Finally we stumbled upon a chance to see some good specimens of petrified wood when we took a short hike up a small mesa in Escalante Petrified Forest State Park.
You can see John in the first two photos below, touching the rocks that were formerly tree trunks millions of years ago. The trees fell into mud flats and silt deposits built up around them, which protected the wood from decomposing. Then over the millenia, minerals gradually replaced the wood fibres so what was wood is now a statue of colourful rock that looks almost like jewels up close (shown in the last two photos). Amazing colours!
While in the Bryce Canyon area we took a driving tour on a scenic byway through the Escalante Grande Staircase. The road wound through many weird rock formations and we were very glad we were not towing the RV at the time!
One stretch of road went along the top of a long, high ridge for several miles, so that the canyons yawned on either side of us. No guardrails of course!
We had lovely views of the valleys below us. What a great day!
We stayed for three days at a nice KOA in the small town of Panguitch, Utah so we could explore in and around Bryce Canyon National Park. We took a drive towards the park, going through a fairly muted landscape of greyish limestone (shown below).
Then we entered Red Canyon and the scenery instantly changed to the reddish orange hue pictured below. It was really picturesque and we stopped to hike a short trail beside the highway to take a closer look and get some photos.
Further down the road we entered Bryce and drove the full length of the park and back to get an overview. The road runs along the top of the cliffs so you look down into the canyons and see the rock formations from above.
There are some fairly short but very steep trails that lead from the rim down into the canyons, but it was just too hot to do any hiking during the day. Maybe if we come back some year in the fall we will get a chance to experience the landscape up close.
After a week in Page in northen Arizona we moved our RV up to the Bryce Canyon area in southern Utah for few days stay. On the way, we stopped for a half hour at a unique museum of natural history built into a cave.
Moqui Cave had displays of dinosaur tracks and fossils, fluorescent minerals from all over the world (including sodalite from Bancroft, Ontario!) and lots of interesting artifacts from ancient civilizations. The photos below show some of the excellent historic pottery displays.
I found this prickly pear cactus in bloom in front of Moqui Cave. Nice to look at but do not touch!
On our trek back from the Toadstool Trail in southern Utah, we took some time to look at the desert beneath our feet and found things that seemed unusual to our Canadian eyes.
The two photos below show the seed pods of a type of agave (possibly a yucca). The seed pods are large - about the size of my fist. These pods are fairly fresh, as we saw others that had turned a dull purple shade. We came across a few that had been picked and half eaten and saw they are filled with stacks of hundreds of flat seeds.
I believe the flower below is a Dune Evening Primrose. The blossoms are about 1 to 2 inches across. The pebbles I couldn’t resist due to the colour mix - love those dark blues and mauves!
John noticed the arcs and circles in the sand dunes (photos below) and realized the breezes have tossed the dune grasses around, so that the tips of the grass stalks swept grooves in the sand. Crop circles explained at last?
I don’t know the name of this plant (below) that was about a foot tall, but I liked the shadow pattern it cast on the dune. It seemed too fragile to survive in such a hot and dry environment.
The town of Page is in Arizona, just a few miles south of the Utah border. During our week long stay in Page, we took a morning hike on the Toadstool Trail, just over the border in the Paria Rimrocks area.
We parked beside the highway and walked up a wash (dry riverbed) into a canyon. About a mile in we found these rock formations called toadstools for obvious reasons. They form this way because the dark rocks on top are harder so act as a protective layer over, but erode slower than, the reddish sandstone underneath. In the first photo below you can see me leaning on a small one. The rest of the photos show other interesting views.
We coughed up muchos dineros to take a guided raft excursion for 15 miles down the Colorado River, starting below Glen Canyon Dam (pictured below). About 90 people boarded a couple of coach buses in downtown Page, after being searched for weapons and explosives (I kid you not - just like at an airport) and were driven to the base of the dam through a two mile long high-security tunnel. You can see one of 19 windows in the tunnel in the second photo below.
We boarded three rafts and because John and I boarded last, I was fortunate to get a front row seat, ideal for taking photos.
As our guide steered the gas-powered raft downriver, I took the photo below of the bottom of the tunnel and the loading platform.
This upper section of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon has virtually no rapids so we didn’t have to wear life vests and only our feet got wet occasionally. The really exciting whitewater that you see in commercials and documentaries occurs about 80 miles downriver from here, towards Grand Canyon.
These photos below show one of the other rafts beside the canyon walls to illustrate the relative height. We felt so insignificant down at the bottom of Glen Canyon!
During the five hour trip I took lots of great photos so it was tough to choose just these few shots to give you a feel for the river and canyon (below).
We saw many interesting formations in the canyon walls (below). The dark stain is called ‘desert varnish’ and is a combination of oxidation and mineral deposits.
We stopped for a half hour on a big sandbar on a bend in the river to use the outhouses and to see some petroglyphs (below).
This lizard posed for the camera on a stone wall just in front of the petroglyphs. Making sure we didn’t touch the ancient carvings I guess!
During our stop on the sandbar we were allowed to go swimming in the river and we had worn our bathing suits to take advantage of this rare opportunity to swim in the mighty Colorado. After all, we Canadians can survive a dip in 49 degree F water, right? Wrong! We made it in as far as our knees… so cold it hurt! Like walking on ice! Of the 90 people, only two teenage girls dove in and they didn’t stay in the water long. Showoffs!
We stayed for a week in this quiet Navajo-run campground, a green oasis of trees in the desert on the edge of Page, Arizona. The staff watered the trees regularly to keep them growing in the parched ground. We climbed up the sandstone hill beside the campground to take the photo below. Our trailer is the last one in the row (near the centre light pole), so we had great privacy looking out towards the hills.
One day we drove down to the south rim of Grand Canyon (shown below). The view was not that different from the north rim but there were big crowds of people there so we didn’t stay long. The south rim gets about ten times as many visitors as the north rim, since the south rim is closer to major towns and highways. We did enjoy the excellent Imax film of the history of Grand Canyon at the visitors’ centre.
Leaving Grand Canyon National Park, we stopped at a lookout over the Little Colorado River Canyon (shown below). The drop in front of me was 1000 feet and there was no handrail. Yikes! But, being much smaller than Grand Canyon, I found it more interesting because you could see more details.
On the drive back to Page, we gained elevation on this scenic ascent up to another plateau (photos below).
Another day in Page, we heard on the local radio station that there was a demonstration of Native dancing taking place downtown. We drove down and found the site, which turned out to be under the canopy of a gas station (a conveniently shady spot). While enjoying free hot dogs and pop, about a dozen of us leaned against the gas pumps and watched these Navajo dancers doing some traditional steps.
Over millions of years, rivers and streams have carved channels through the soft Navajo Sandstone all over the southwest US. When the channels become very deep but remain narrow, they are called slot canyons. One of the most famous for photographic opportunities is Antelope Canyon, just outside of Page, Arizona. So of course we had to take the guided tour (the canyon is on Navajo land) for an exhorbitant fee but I thought it was really worthwhile.
Tours left every hour with the guests being loaded into the back of four wheel drive pickup trucks like the one pictured below, for the ten minute drive up the wash (dry riverbed) to the canyon. Our group had couples from France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and one from the USA. It was a really windy and bumpy ride.
The photo below shows John on the left along with the other tourists at the unprepossessing entrance to the slot canyon. Once we stepped inside, the play of reflected light on the gracefully sculpted sandstone walls just took our breath away. The canyon has a sand floor that changes every time a flash flood brings water and debris into the slot. Eleven people actually died here a few years back when they were caught in a flash flood. Most of the year the canyon is dry.
The first photo below shows a log from a recent flash flood caught in a nook of the wall. The second photo shows sand drfting down from the rim of the canyon 120 feet above.
The next two photos show the view looking straight up between the canyon walls. Photographers come from all over the world to capture the wonder of this place, which is sacred to the Navajo people. I managed to get about 80 good shots, so these are just a sampling of the most interesting ones.
We got up bright and early on our first full day in Page, to catch our 7:30 cruise on Lake Powell to see Rainbow Bridge National Monument. We were out for a half day and only journeyed up the reservoir about 50 miles and back. The lake is surrounded by gigantic sandstone cliffs and fills many canyons, providing 1960 miles of shoreline - more shoreline than the entire Pacific coast of North America.
I took some photos with boats in them to give a sense of scale. This is a famous lake for houseboating, but we found out it is really expensive ($15,000 a week to rent a big one). The slip fees are so high that many of the rental boats are kept in drydock in Page and trucked down the highway to the lake each time they are rented. The marinas are all run by Navajo bands and there are only two marinas on the whole lake. We didn’t see any dwellings on the lakeshore - just miles and miles of bare rock.
So we have added a Lake Powell houseboat rental for us and our best friends to our ‘Things to do when we Win the Lottery’ list…
Rainbow Bridge National Monument (shown below) is the world’s largest natural bridge at 275 feet across and 290 feet high. It is a sacred place to at least five Navajo tribes so tourists are asked not to walk under the arch. The height of Glen Canyon Dam was determined so that Rainbow Bridge would never be inundated. What an amazing sculpure!
Lake Powell was one of my key destination picks for our trip, so we packed up from Zion National Park in Utah and headed down to Page, Arizona to stay in a campground there for a week.
This manmade lake sits behind the Glen Canyon Dam (pictured below), which we had to cross beside to enter the town. The reservoir is filled with water from the Colorado River and its tributaries and it took 17 years to fill up after the dam was completed. Imagine the amount of water in the lake, which is an astounding 185 miles long! The lake is used for water storage (this being the desert and all), power generation and recreation.
The photos below were taken at the top of the Horseshoe Bend in the Colorado River, just a few miles below the dam. I believe the canyon walls are about 800 feet deep at this point. A few days later we would be floating around that very bend on a river rafting excursion (stay tuned). Love that Navajo Sandstone!
While we stayed at Zion National Park in southern Utah, we took a day trip in the truck down to see the north rim of Grand Canyon in northern Arizona. This was my first view of one of the seven wonders of the world and it was truly awe inspiring. The canyon is so deep and wide that the far side looks like one of those painted Hollywood backdrops for a movie made 50 years ago. It was pretty scary for me to step up to the railing to have our picture taken (below) as I am not comfortable with dangerous heights. Can you see me gritting my teeth?
We learned that a handfull of people die every year slipping over the edge (accidentally or on purpose). As everyone says, the photos cannot do Grand Canyon justice; you have to see it in person to feel the wonder of this enormous bit of geography.
One of the viewpoints was accessed by a sturdy but narrow trail about a quarter mile long, sometimes with cliff edges on both sides. Below is a photo of John on the trail. I did make it out to the end point. Whew! The sacrifices I make to get photos for this journal!
Several opportunites arose to photograph wildlife in the park. Pictured below are a flowering tree with a huge bumble bee, a couple of deer and a herd of bison.
On our drive back up to Zion park we stopped for gas and saw this sign. Just shows you what are priorities in life!
The sandstone formations of Zion National Park began millions of years ago as the largest desert known to have existed anywhere in the world. The sand dunes were up to 3,000 feet deep, which means the region was a desert for millions of years. Then the sands were covered with an inland sea and the water leached into the sand and slowly compressed it into rock. Then the Colorado Plateau rose upward above the sea and the surface rivers eroded the canyons down through the sandstone. The process is still continuing today.
One day we drove through the park, passing through the mile long tunnel that was built during the Depression (the first million dollar mile built on US highways) over to East Zion, which has a more subtle topography than the western region. (There is a north region we did not have time to explore and would love to return to Zion in future to see this northern area that has lots of hiking trails.) These photos below show the distinctive ‘checkerboard’ formation found in the eastern side of the park.
On our way to the Narrows river hike in Zion National Park, we passed an area of hanging gardens. The sandstone here oozes water that has percolated down through the layers over hundreds of years, providing nourishment for a variety of tender plants such as ferns and these lovely columbines. The water contains minerals which leave coloured vertical stripes on the canyon walls.
A very common plant we have seen throughout the desert regions is Jimson Weed, made famous in the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe. I took the time to photograph this specimen in Zion park. You can see the progression from bud to bloom. The flowers are about four inches across and about the same length. The flower bush is about two feet tall and seems to grow in very inhospitable regions. It is poisonous and I believe it is the same plant we grow as an annual in Ontario, called Angel’s Trumpet.
I don’t know the name of this wildflower but it sure was an unusually lush bit of growth. The bush was about three feet across. The grass is a non-native species imported by early Mormon settlers who farmed in the flat valleys well before this area became a park.
The RV park we stayed in during our Zion National Park visit was a privately owned campground within walking distance of the park gates. The campground was quite full and had no grass and very few trees, being in a desert climate, but it was nice and quiet. Here is a photo of John relaxing with a cold brew in the shade of our awning. You can see the lovely mountain view in the background. Can life get any better?
One day we went on a hike to the Emerald Pools. The scenery was lovely as we climbed up the mountainside on fairly easy trails and the quiet pools at the top of the loop were very tranquil.
Here is a photo of me perched on a boulder at one of the pools and one of John on the trail as it curved under a big overhang that had a small waterfall dripping off of it. Nice sound effect.
Quite a few small lizards (perhaps 6 or 8 inches long) scurried out of our way as we walked along and I managed to grab quick shots of two of them. We also saw a wild turkey and lots of squirrels looking for a handout.
You can explore the park on horseback or by mule (for a hefty fee of course). These trail riders crossed a creek below us as we ended our hike for the day. Looks like fun!
We headed out of Nevada through the NW corner of Arizona and into Utah. The scenery was very dramatic in this Arizona canyon.
We had reserved a campground just outside of Zion National Park for a three day stay because we had read about all the hiking opportunities in the park. The campground was really nice and located just outside the park, and the park scenery was so breathtaking that we added another two days to our visit. We felt like we had finally arrived at our holiday destination - the great outdoors.
The next day we walked across the road to the outfitters to rent some river-walking gear and took the free shuttle bus to the trailhead for The Narrows. This is the slot canyon carved by the Virgin River through the park and we spent about seven hours walking upriver, in the river, and back. It was an awesome day. The current was fairly strong so when the water got thigh deep it was hard work to keep your footing on the boulders on the river bottom. Below are photos of John in the river in the canyon. The walls were 800 feet high so I had to take two photos of each scene.
Below is a photo of John and I in our river-walking gear and another view of the river. We rented the special footwear and walking sticks from the outfitter and I also rented the waterproof pants. (I found out that meant they leaked but held water really well!)
It was an exhilarating and thoroughly enjoyable trek but boy was I tired at the end of the day! The next day we slept in till 10 am and took the remainder of the day ‘off’ to rest up… So I had fun working on a painting of irises for 3 or 4 hours…
You might think Las Vegas would be the epitome of fake, touristy cities but we loved it. And we didn’t even gamble! We stayed in a KAO campground behind Circus Circus Casino, so we could walk to the Strip from our RV. A taxi driver told us the weather was unusually cold (mid 80’s) and normally it is in the low 100’s in early June. So in that respect I guess you could say we got lucky in Vegas!
The casino architecture on Las Vegas Boulevard was astounding, like glorious palaces in a Hollywood movie set but so well designed and landscaped that they took our breath away. Everything was so clean – the Strip looked as good in daylight as it did after dark, with all the lights animating the scene (below).
The last time we visited Vegas, about 30 years ago, many of the now-famous casinos had not been built yet. Below are photos of the Venetian Casino. There must be money in this gambling racket!
Below are the Riviera and Harrah’s Casino entrances.
Below is the Paris Las Vegas Casino. Astounding! They even have a replica of the Eiffel Tower.
On our first night in Vegas we saw the Terry Fador show at the Mirage Casino; he was the winner of the TV show ‘America’s Got Talent’ and he was very entertaining (ventriloquist, singer, impersonator). After the show we took a taxi Downtown to see the Freemont Experience (the roof over the old town section of the street). There was a group performing songs from 1969 (great sound system!) and psychedelic images were projected onto the roof above the street. Very cool. And you could walk around with a beer in your hand… We caught the shuttle bus back to Circus Circus and turned in around midnight.
The next morning we cruised on our motorcycles the full length of Las Vegas Blvd including the Strip and Downtown while temperatures were still nice and cool. We were quite comfortable in our helmets, jackets, jeans and boots and the traffic was fairly light, being a weekday. Then we walked around in the afternoon and tried to get tickets to see Carlos Santana performing but he didn’t have a show that night.
So after a good nap in the afternoon (handy having our RV so close!) we strolled and people-watched all along the Strip after dark. We saw several groups of inebriated girls dressed up in high heels and short dresses, with the bride-to-be wearing a short veil. Apparently Vegas weddings include a ’stagette’ the night before! Goodness knows where the grooms-to-be were - in a strip club perhaps? I took this interesting photo of two full moons beside the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Casino.
The next morning we bid adieu to Vegas and headed north to Utah to experience Zion National Park.
We had read about and been told about how fabulous Sedona was – an artsy town in the mountains, but our impression was very different. John said it reminded him of Niagara Falls with lots of fake, overpriced, touristy shops and galleries. We were much more impressed with the ‘real’ historic district in Taos where the Indians sold their hand crafted treasures from blankets in the plaza. It is so cool when we can buy our trip souvenirs directly from artists whenever we can, rather than in retail shops. We spoke to some RV’ers later on in our trip who said Sedona used to be wonderful before it got so commercialized.
That being said, Sedona’s setting was very dramatic with many sandstone peaks surrounding the town.
The main access road was under reconstruction so it was like threading a needle for John to pilot our rig to the campground. He managed without a scratch and the campground was lovely, down in a treed valley on the banks of Oak Creek. We had a nice al fresco lunch at a café in town and then drove out to the Chapel of the Holy Cross, because we found out it was based on a design by, you guessed it, Frank Lloyd Wright. It is built high on a hill overlooking the town but is actually very tiny. Below are the front and back views of the Chapel.
We saw some hikers on the hills around town (shown in the centre of the photo below) but the weather was too hot for us to try some hiking of our own. We only stayed in Sedona one night and carried on towards Nevada the next day.
Our main reason to come to Phoenix, other than see some spring cactus blooms, was to have a tour of Taliesin West, which was Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and architectural school. It is now headquarters for the FLW Foundation, which includes the FLW School of Architecture and FLW Archive. What a treat it was to have a two hour guided tour through all the buildings and grounds and hear the stories from when Wright lived there. Below is the drafting wing where all the drawings were done by FLW and his apprentice students and the next photo shows where that wing connected to the living quarters on the right.
The first photo below shows the staircase going up to the second floor guest rooms and the second photo shows the lovely theatre in which the apprentice students performed plays and recitals. Wright insisted on this so his students would become comfortable with public speaking, a skill they would need in their future careers as architects, making presentations to prospective clients.
The one and two storey structures, which are stone masonry walls with redwood beams and canvas roofs, were designed by Wright and built by the students as their winter camp. They all would move back to Taliesin in Wisconsin for the summers. Photo below shows FLW’s office with chairs built from his original designs. Note the canvas roof. The windows were added much later because Mrs. Wright complained for years about the dust and insects getting inside.
There is a small stone building at Taliesin West which was designed as a fireproof, weatherproof vault to store all the drawings safely, and apparently Wright was quite the packrat in regards to keeping every one of his drawings. For this reason, the Archive is incredibly complete and people who want to restore a Wright-designed home can obtain copies of the original drawings, which specify not only the minutest building details but also all the furniture, light fixtures, window glass designs, etc. The vault is pictured below. (Nowadays the valuable documents are stored in a climate controlled facility that was built at Taliesin West recently.)
All the drawings for the unbuilt projects are there too and the gift shop at Taliesin West sells an extensive line of licensed products based on Wright’s designs. We were so impressed with the effort the Foundation is making to preserve Wright’s ideals that we bought an annual membership and will receive their quarterly magazine.
From Phoenix we journeyed back north (away from the oppressive heat!) up to Sedona. Phoenix had some great freeway art and I managed to get a few good shots of it as we left the city (below).
From central Arizona we headed south through the Apache Mountains. John did a great job piloting our big rig around those mountain curves! Glad we have new brakes on our trailer. We are learning that those roads on the state maps marked ’scenic’ are not necessarily the roads we should take when we are towing…
We set up in a pretty KOA campground in Mesa, on the outskirts of Phoenix. Now we are really in the desert and it is very hot (low 100’s)! We saw our first saguaro cactus along the highway today and our KOA campground was beautifully landscaped with cactus gardens between each camp site. (I wouldn’t want to drink too many mojitos and stumble my way home in the dark – ouch!)
I took some great photos of cactus flowers while walking around the campground that evening. The first photo below shows a grouping outside the camp office with the tall stalk of the agave on the left and the substantial saguaro cactus on the right. The second photo is a close up of the agave flower heads.
The first photo below is a close up of the saguaro cactus (by the way, it’s pronounced soh-WAR-oh) with a curve-billed thrasher on its nest surrounded by the fruit pods which form after the cactus blooms. The second photo shows a small barrel cactus in bloom.
These next two photos I am not sure of the name of the cactii but their flowers were so lovely in the soft evening light.
Our second day in Arizona, we rode the motorcycles through Petrified Forest National Park and part of the Painted Desert. Very interesting landscape, although another tourist told us other parts of the Painted Desert have brighter colours than those we saw below.
It was sad to see that much of the petrified wood has been stolen from the park region by visitors (evidenced by old photographs taken in the park). But I did get a good photo of some large specimens of petrified wood at our campground (shown below).
While in the Park we also saw the ancient stone foundations and petroglyphs (see light marks on the black rock face on the left below) of Puerco Pueblo as well as a tiny but very colourful lizard thaT posed at my feet for a while to get its picture taken.
We rode back to camp between storm clouds but avoided the rain. That night we walked along Route 66 for a few miles to get some exercise. The road had been upgraded with new pavement, sidewalks and light standards but the businesses along the route did not look too prosperous. Maybe in the summer season they will be busier.
Moving west to Arizona, we were welcomed into the state by this impressive rock formation right beside the freeway.
We set up camp for a couple of days in Holbrook and spent the first afternoon visiting Meteor Crater. The first photo below shows the typical flat land of central Arizona, with the Meteor Crater sides taking up over half the horizon. That’s one big hole in the ground – 4000 feet across and 550 feet deep! They figure the meteor struck about 50,000 years ago and was about 150 feet across. The extraordinary thing is that erosion has not erased the impact evidence.
We continued up from the Four Corners into Colorado to visit Mesa Verde National Park for the day. We decided to purchase an annual US National Park Pass for $80 so we can visit any national park for free during our trip – a good deal! Here is a photo of the typical natural beauty of this large park. There are over 4,500 archeological sites found in the Park, 600 of which are cliff dwellings.
Mesa Verde is very deserving of its UNESCO World Heritage Site designation. What a wonder to see! It was inhabited by the Puebloan people for about seven centuries ending in the 1200’s. We were most interested in the cliff dwellings, so we took the guided tour of Cliff Palace, pictured below from the opposite side of the canyon. We climbed down some very safe stairs from the top of the cliff on the left to walk in front of the rooms below.
Our guide explained the current theory, which is that this cliff site (the largest in the park) was used for religious ceremonies, which explains the high proportion of Kivas.The second photo below of a circular sunken room is a Kiva, without its wooden roof. These rooms served as small places of worship and as communal workrooms.
The construction material was local sandstone shaped into rectangular loaves, held together with mortar mixed from dirt and water. The majority of the inhabitants lived down on the canyon floor where crops could be grown and there was better access to water. The descendants of these ancestral people still come to visit Mesa Verde to pay homage to their ancestors. We were so pleased to tour and learn about this renowned archeological site.
We moved our RV from Taos to Farmington, which is in the northwest corner of New Mexico. We passed through several Indian Reservations (yes they call them Indian here, not First Nations) and the high mountain passes of the Carson National Forest. The temperature went down to 5 degrees C and we saw patches of snow in the ditches. Shown below is our truck and trailer at one of the overlooks.
The next day was an awesome experience. We drove the truck to the Four Corners and had our picture taken at the only spot in the USA where four states meet. The scenery is dry and dramatic. In the second photo below, I am standing in Arizona and Utah and John is standing in Colorado and New Mexico.
The Four Corners site is on Navajo land, so there was a good display of Indian-made crafts. John bought a beautiful hand made decorative knife and I took his picture with the artist, William (below), who also made unbelievably fine etched pottery. Those small pots just below John in the photo were priced at $1500 each. I bought a nice inlaid turquoise pendant from another artist there.
