A Caravan Tour of the United States - Part Four
Created | Updated Feb 4, 2009
If a Coyote Crosses Your Path
Antelope Canyon, Navajo Tribal Land, Arizona
I'm a little nervous about offending anyone on the Navajo tribal lands, so I brush up on do's and don'ts. The problem is that there are hundreds, so I memorize a few of the most relevant. Most of them seem sensible or whimsical. I wonder how many are from the coyote trickster.
If a Coyote crosses your path, turn back and do not continue. If you keep travelling, something terrible will happen to you.
Don't point at a rainbow with your finger. The rainbow will cut it off or break it.
Don't throw rocks at a whirlwind. It will throw them back and chase you.
Don't call whirlwinds a name. Evil Spirits will get you.
Do not roll a rock from a mountain. The holy people put them there and it will be bad luck.
Do not watch a river flowing swiftly, or you will get dizzy and fall in.
Do not run over a snake in your car or you will have a bad life.
Do not talk to dogs or other animals because they might talk back and you will die.
Do not say, 'I wish I had some meat' when you have the hiccups, or your livestock won't grow.
Do not eat frogs because you will have bad luck or bad breath.
Do not eat the heel of a loaf of bread or you will have lots of children.
Do not bite on roasting corn and then put it back or it will get cold and ruin the rest of your crop. Also, your teeth will fall out.
Do not burn blood from a nosebleed because you will get headaches and your head will split.
Do not have three people comb each other's hair at the same time or they will get stuck.
Do not turn pages backwards or you will go blind.
Do not peel potatoes or apples when you are pregnant or the baby will have a flat face.
The Navajo guide leads us into the otherworldly slot canyon. Visualize a tunnel made of red, orange, yellow and purple sandstones with a narrow slot cut in the top of the tunnel open to the surface. It's breathtaking on an overcast day, but today the sun is shining through the slot, creating spectacular light and shadow effects.
The floor of the slot canyon is sand. Occasionally, it rains hard here in the desert and a flash flood from 40 square miles of desert rushes though the tunnel, carving new shapes or depositing driftwood.The floods may deposit or remove several feet of sand, depending on their intensity. Here is a slideshow showing a few pictures of Antelope Canyon. Don't miss it if you visit Page, Arizona.
On the Borderline
Lake Powell, Arizona
We're parked about 100 feet from the Utah border. This seems to be the houseboat world capital. The big lake winds though 100 miles of sandstone canyons which used to be the Colorado River. The water flowing out from the dam is now clear and a constant 47 degrees. The 173 million tons of red sediment that used to flow downstream are now deposited in the upper reaches of Lake Powell. The fish downstream are probably confused by all this.
We wanted to take a modest raft trip from the base of the Lake Powell dam to Lee's Ferry about 20 miles down the Colorado. That's probably the last place to get out before Bright Angel in the Grand Canyon National Park. The wind was blowing too hard, so the outfitter cancelled on us. The rafts overturn heading back upriver empty in high winds. We drove up to Lee's Ferry instead and spent some time watching them prepare the rafts for the long floats.
Lee's Ferry is where the big six and ten-day raft trips though the Grand Canyon begin. Big supply rafts are being loaded. They will accompany a group of rafters that are due in by helicopter from Las Vegas in the afternoon. At the end of the trip they will be airlifted out.
Desert Drive
Southern Utah Desert
We found a hike to a another slot canyon for today. To see it you need a rope so you can rappel down 40 feet into the canyon. Mrs. Phred has expressed doubts about my rappelling ability.
..When I was out on the desert, ya know
I don't know how to tell you
but, ah, I killed somebody
It's no big deal, ya know
I don't think anybody will find out about it, but...
just, ah...
- The Doors
Well....you know
We went on this drive, ah...
46 miles of dirt road...
We walked up into a box canyon
then,
it..ah...just ended
We found a cave under a cliff
and desert wildflowers and strange stunted trees
Then we walked a mile into,
like, a slot canyon...
but I walked out alone
Some of the mesas looked like, ah...
variegated confectionaries
and, ah...
It's just that...
I'm worried that, ah...
somebody might find the body
If you're interested in this strange desert, here are a few more pictures.
Valley of the Gods
Southeast Utah Desert
The Valley of the Gods is 600 square miles of empty desert valley uplifted 6,000 feet. Twenty miles of empty dirt road winds though the valley past the strange spires.
This is BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land. Camping is permitted anywhere you can find a spot to pull off the dirt road. Light pollution doesn't exist here. There are no small towns within a 100 miles and the valley is surrounded by 7,000 foot bluffs and mesas.
In two days there will be the darkness of a new moon. We'll find a spot to camp near a mesa and listen to the coyotes talk to each other.
At 4am the Navigator's Triangle (Deneb, Vega and Altair) is directly overhead this time of year. The Milky Way burns a gossamer silver swath across the sky though the middle of the triangle. The Navajos think that it is very bad luck to try to count the stars. It's hard to imagine all this springing from a point smaller than an atom at the moment of the Big Bang. Trouble is that none of the other explanations seem credible either....Just an ant wandering the inside of an empty can trying to grasp what it all means...We need bigger brains.
The evening of May 3rd, we'll be out here alone, in the inky black night, ten miles from the nearest road and thirty from the nearest electric light or human habitation.
This place is not well known or widely publicized. Only one of my maps even shows that it exists. It's a lovely, lonely desert. Right now the desert is blooming with wildflowers and greenery from the spring snow melt.
Flying Pig Escapes
Cadillac Ranch RV Park - Bluff, Utah
By now, you've probably heard that the inflatable Pink Floyd pig broke loose at a California concert and flew high before exploding in the stratosphere. The pig had the word 'Obama' stencilled on its belly, with a check mark next to the word... The pig came to rest in tatters in two driveways in a California desert town. The inhabitants will split a $10,000 reward from Roger Waters.
In the morning, we hiked up to more Indian ruins. The story is the same: built from 1250 to 1275 AD, dated by dendrochronology, abandoned for reasons unknown. I find an interesting looking bud on a cactus and eat it. I expect visions, but nothing happens. We look at the Natural Bridges National Monument later in the day and have lunch. The monument was declared the first International Dark Sky Park. They have an astronomy program tonight and Sunday at 9pm. The weather report is for partly cloudy tonight and mostly cloudy Sunday evening.
I learn the difference between plateaus, mesas, buttes and pinnacles. They all have flat tops but are different sizes. It's just another crazy, imprecise human classification system like rivers, streams and creeks. Most of the red buttes and pinnacles we've been looking at lately are 250 million year old red petrified sand dunes.
My personal favorite natural bridge is the Sipapu. Sipapu is a Hopi word meaning place of original emergence. This is the place on earth from which the earliest humans emerged at the beginning of the world.
We wander down to Muley's Point and take in the vista carved by the San Juan river. Then down to the Goosenecks State Park to see the "meanders". Meanders occur when the river traps itself in a series of horseshoe bends by rapidly digging itself into soft rock. You can see the river travel ten miles to get downstream one mile.
We don't have a picture of the meanders that show them all. Even though we're looking down 1,000 feet from a bluff, you really need a helicopter to take in the bends. I do a video, but it's 76 megabytes, too big to be worth posting. The last two minutes of the video is of my tennis shoes after I put the camera strap back on my shoulder. I need to learn how to stop filming. I've got the start part figured out.
The picture below is of the San Juan from the Muley's point overlook. You can just make out a dirt road below leading to the river. There's a big 'four-corners' Indian festival today right up the road in Blanding. The Zuni, Hopi and Navajo tribes will all be competing in an art festival.
I was up at 2:45 this morning. I slipped outside without spoiling my night vision and took in the stars and desert silence. For the first time I locate the Navigator's Triangle from seeing the Milky Way, rather than the other way around. At 5am, the noise level has picked up. A coyote is yipping up on the bluff and someone close has a jackass. We may go camp in the Valley of the Gods today. We'll put out the lawn chairs, read novels and wait for darkfall.
San Juan River Raft Trip
Bluff to Mexican Hat, Utah
At 4:32am this morning the International Space Station became visible in Bluff, Utah. It wasn't as bright as I expected it would be. You would think anything with a $190 million dollar toilet would be dazzling.
The raft trip departs near Bluff at 8 am and ends up in Mexican Hat, 26 miles downstream, around 5 pm. Our guide, for some reason, wears a striped necktie with his straw hat and tennis shoes.
The first stop is a sandstone wall with 150 yards of petroglyphs. The earliest of these may date back 10,000 years to Clovis Man. More elaborate designs are about 1,000 years old by the basket weaver culture. I suspect that the ones that say "BLM Sucks" are fairly recent additions. One recurring enigmatic design appears to be Kenny from South Park.
We see more Indian ruins, after a 1/2 mile hike. These were the Anasazi, ancestors to the local Zuni, Hopi and Ute tribes. The cliff shelter forms a natural amphitheatre. I can clearly hear the group conversations from 100 yards away. You can imagine voices from the inhabitants on a warm summer day.
We run into some mountain goats about halfway though the float.
It's interesting to watch the layers of sandstone along the river. One yellow layer traps petroleum. Sometimes it dives into the earth, sometimes it reappears. Mrs. Phred claims she can smell oil. The red layer is Navajo sandstone, petrified ancient sand dunes. There is one very old layer called Paradox. It is believed to have originated near the equator, in a shallow sea, back before the continents drifted apart.
The thing about the yellow layer of rock is that it's fairly impermeable. If you can find a place where it folds up into an anticline dome, the low density oil and gas bubbles up and accumulates at the top of the dome or fold. It's the kind of structure that gets oil geologists really excited.
