From:
John Freeman [johnfree@pacbell.net]
Sent:
Tuesday, November 21, 2000 1:58 PM
Subject:
Utah
---------------
National
Parks,
killer
hikes,
Magic
Mormon Moments, and
John
loses his wallet.
---------------
Sunday
Nov 5� Monticello UT - Blanding -
Capitol Reef NP - Torrey UT
It
snowed big fluffy flakes while I was loading the truck, and rained and snowed
intermittently all the way to Blanding, but visibility was good and I could
always see good weather a few miles off in some direction.� The Abajo Mountains behind Monticello were
looking very dramatic as they were wreathed in their own private cloudbank.
Blanding
is the last town for 120 miles where I'm going, so I am banking heavily on
being able to get a meal there.� It's
Sunday morning, and I got a bit of a scare as everything including the only
grocery store were not open, but then there was a new restaurant on the far
side of town that was open.� The food
was average, as I have come to expect in Mormon-land, but the cheerful,
intelligent kid serving it kind of made up for it (and for the surly BYU
football player type who seated me -- ease up on the steroids sonny!).
Well-fed
(well, fed anyway), I head off on a part of the trip I've been looking forward
to since I conceived the notion of this journey, the drive on Rtes 95/24/12
across the interior of Utah.
The
weather had cleared while I was dining, and all vestiges of low spirit in mind
and body magically went away and stayed away as soon as I hit that wide-open
road, I am pleased to say!�
The
first few miles are the usual mesquite and sagebrush, but then you bust through
a road cut into something called Comb Ridge and the fun begins.� It's one of those uptilted ridges that is
only 200 feet tall on the eastern approach (the shallow tilt side), but on
other side drops away in a 1,200 sheer cliff that extends to the horizon in
both directions.� The valley below has a
little stream and clumps of cottonwoods that are still bright yellow.� There's a couple of campers down there that
are obviously braver about the cold than I, but then they have heaters in those
things, don't they?
The
next 30 miles are generally red sandstone mountains on the left and white
sandstone hills and gorges on the right.��
I start catching an occasional glimpse of Lake Powell off to my
left.� Eventually I wind my way down to
lake level and across a nifty bridge over an arm of the lake.� I do not like Lake Powell.� In fact, I do not like most of the man-made
lakes I've seen on this trip -- including the TVA-created lakes in
Tennessee.� They just don't seem like
they belong.� There is an increasingly
vocal movement to get rid of dams whenever possible, and I'm totally for
it.� I look at the beauty of the land
around Lake Powell and think of the beauty of the canyons that are slowly
filling up with muck at the bottom of the lake and it makes me a little
sick.� Nuke it, I say!
As I
approach Capitol Reef National Park I pick up the Fremont River, which is
pretty much raging down the mountain to join Lake Powell after the snow/rains
of recent days.� There's a place where
it squeezes through some harder layers of rock where it makes a really neat
waterfall/rapids thing where I spend some time.
I whiz
through Capitol Reef National Park with the notion of getting a room in the
town of Torrey then coming back for sunset.�
So here I am at 3 PM on Sunday about to stumble on another Mormon
cultural oddity.� At the first motel I
tried, there were two groups of people leaving as I was coming to the motel
office.� One bunch was led by a guy in
black suit/white shirt/dark tie, and the other were a stylish young
couple.� The couple pealed out of the lot
in a hurry.� After the motel woman waved
them all goodbye, I had my pleasant smile on, expecting some sort of warm
afterglow smile from her.� But instead I
got a really intense hate stare for just a second before the mask of formality
resumed.� That kind of spooked me, but
after I looked at the room and came back and she had her normal pleasant
demeanor back in place.�
I
didn't like the room (or that strange little interlude), so I went to another
place, and guess what?� There's a group
of people in their Sunday best leaving that place also!�
So what
is Anthropologist John's conclusion?�
That there is a Sunday visit thing in the Mormon culture that out here
in the hinterlands is nearly mandatory.�
Three o'clock must be the earliest time it is acceptable to leave, and
therefore since no one really wants to be doing it anyway, they all sit around
sneaking peeks at the clock till three when they can get the heck out of
there.� At the first place the hostess
didn't like the people, but she had to be nice to them, but as soon as she
didn't have to have her happy face on for them her suppressed emotion came out
on the first hapless being who came her way -- me!
At the
second place, by the way, there were three Mom-types and 7 or 8 kids all over
the place and I only saw one guy, so I have a secret theory that there was a
little polygamy thing going on, but that is, as they say, "pure
speculation" :)
Anyway,
back to the trip.� I had asked the nice
ranger for a good sunset hike, and he fixed me up with a dandy.� 3 1/2 miles, 900 feet elevation, to the top
of Chimney Rock.� The moon is waxing
half full, so I got to do the thing I love so much, namely watch the sunset
from the TOP and enjoy the deepening twilight and then moonlight on the way
down.� It was super!� This was before I figured out why my
pictures were turning out blurry, so the pictures of this are of uneven
quality.� I had this concept of taking a
series of pictures of the same landmark at intervals as I hiked along and then
putting them together in a crude animation sequence, but it didn't work out too
well.
Monday
Nov 6� Torrey UT - Escalante - Bryce NP
- Panguitch UT
This
motel had a kitchy little restaurant, so I had breakfast there.� Same three Moms, countless kids, and no
Dads.� hmmmm... More indifferent Mormon
cuisine.�
Within
20 miles I am at 9,200 feet and driving through flurries on a snow-covered
road.� It's beautiful up here, and I
feel like Mr. Cool and In Control in my 4WD truck.
Came
off the mountain to the town of Boulder, a pretty little farming and cattle
community.� It is one terminus of a 120
mile scenic gravel drive called the Burr Trail (dunno why) which winds into the
wilds of Capitol Reef, into an area called Waterpocket Fold.� I'm not driving it this time, but I have a
feeling that the Waterpocket Fold is really cool and I am as of now already
planning my next trip to this wonderful area to take that road.�
I climb
out of the valley, driving along on white limestone that looks like frozen sand
dunes, on the way to Escalante.� I pull
off at a harmless looking scenic vista and notice a gravel road and a sign that
this is the Hell's Backbone loop road to Escalante.� So instead of a 27 mile paved road I could take a 42 mile unpaved
road.� I'm still feeling unfulfilled
about not taking the Burr Trail, so I make one of those classic guy impulse
decisions to JUST DO this 40 mile drive and see what the Hell's Backbone is all
about.
The
first 10 miles is pretty pleasant, even a quaint backcountry farming community
to drive past, but then the road starts climbing.� By the time I get to the actual Backbone (a narrow ridge with a
road on top) the snow is pretty deep.�
There is a one-lane bridge spanning the 100 foot deep gap between two
parts of the Backbone that is kind of exciting.� The truck is handling the snow well, so I'm pleased.� But the road keeps climbing and the snow is
getting deeper.� Finally there is a
shaded uphill stretch where the snow is really deep, where the snow in the
middle of tire tracks is higher than my clearance (a foot 1/2 or two feet!) and
I start to slide and drift to one side and then the other.� That really got the old heartbeat racing,
but I made it around the corner into the sunnier side where the snow was less,
and soon after that the road started heading downhill and I lived happily ever
after instead of having a really interesting disaster story to tell.� I'm still a 4-wheel novice so I don't know
if I was really in trouble or if all that sliding and drifting was just
business as usual in the 4WD world.� But
I did confirm that my beautiful truck can handle a pretty stiff snow pack, but
is not invincible :)� Two important
pieces of information!
Ate
lunch at the only restaurant in Escalante, where I had today's Magic Mormon
Moment.� As I came in the waitress was
deep in conversation with some locals about a local kid who ran away from his
mission and his parents refuesed to let him back into the house, and in fact
completely disowned him.� To their
credit, the locals thought the parents were being f---ed up.
Drove
on through more red rocks, gray rocks, pink rocks, green rocks, and even a few
mauve and lavender rocks.�� There's so
much beauty here.� There were sections
that look like Death Valley, the subtle colors and subtle patterns of
erosion.� There was another section
where the layers were wrinkled and eroded in such a regular manner that there
these little 300' tall sentinels of harder rock sticking out of this ridge
every half mile like clockwork, for about 7 miles.� Hard to explain but awesome to see.
Today's
endgame is to do a sunset hike in Bryce Canyon, then find a room on the other
side of the park.
Bryce
is at about 8,000 feet.� One of the
exhibits says the temperature drops below freezing over 200 days a year
here!� This apparently is why Bryce,
with the same rocks as other places, is the only place to have the weird
formations it does, because of the constant freezing/thawing action.�
Again a
nice ranger fixed me up with a rockin' hike.�
4.5 miles, maybe 700 feet elevation, going down then up, rather than the
usual up then down.� The red rocks with
white snow on them were beautiful.� Once
you are down in those canyons looking up at the formations in the lengthening
shadows it gets pretty spooky.� The
forms are so weird and plastic and evocative in that Rorschach inkblot kind of
way that I would be a little leery of taking mind-altering drugs down
here.� It's plenty mind-altering cold
turkey, as it were...
Again I
dawdle until I can see a serious moon shadow, hanging out on the now deserted
overlook to watch the formations by moonlight, then I drive about 25 miles to
the little town of Panguitch.� There
were some Roosevelt Elk munching grass by moonlight near the road -- cool!
Tuesday
Nov 7� Panguitch UT - Zion NP -
Springdale UT
Panguitch
seems to have quite a bit more personality than most of these little burgs in
the daylight -- interesting stores, interesting architecture.
Anyway,
I head out of town, back past Red Canyon, the gateway to Bryce through which I
had blasted in the dark last night.� I
follow the Sevier River upstream until it disappears into a bog, then pick up
the headwaters of the Virgin River and follow it downstream toward Zion
National Park.� The road takes me past a
desolate little community with the scary name of Orderville.� I zip through Zion to the adjacent town of
Springdale to get a room before today's monster hike.� I again foolishly stop at the first place I see, which turns out
to be a campground with some tiny little cabins.��
The
monster hike in question is the Angel's Landing Trail.� Only five miles, but 1,460 feet elevation,
it takes you to the top of one of those super-dramatic promontories in Zion
Canyon.� Climbing to the top you're on a
ridge that's maybe 12 feet wide in places, which is plenty wide, except that on
each side of that 12 feet there is a 1,400 foot sheer drop!� It's really exciting, and if you have any
secret acrophobia issues hiding in the dark corners of your psyche, this is
pretty sure to bring 'em right out into the daylight!� I dawdled around at the top till almost sunset, and had another
delightful time in the gathering gloom on the way down.� I noticed something on the way down, I could
actually see the shadow of the moon move!�
I could stand on the trail just inside of the shadow of the opposite
side of the valley, and watch the edge approach me as the moon rose
higher.� And pretty quickly too, like a
10 count would clear a bush, and a count to 50 or 80 would clear a whole pine
tree!
Toward
the end of the hike I started thinking about how our next president had
probably been elected while I was enjoying the moonlight.� Boy was the joke on me on that one!
Tonight's
MMM isn't as dramatic, it's just a couple of beefy young (20-25) guys at the
register of the local diner discussing having children, one wants to have a boy
first and one wants to have a girl first -- the implication being that they
will each have many, many kids.��
Basically I have this disconnected Stepford Wives kind of vibe whenever
I'm interacting with people in the Beehive State.
Wednesday
Nov 8� Springdale UT - La Verkin - St
George - La Verkin - Enterprise UT
Froze
my ass off in my tiny little cabin.� I
steeled myself to the depressing thought that George W was probably president
by now and turned on the TV, only to find instead that Indecision 2000 was in
Day 2.
I hung
around Zion for the morning -- I did another 2 mile hike, the Watchman Trail,
which is supposed to be the best sunset or early morning hike.� I did it at 9AM and it was pretty fine, but
would have been even better earlier when the shadows were longer.� I drove to the back of the valley to admire
Angel's Landing one more time and follow the progress of itty bitty hikers at
the top with my binoculars.
I
finally left and headed down the Virgin River valley, through the town of Virgin,
which recently had its 15 seconds of fame for *requiring* guns of
residents.� I got gas at the town of La
Verkin, drove another half hour and stopped to get a sandwich, and could not
find my wallet!� massive bummer!!� I rummaged and re-rummaged the truck, and
still no wallet.� mega-yuck.� I found the gas receipt, called the station
and they didn't have my wallet.� Serious
desperation is setting in.� I have 0
stashed in my suitcase, and without my trusty MasterCard, I think my only
option is to power drive home to Marin and regroup.�
The
only useful thing to do before that is to drive back to that station anyway,
because I am completely� f---ed without
my wallet.� So I retrace my path through
rush hour St George (no big deal) and the 20 miles of SR 9 to La Verkin (which
was actually kind of a pretty drive except for the stress, the canyons of Zion
in the distance with the sun at my back), and oh glory be, my wallet comes back
to me! :)))� To make a long story short,
some honest citizen saw it on the street while driving past, called the station
and left his number just in case, and then drove my wallet back when I got back
to the station and called his number.�
Amazing!� I must have done
something retarded like left it on the roof of the truck and drove off.� sometimes I wonder.....� Again I become living proof of the adage
that if you can't be smart at least you can be lucky.
So I
drove back through St George for the third time.� By the time I got through with this little drama it was 4:30, but
I don't like the crowdedness and suburban-ness of St George and I just didn't
want to stay there, so I lit out on SR 18, into yet another bitchin' desert
sunset.�
Drove
to the town of Enterprise, which does have a motel I'm happy to say.� I went to the room marked
"office", which turned out to be a motel room occupied by an elderly
gent breathing out of an oxygen tank, with a paper cup of bullets and a hunting
knife on his table.� A little weird, but
he was a right friendly old cuss after he put his tank on a cart we rolled out
to look at the rom.� This funny looking
little motel turned out to be pleasant and comfortable, and the little town of
Enterprise had a friendly little diner with good food, and best of all I had a
wallet to pay for it all!� :)))
�����