A Caravan Tour of the United States - Part Six
Created | Updated Mar 4, 2009
The Search for the Moonlily
Arches National Park, Utah
We signed up for a three-hour ranger guided hike though the 'Fiery Furnace'. It's a maze of sandstone fins, spires and box canyons with narrow openings between the sandstone formations.
You are encouraged to take this hike with a ranger. We draw Becky, the former English Professor who conducted the lecture on Edward Abbey. Becky tries to scare off those that are afraid of heights, of rock-climbing, are short of breath or who feel unable to refrain from using a bathroom for three hours. No one drops out. She spends some time explaining the ecological importance of the little bumps in the sand (Cryptobiotic soil crusts, consisting of cyanobacteria, lichens and mosses) which take 250 years to grow large enough to be visible. We try to stay on the rocks and washes where these don't grow to avoid destroying them.
An opening in the rocks has to have at least a three-foot dimension to qualify as an arch. There are about 2,500 discovered arches in the park. At 95 pounds, Mrs Phred easily squeezes through 'Crawl-Though' arch. I felt a little like Homer Simpson when he ate too many donuts and got stuck in the waterpark tube. My belly and butt barely squeeze through.
Becky does a fine job explaining the native plants. It's spring, so the desert wild flowers are everywhere. My personal favorite is the Utah Juniper. When it runs low on water it kills part of itself to save the rest. The strange, twisted shapes of the half-dead, half-alive junipers are everywhere.
I keep my eyes open for the sacred datura (moon flower, thorn apple, moon lily) whose ghostly, white trumpet-shaped flowers bloom only in the desert night. The moon lily carries a heavy dose of atropine, a strong vision-inducing alkaloid.
The soft sandstone sometimes forms a honeycomb pattern, where acid, trapped in the rock, has eroded holes.
The 'biscuit root' is here. It's an endangered plant that grows only in the sand worn off from this particular strata of sandstone. The arches below are called the 'skull' arches. You may notice that the picture appears to be upside down. I was standing on my head when I snapped it. In retrospect it might have been easier to flip the picture over with my photo editor.
Plan B
The Short Way Home
Moab, Utah
I've been thinking about cutting 5,000 miles off the planned trip and taking a short cut. This return route puts us back to Florida after 4,536.2 miles in late November. That's an average of 25 miles a day. We could walk it...and the lost ashtray turned up.
Do Horses Like Bananas?
Dead Horse State Park, Utah
The jury is still out on that one, but my own sample of three horses resulted in one horse asking for more and two horses spitting them out. I was out of apples. The horses are in a pasture behind our RV.
We went up to Arches again last night for some sunset shots. It was a choice between that and 'Ironman'. The local theatre has one movie, which it presents each day at 8pm.
We went for a six mile hike up on the mesa at Dead Horse State Park today. The trails lead around the mesa rim for views of the Colorado River canyons 2,000 feet below.
The 'point' is reached by a narrow neck of land, about 30 feet wide. It was convenient to herd wild horses onto the point and then construct a short fence over the neck from juniper branches.
Horses existed in North America from at least 100,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, when they went extinct. Mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats and giant sloths disappeared along with the horses as part of the Holocene mini-extinction event. Most scientists attribute this to the arrival of the Amerindians, with climate as a possible contributing factor.
Then the Spanish reintroduced horses to North America 500 years ago and 300 years later there were herds of wild horses up on the mesa near Dead Horse Point.
The horses were rounded up and the good ones were sorted out from the inferior 'broom-tails' (a class of range horses that are considered not worth much). Legend has it that one time the cowboys forgot to take down the fence after the round-up and the leftover horses died of thirst out on the point.
The hike was good. Lots of good overlooks, unimpressive cryptobiotic lumps, little lizards, wild flowers, warped junipers and pinion trees. If we did six miles like this everyday, I could melt off some extra pounds.
Dead Horse is up on the same big mesa as Canyonlands National Park. Down below we can see the same road we bumped up on the jeep.
The Donner Party and Sentinel Chickens
Wendover, Nevada
We've covered some territory in the last few days. The RV is back in Moab, Utah. We drove the Toyota 100 miles over the Great Salt Lake desert to Wendover, Nevada to see my brother. He took us way out into the desert to see a little lake or spring that percolates up at the base of a mountain range.
You can tell a poison spring in the desert by the lack of insects and other life. Many of them are full of arsenic or selenium. This one was full of little fish and mosquitoes. They put 'sentinel chickens' near some of the springs so they can test them for West Nile virus.
Later we walked out onto the Bonneville Salt Flats. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) prepares a strip 80 feet wide by ten miles long for world land-speed record attempts every year after the salt dries. When the salt is wet, it's like driving on porridge.
We also found a place 25 miles out in the desert on an empty gravel road where the Donner party crossed the salt flats and drove their wagons up over a low pass. That's the party that got stranded in the mountains for the winter (because they got stuck in the salt and delayed) and revived the practice of cannibalism.
After we left Wendover we went in to Salt Lake City. We went to Temple Square and saw a two-hour movie about Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon religion. The movie showed Smith finding a loose-leaf binder filled with gold pages. The binder was full of revelations. It was in a language that only Smith could understand. Smith established the Mormon religion and moved his congregation around the country (New York, Illinois, Missouri). Apparently the Mormons were persecuted everywhere and Smith was killed by intolerant neighbors in Carthage, Missouri. Then Brigham Young took over the church leadership and moved the Mormons to Salt Lake City. Mormons have a reputation as hard-working people who shun alcohol, gambling and tobacco. They have a strong evangelical tradition.
We caught a plane in Salt Lake City and flew to North Carolina to visit our six grandchildren.
Secrets of the Universe
Raleigh, North Carolina
I've made a breakthrough discovery. You know those rolls of 'Reynolds' tinfoil and 'Gladwrap' cling paper? You notice how the rolls always come out of the box when you pull on the end of the wrap and get all messed up? Well...If you look at the end of the boxes, there are tabs on the end that you are supposed to push in. The tabs hold the rolls in place and allow them to rotate freely within the box without coming loose. Reynolds made that product improvement in 1996. Unfortunately, I never got the word.
The oldest grandchild is quoting Latin and playing classical piano very well. One of the youngest made a big sloppy mess in his diaper while I was watching grandchildren 1-5 by myself. The only hope for it seemed to be to put him in the tub and soap him up completely as part of an irregularly scheduled maintenance. It's been 38 years since my last diaper change. They don't use cloth and safety pins any more. There are these new things that use velcro fasteners and are disposable. Who says that NASA research didn't improve our lot? The gag reflex still works even with the new technology.
A Philosopy for Retirement
Grand Junction, Colorado
The city of Grand Junction has an interesting Main Street. They have over 150 metal side walk sculptures. Some are whimsical. We don't know quite what to make of James Dalton Trumbo in a bathtub. I remind Mrs Phred of his powerful anti-war novel, 'Johnny Got His Gun'. It came out sometime in the 1930's. The protagonist has lost his arms and legs and is blind, deaf and unable to speak because of war injuries. A nurse establishes communication with him after ten years in the hospital by tapping on his chest. The novel got popular again in the late 1960s.
The shop windows on Saturday night are full of interesting images. I see a Grateful Dead sticker I want for the RV. We settle on an Italian restaurant for dinner. I order Mrs Phred a glass of local wine, Plum Creek Cabernet Sauvignon. I have a Ceasar salad and am dismayed to learn another closely guarded secret of the universe: it's only lettuce.
We spent our first day here relaxing and reading. We're trying to slow down and act as if this travel thing is our life, not a long vacation. After almost three years on the road, we need to reassess what it all means.
We took a long drive on a canyon rim, and a hike up in the Colorado National Monument today. The geology is still similar to the Utah sandstone 100 miles to the west. We're still 300 miles west of Denver, at the beginning of the Rockies.
The world's largest flat-top mountain is near here. The top of Grand Mesa is at 10,000 feet. There are over 200 lakes on the mountaintop, all full of big, tasty trout. I still have my hip-waders from the trip to Alaska last summer. I think we may go camping up there for a few days. We have to be back at an electrical source by Friday for the finals of the French Open.
Hummingbirds Can Fly at 8,000 Feet
Vega Lake, Colorado
I got up this morning and stepped out to our lakeside camp ground in the high and remote Vega State Park. My red camera strap was being dive-bombed by dozens of nectar-crazed hummingbirds. I retrieved the camera and held up a pink plastic rose. A stream of hummingbirds flew up to my hand and dipped their beaks into the plastic.
We had intended to camp on top of the 10,000 foot flat-topped Grand Mesa. We dragged the Toyota up the mountain for two hours. When we arrived, all the camp grounds were closed and under ten feet of snow. So we went to 'Plan B' and spent two nights at 8,000 feet at Vega Lake.
I went for a four-mile hike in the early morning by myself and saw some turkey vultures drying their wings, a Northern Flicker woodpecker, and sub-alpine meadows full of wild flowers. Lately, when I hike, my left heel becomes very painful for about 36 hours. It's disturbing. I've read that when you get old, your body starts falling apart. Aside from the results from a few motorcycle crashes, my body has served me well, up to now. I go online and diagnose Plantar fasciitis.
We've driven several hundred miles now in the Colorado Rockies. The state is amazingly green compared to brown Utah, only a few hundred miles to the west. I put it down to the adiabatic process. That is the process by which air drops its moisture as it is lifted over an elevation as it flows over a mountain range. There are places in Hawaii that get hundreds of inches of annual rainfall as the tropical air gets lifted and cooled by flowing over a volcano. I seem to recall that air tends to be two degrees Celsius cooler for each thousand feet of additional elevation.
The rivers and streams are still swollen with Spring snow melt. We saw some kayaks today on the Colorado River which were negotiating some amazing rapids in the canyon along the highway. The kayaks almost disappeared in the huge rapids.
