Zion National Park, Utah – 4 November, 2005

This morning, Tom and Maggie, balloonists from Gallup, New Mexico, asked me to serve as a crew member on their balloon. I assisted with assembling the gondola and unfurling and inflating their balloon. Apparently, their crew failed to show. I followed them into the cold desert, helped them out and then left after his lift-off. The sky is filled with colourful balloons.

Later we drive to Zion National Park three hours northwest of Lake Powell. The shuttle service is closed down for the winter season and they opened the scenic roads to private vehicles so we take the motorbike up to the scenic road to the head of Zion Canyon.

It's a spectacular park, formed from Navaho sandstone. The fall foliage makes it even more wonderful. This is a good time to visit the Southwest. The elevation in the park runs from 3,600 to 8,700 feet. One mountain has a pine tree growing on its shoulder.

Night sky viewing conditions are excellent. Venus is up in the evening. It comes around every six years. By Spring it will be a morning star again. A huge shooting star leaves a 4 AM fiery trail.

Zion Canyon was named by the Mormon settlers. It means place of safety or refuge. We hear on the radio in the evening that a Mormon judge is in danger of being disbarred for polygamy. The commentator is upset that he is being prosecuted for practicing his religion.

There is a municipal tennis court just outside the park. Mrs Phred won again, 6-2, 6-0. The cold weather is making my shoulder act up again.

The Turning Point

Zion National Park, Utah – 5 November, 2005

The morning tennis scores are 6-1, 6-1. I lose again. She has a hat to shade her eyes, but I left mine at home.

They have some great hikes here (easy, moderate and strenuous). We do the easy Emerald Pool and the River Walk hikes. We read in the afternoon and get sun-burned falling asleep in camp chairs. We make a campfire and roast Wal-Mart chicken apple sausages. The Utah State liquor store is cleverly camouflaged. We can't find it again, so we pour orange juice into our wine glasses.

Here are a few inadequate pictures that give a poor impression of this place, but you can figure if they put Zion National Park out in the middle of nowhere they must have had a reason.

We head for Bryce Canyon National Park in the morning We go east now at the turning point in the long loop toward home and the holidays.

Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah – 6 November, 2005

Bryce is known for Hoodoos, Antelope herds, Bristlecone pines and excellent stargazing. Ebenezer Bryce was a Mormon who settled in the mouth of the canyon in the 1870s. When asked about the canyon he reportedly said, 'It's a hell of a place to lose a cow.'

Like many of the great parks, the Union Pacific railroad built a huge rustic lodge here to stimulate rail travel before the property became a park in the early 20th century. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corp jobs programme developed many of the trails and other facilities that still exist in America's parks.

Bristlecone pines live on the rim of the 10,000 foot summit and are known to reach ages of 1600 years. Hoodoos are orange spires formed here in the desert by erosion from rain. The Paiute Indians said that they were 'legend people' who had been turned to stone by the trickster Coyote. Here are a few Hoodoo pictures.

We drive the motorbike 20 miles up to the Sunset Point summit and walked the Bristlecone trail. The average visibility is 113 miles. The park boasts the best star-gazing conditions in the US. They claim you can see your shadow by the light from Venus. Unfortunately it was overcast in the evening.

Moab, Utah – 7 November, 2005

It's 4 AM. I'm typing by candlelight because the campground has no electrical hookup and the RVs 'house' battery has been drained overnight. The laptop and its cellular modem is running on its own battery. It is 28 degrees F (-2 C) and the propane heater isn't working because it needs DC power to operate its computer controller. I'm afraid to turn on the van motor and recharge the house battery because there are people (hardy souls) tenting nearby and it would be inconsiderate to disturb the morning silence.

I break out the tools at dawn and replace the dead house battery with the van battery. The RV has two 'slide-outs' which give some extra square feet when parked, but you can't drive with them open. To retract the slides, I have to exchange the batteries.

We buy another battery near Bryce and in the process I meet a Mormon mechanic named Clay. Clay graduated from High School four years ago. He spent two years in Toronto on a mission to spread the word. He was a very handsome young man with sparkling blue eyes. I told him that some Mormon young people had visited me in Tampa and left me a bible. He asked if I had read it and I lied to his face. He was a delightful and friendly young man.

The trip 270 mile drive today leaves us in Moab, Utah. Next door is Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. I like this place. It has two used book stores.

Today I took a bunch of casual snap Utah windshield pictures on the astounding 270 mile drive from Bryce to Moab. One geologic formation really made me laugh.

Arches National Park, Utah – 8 November, 2005

We rent a jeep to explore Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. A sign in Arches says to watch out for Mountain Lions and whatever you do don't jog in the park. Apparently jogging stimulates their appetites.

Arches is quite unusual. We're glad we came here. Here are some pictures of Arches.

We rent two DVDs for the evening. Sin City and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This morning it comes to me which part Rutger Hauer played in Sin City. He's my favourite actor. The Hitcher was his best movie. I see from the credits that Quentin Tarantino played a role in creating the movie.

The weather is pleasant. It's a late winter. It usually snows here by October 15th. The average elevation is about 5,000 feet. This is still part of the huge chunk of ocean bottom that was uplifted several miles and covers parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. We've been roaming in this uplifted area for several weeks now.

Canyonlands National Park, Utah – 9 November, 2005

Canyonlands is a vast park. There are about 16 miles of paved road and several hundred miles of roads that require a high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicle. These back-country gravel, bedrock and dirt roads run around the rims of deep canyons, up loose-gravel narrow switch-back mountain trails and back down though narrow canyons. It can take several days to traverse the park circumference.

The Green River and Colorado River confluence is inside the vast park. You may recall the 1869 exploration of the Green and Colorado rivers by John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran.

Driving these roads is an exciting experience. When the going got really scarey Mrs Phred took over the driving. Once the rear wheels started to spin and slide toward the edge of a 3,000-foot drop, so she coolly engaged the 4WD and continued slowly upward. We spent about nine hours bouncing over tiny rugged trails on canyon rims and hiking short hikes to see arches, deep canyons and 'upheaval dome', site of a possible large meteorite strike. We only met two other vehicles during the day. The silence was as immense as the landscapes. Here are a few pictures of Canyonlands that give a glimpse of a small part of the park.

Included are several shots of grazing antelope, prickly pear cactus, desert ravens and twisted junipers.

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado – 10 November, 2005

The park is located between Durango and Cortez in the southwest corner of Colorado. The entire area, including the large park, is dotted with the architectural remnants of the
HREF="http://community.webshots.com/slideshow?ID=502817667">Pueblo Indian culture.

The centrepiece of the park is an excellent museum that displays small dioramas built by depression era Civilian Conservation Corp artisans. These displays illustrate the development of Pueblo architecture and building techniques over a period of many centuries.

The Pueblo Indians attained a high state of technology and the museum contains fine examples of stone and bone tools, jewellery, pottery, building construction materials, woven cotton clothing, woven baskets, arrows and similar artifacts. Some of these items are from Mexico and California implying that a widespread trading system had developed. The museum also contains many fine fossils and examples of rare stones, including my personal favourite, the Firecloud. One exhibit does a good job of speculating about the original migration from Asia ten to twenty thousand years ago.

At the high point of this culture, before a great drought in the 13th century, these people were building large villages of three-story stone houses that still stand proudly after eight centuries. The development of agriculture (including corn, beans, cotton and squash) allowed this people to build and develop an impressive civilization. The type of construction and the density of construction sites imply a very long period of peace before a retreat to more defensible cliff dwellings.

Dendrochronology, or the study of tree rings, has enabled archeologists to precisely date the times that various buildings were constructed and when this large civilization disintegrated and migrated to Arizona and New Mexico to form (or join) six related tribes, including the Mogollons. Speculation is that rapid population growth, combined with a great drought of thirty years, caused the collapse of this advanced civilization.

One of the exhibits has some interesting speculation about the origin of corn. One theory is that it originated as a deliberate cross between two weeds, implying that genetics was developed long before Gregory Mendel started playing around with peas.

The park burned to the ground in 1991 due to Park Service mismanagement and failure to allow small natural fires to clear wood trash and undergrowth. The blackened, dead Junipers will require 150 years or more to recover.

It's a different type of park, but worth a day. We find a place to spend the night and I ask my faithful companion if we can have liver and onions for Veterans Day. She says, mysteriously, 'Next year, in Jerusalem'.

Journey to the Heart of the American Southwest Archive

Phred

23.02.06 Front Page

Back Issue Page