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.
