The Southwest

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This blog follows our 2 week journey through the southwest, which compromises of Southern Colorado, New Mexico, Southern Utah and Arizona. Like the Rockies blog, this one is also going to be a squeeze because there is just so much to say about this area and we saw so much!

We start in Southern Colorado. On our way to Great Sand Dunes National Park we stopped at some hot springs. It was a bit of a wild goose chase to go looking for these springs because we didn’t have much to go on. We’d stumbled across a brief mention of them in a very old book in a second hand book shop in Boulder a few days before, so we weren’t even sure if they would still be there. So after driving around the valley for a while and going up and back down very rough dirt roads we finally came across the springs! They were pretty nice, with pools winding down the hillside with a view of the sun setting over the Sierra Nevada mountains. However, once again we felt that we were intruding on some sort of hippie gathering, at one point a man started preaching to me about the many benefits of hemp seeds and the amount of medicated marijuana he bakes into his cakes…

We rattled back down the dirt roads into the 21^st century and on to the sand dunes. This national park is one of the quieter ones and also one of the smaller ones. Sand dunes that nestle at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains for about 30 square miles, they do look fairly out of place but also impressive. At sunrise they look a lot like the meringue topping on a lemon meringue pie! We spent 2 nights there and climbed to the top of the originally named High Dune in our bare feet! It was a seriously strenuous hike! But worth it to be able to run and slide back down again.

Next we entered New Mexico which really is a completely different country! On our way to Santa Fe we drove past Earthship; a community of bizarre looking self-sufficient houses. The houses are made out of bottles and tyres and things like that and the whole community is not on the national grid. We also stopped in Taos, an artists town northeast of Santa Fe and had a brief look around. This was our first sighting of the famous adobe buildings of New Mexico. The buildings are all made of adobe (which I think is a kind of mud) in the traditional pueblo style. It gives the town a really village-y feel and also looks very beautiful against the blue blue sky!

Santa Fe is the oldest state capital in the US and is the second oldest city in the country. It is also very artsy, full of galleries and jewelry shops. The whole city is built of adobe, so even though it is a state capital it feels like a small town, it’s hard to describe but it is strange and extremely beautiful. We pottered around the city for a couple of days, exploring the gorgeous little back streets etc. Then we moved on towards the state line and four corners.

As we drove northwest towards four corners we entered the Navajo reservation, which we would be weaving in and out of for the next week or so. Unfortunately our experience of the reservations was not the romantic and heroic image that we are given of the Native American culture. We just saw a lot of poor communities, not-genuine trading posts and over weight Navajos driving huge trucks. As the 4 corners monument is in the reservation it is maintained by the Navajo nation. It is the point where the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona all meet and it is literally in the middle of nowhere! We drove through some of the most empty and barren land I have ever seen to get there and all it is is a pile of concrete and a metal plaque in the mud. We made it a very brief stop. A few days later we were horrified to discover, whilst watching The Simpsons, that there is a 5 corners. However, a quick google search reassured us that this is in fact a fictional place. Phew!

Luckily, our next stop made the drive through the desert worth it. We set of to Monument Valley very early, arriving within sight of the huge sandstone buttes at sunrise. Seeing them rise up on the horizon was just incredible. We couldn’t believe that years ago we had been google-ing pictures of this place and now we were actually there! It looks like (and is!) a western film set! The only way to see Monument Valley really is to drive through it, as it goes on for miles and the buttes are huge. So we drove on in amazement, enjoying the amazing red and orange colours of the rock and the sunrise. So different from anything we have seen before.

That same day we carried on, turning south through Arizona to The Grand Canyon. Absolutely do join the crowds to see this natural wonder if you can, there is a good reason there are crowds! Like many of the things that we saw in the southwest, it is very difficult to describe what it was like to walk up to the rim of the canyon without sounding a bit poncy, so you will just have to look at the photos and forgive me for sounding ridiculous. We were sufficiently impressed anyways. While we were there we did a hike over the rim and down into the canyon and had our lunch in probably the most awesome place we will ever eat lunch – on a ridge with 360° views.

Just a note, Mum and Laura you would freak out at the grand canyon, there are no rails and it is a shear drop over the rim. I was yelling at Matthew to get away from the edge while he was taking photos. That night we wandered back to the canyon from our campsite to do some stargazing (it is one of the darkest places in the USA) and found ourselves looking down into the black abyss that is the grand canyon in the dark, a very eerie experience! We did see many a shooting star though.

After a cracking few days there, we went back north to the Arizona/Utah border to spend a couple of days on the shores of Lake Powell. Lake Powell is the result of a dam being built at the end of a canyon and the canyon being flooded. It is another of the southwest’s unusual features, a lake in the middle of the desert. Despite its isolated location, Lake Powell has become a hub of watersports. So we hired a kayak and spent a brilliant day paddling around Wahweap Bay checking out some canyons and swimming in the beautiful blue water. One question we have though is why are there sandy beaches if the lake is a filled in canyon? Any answers would be appreciated!

Another attraction at Lake Powell is Antelope Canyon, which is in Navajo lands so can only be visited as part of a tour with a Navajo guide. It was pretty expensive to go on the tours but definitely worth it. The canyon is a slot canyon (for anyone with canyon knowledge) so it is very narrow and very tall, with walls that curve and twist, all striped red and orange. We got so many photos that it will be impossible to chose one to show!

Next our travels took us across Southern Utah to Zion National Park. On the way we stopped in Kanab, known as ‘Little Hollywood’ because it was the base for the western film industry in the 20^th century. There we checked out a museum which had the sets that were used in lots of the western films. It was such a winner! They are obviously not big on conservation because we were allowed to climb onto the carts and try on props and generally fool around like kids. A breath of fresh air from the national parks where you are barely allowed to touch the trees.

We entered Zion National Park from the east so we had to drive the Zion-Mount Carmel highway past the huge red peaks and even through a mile long tunnel that was carved through one mountain. Very dramatic. The main part of the park is in the base of the canyon, so you always have the cliffs and peaks bearing down on you, they all have religious names like The Mantle of Sacrifice and The Three Patriarchs and it is easy to imagine the Mormon Pioneers awe when they stumbled into the canyon. Unlucky for us we happened to get to Zion NP on a bank holiday weekend so it was absolutely rammed! In a desperate attempt to get away from the gaggles we picked a strenuous hike up to the top of the canyon and a great viewpoint called Observation Point (another creative American name there). It was hard going, up hill the whole way, but we made it and could see down the whole massive canyon that is Zion NP.

In light of the overcrowding at Zion, we changed our plan to stay 2 nights and instead went north to Bryce Canyon National Park. Our detour paid off, Bryce was deserted compered to Zion and the ‘amphitheater’ that is the main part of the park was astonishing. It is a canyon full of hoodoos (spires or pinnacles of rock) in red, pink, orange and white, with trails running between them. We spent a day doing a long figure of 8 trail through the canyon and I think it is safe to say we will never get to hike through scenery like that again in our lifetimes!

In complete contrast to the wilderness of the southwest, our next and final stop was Las Vegas. We had bagged ourselves an absolute bargain at the Tropicana Hotel on the strip, so after nearly 7 weeks in the van we were VERY excited about staying in a proper hotel, no not a hostel…a hotel!!! Las Vegas strip is probably the most surreal place we had been so far. Every building is like a small town; there was a sphinx, a replica of New York, the Eiffel Tower, in fact most things you can think of. We were a bit overwhelmed, especially after being in such remote places. When we walked into our hotel the first thing we saw was the casino, rows and rows of slot machines right there in the lobby.

We spent the afternoon and evening wandering the strip taking it all in, not really knowing where to start. We lost a good hour or two in Caesar’s Palace with its acres of casinos, shops and restaurants. There was even a Hogwarts style sky!

Next morning we had a fancy breakfast in The Sugar Factory, then got back in the van and headed west towards Death Valley and back into California.

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Comments

[Stephanie and Andras]

Beautiful photography! Very glad to you got experience this part of the United States - as you discovered there are some incredible sites that even many Americans don't know exist (like the Great Sand Dunes!). Thanks for sharing. Happy travels.