ days and about halfway through our road trip.
We arrived in Denver at the end of June, picked up the hired car, spent a night in an airport hotel and then set off for our first stop which was Estes Park high in the Rockies. The car by the way was a Chevy Jeep SUV that was so big that it was a bit like driving a small bungalow. I tried to wipe the windscreen by hand but I couldn’t reach the middle, the hood comes up to my upper chest level.
As soon as we arrived we felt like shit. The motel we had booked turned out to be not very nice and the combined jet lag and mild altitude sickness really hit us. Headaches, disrupted sleep, mood swings, moments of dizziness and general fatigue. Made us both feel ancient and little depressed. But it slowly passed.
Estes Park was a nice enough little town, fairly touristy but the Rocky Mountain National Park was just a few miles up the road and it had a great little bookshop. Isabel and I both really love American independent bookshops and American books in general. The physical quality of the books here just delights us and we happily while away time in bookshops discussing and comparing the leading in the US books (leading is the space between lines of text and it is much more generous and therefore better than in Europe, even smaller fonts look delightful with more leading), the slightly larger formats used for paperbacks and the lovely matt coating they use for their covers (I often get odd stares from other customers who spot me running my hands over the book covers and purring a little as I feel its subtle stippled texture).
We managed a couple of hikes in in the Rockies, including one up to Emerald Lake, before moving on but the altitude meant the walking and especially the climbing was hard work. Above 10,000 feet we both ran out of puff alarmingly quickly on the uphill sections (i.e. 90% of the walk) and had to stop often to recover.
Emerald Lake at the end of our hike
One of the many waterfalls in the Rocky Mountain National Park
Isabel crosses a snow field on the way to Emerald Lake
From Estes Park we headed up and over the Rockies through the National Park and across the continental divide on one of the highest paved roads in America topping out around 12,500 feet. There was still a lot of snow around and we went part of the way up via the old dirt highway past lots of lovely vistas and a great waterfall all done at a sedate 15 miles an hour through the switchbacks.
The top of the pass over the Rocky Mountains on the way to Leadville
Once over the mountains we dipped down and then up again to reach our next stop which was Leadville, the highest town in Colorado. On the way we passed through the delightfully named town of Climax. We had stopped in Leadville once for lunch on a previous road trip during a snow storm and really liked the look of the place and so decided to come back and take a closer look. It’s an old mining town with many wonderful original buildings from the late 19th century and an odd population of tanned mountain folk with a lot of fairly weird and wonderful refugees from the rest of America who have washed up here. One can’t help but feel that some people who made their money from the drugs trade back in the sixties and seventies chose to retire to Leadville. It claims to have the highest (by altitude) head shop in America which we visited. We were there for the 4th July parade and we both got absurdly excited. Its was a great small town community event, a parade which included pretty much anyone who wanted to join in, the cops and local firemen (hitting their sirens), anybody with a horse or slightly odd vehicle (and there were a lot of them), the Scouts, a float promoting the campaign against domestic violence, etc etc. Many of the participants carried banners promoting candidates for local office. Everybody on the parade was chucking sweets and small plastic toys out of their cars by the handful and the local kids were running about in state of great excitement picking them, eventually even Isabel got carried away and grabbed some. Later that evening there was a truly stupendous fireworks display which we later discovered had cost an astonishing $10,000, all raised locally.
The 4th of July in Leadville
We stayed in Leadville for a happy four days pottering about.This was long enough to really encounter the odd and slightly overwhelming experience of American western conversation. Everywhere you go people say “hi,” “how are you?”, “how’s it going?” and as soon as we reply back comes the inevitable “you folks are not from around here?” opening gambit and then you know you are lost and soon you will be deep in often intimate conversation with complete strangers. One night in Leadville we sat down in a diner and bar and ordered our meals and noticed the elderly couple with a very hyperactive young boy on the adjacent table. The inevitable exchange of pleasantries and then Isabel was deep in conversation with the older lady.
Above the background of the diner noise I could only get snippets and within seconds of the conversation starting I knew this one was juicy. I heard the old lady’s indistinct voice “murmur, murmur – we are his legal guardians – murmur, murmur – his mom went of the rails – murmur, murmur – his father is serving two years with good behavour – murmur, murmur – technically he is a pedophile as she was only fourteen murmur, murmur – then he got involved with the Hells Angels and disappeared into the desert two years ago and nobody has seen him since – murmur, murmur”. On and on it went right through our dinner arriving and us eating it. Later Isabel said the reference to the Hells Angles seemed to refer to the women’s dentist.
Once when we were in Crested Butte (see below) we were walking down from the mountain and a mountain biker came down behind us, we stepped aside to let him pass and he said “thanks” and we said “no problem” and he said “have a great day” and we said “you too”. Then he stopped a little way down the track and we knew we were in for a conversation. As we approached he looked at me and said ” Australian?” – “no I’m from London” I said (lots of people have mistaken my accent for Australian in the US and in Europe). The mountain biker was suited up in the latest high tech and colourful biking kit with wrap around mirror shades, he was our age, maybe a little older, with a white goatee and large moustache. Within three minutes of the conversation starting we knew that he carried the flag in the 4th of July parade, that his only son had been killed in a car crash in Vegas a few years before, that he had lost his mother to cancer shortly after, that he was over that and enjoying life again, that he worked for a guy in town who owned lots of property in the area and that he spent time in Costa Rica also working on this guys property. I am not kidding – we got all this and more that I cannot remember in less than five minutes.
At one point I wanted to shoot some photos of the old buildings in Leadville and I left Isabel with the laptop in the coffee shop where she planned to write some emails. When I returned I discovered that she had abandoned the emails in the face of the relentless conversation with her two new best friends sitting at the table who were called Ernest and Joseph. It turned out that Ernest, who was sixty and who looked like a left over from Grateful Dead concert and Joseph, who was extraordinarily intense and never stopped talking unless you actually interrupted him and who was a very youthful looking 70, had themselves just met each other in the coffee shop and discovered they had something in common – they both ran in 100 mile road races. There are several such 100 mile events in that part of Colorado. As they chatted away sharing there intimate secrets with Isabel I strolled in and soon the conversation had shifted to photography which took some of the pressure off of Isabel. An hour and half later we tore ourselves away after the inevitable exchange of email addresses.
Isabel deep in conversation with Ernest and Joseph in a Leadville coffee shop
There is of course an entirely different form of western conversation practised by some we have met which consists mostly of silence. When we shredded our tire deep in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison (see below) we managed to flag down a park ranger who did indeed help me change the tire, in fact he did most of the work, and during the whole exercise (during which we had to jointly solve several tricky technical problems like the jack being too small) he only actually uttered about five words. I thought at one point I would be forced to use sign language. Later we met Chip of “Chip’s Tires” in Moab where we spent several days popping in to see if the replacement wheel he had ordered for our jeep had arrived. Chip was a man of few words. “Hi” I would say “how are you” (the necessary preface to all transactions out here) “is the tire here?”. Chip wouldn’t even acknowledge by word or expression that he had heard what I had said. After a while he would wander off, seemingly to deal with several other unrelated issues in his team of workers at the tire shop, then wander back. “Nope”
After we left Leadville we headed over Independence Pass (12,500 plus and the second highest paved road in the US – fantastic views across the alpine tundra and large snow pockets at the summit) to the small mountain town of Crested Butte. On the way we stopped for lunch in Aspen, ghastly place, don’t go there. Crested Butte on the other hand turned out to be a very pleasant place, surrounded by mountains, the wild flower capital of Colorado and full of award winning restaurants. So we ate and we walked and we had a very nice time indeed. It even had a passably good book shop.
At the top of Independence Pass
Isabel walking above Crested Butte
At the summit of Mount Crested Butte, 12,500, puffed but happy
One night we went to the monthly civic forum meeting. Crested Butte attracts a lot of well connected and intellectual retirees, and the topic on the night we went was the USA’s response to Iran. The speaker was an ex-diplomat who had spent a lot of time in the communist block, spoke fluent Russian, had all sorts of academic and government connections and I thought had ex-spook written all over him. What he had been working on for several years was building informal links to the leadership in Teheran and trying to convince the US government to have a more nuanced and subtle approach to Iran. His talk was excellent, full of useful information and insight and the Q&A after also produced lots of interesting debate. A great evening.
After Crested Butte we headed off for Moab and Utah’s red rock country. We had been to Moab before but I wanted to go back to photograph the fantastic and wild canyon landscape although we knew that with daily temperatures mostly over 100 degrees the hiking would be limited. On the way we planned to spend a couple of hours having a look at the huge and deep Black Canyon of the Gunnison. The canyon itself is 2000 feet deep and after taking in the rim views and suffering a bit in the heat we decided to take the switchback road to the bottom of the canyon before resuming our journey to Moab. Unfortunately almost at the bottom the Jeep’s front wheel came of the road and into a deep gully full of sharp rocks and dead tree timber. We managed to pull the jeep out before hitting the canyon wall but by then we had a large piece of timber embedded in the shredded tire and the aluminium wheel rim was also chewed up. As we stopped the tire just deflated. We were a bit stuck. We had no phone signal and when I checked for a spare tire I couldn’t even locate it. Luckily with the help of a passing driver we managed to locate the spare which in Jeeps is slung under the car but neither of us could work out how to release it. Eventually the verbally challenged ranger stopped and we were were soon on our way again.
The 2000 foot deep Black Canyon of the Gunnison, We managed to shred our tire at the bottom,
We wasted a couple or hours in nearby Montrose trying unsuccessfully to sort out the tire and then set off for Moab again several hours behind schedule. We drove for three hours through a lot of very pretty nothingness (a bit nervous given we now had no spare tire) and passed the tiny town of Paradox before getting to Moab just before dusk where we were met by a glorious sunset sky, a very nice large motel room and a couple of cold beers.
My family gathered at our place to watch England play their opening game against the USA, the usual mixture of subdued excitement, hope, occasional boredom and ultimate disappointment, all conducted to the wall of sound we produce when we are all in the same room. The star of the night was of course little Zena. The photos are here.
We held a small gathering at our house to watch the election results, gossip, drink and eat lots of comfort food. In the end the night was not the disaster we all feared and there was even the chance for a few laughs – plus of course the chance to spend some time with with some old friends. The photos are here.
