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Published: October 26th 2010
I’m not sure which part of “you’re too clumsy to be a serial killer” is supposed to be a compliment, but apparently it is and that’s the words that came out of Andy’s mouth just after the last update. We’ve only done 3 states worth of travelling since then, but the words in the journal are mounting up and now we have an end date to our trip. Plus we met a lovely couple from New York who also have a journal and update it every day. This makes us look more than slack, so let’s by step Andy’s “compliment” and start from the storms and tornado warnings we left from last time.
Southern Utah has 5 National Parks in total, plus the ‘Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument’ which covers 1.9 millions acres and links most of them with the Grand Canyon. To put it in very short terms, the Grand Staircase was created when the ‘Colorado Plateau’ (or a gurt area of land in USA) was pushed up by underground forces (or badgers with special powers). The whole area is a wilderness of cliffs, weird pokey rocks and damn beautiful landscapes that look very different from the rolling fields of Somerset.
Also being that Utah is a desert, I may be mistaken but Somerset is far from it.
Zion was the first park we visited, and thankfully the weather cleared up so we could actually explore. Zion used to be a desert with 3000 foot sand dunes, which got compressed and cemented together by various elements (or fat badgers) and formed massive brick-red cliffs. These were eroded into a canyon, by a river that frequently flash floods (badger wee??) and created the most stunning collection of towering cliffs and side-canyons. To be honest, there were no badgers, but the ground squirrels are so tame they’ve become a bit of an issue. Despite the presence of mountain lions, bears, snakes, spiders and scorpions, the squirrels are the most dangerous! Bless them!
Bryce Canyon was next along our route, although I wasn’t sure if we’d taken a drastically wrong turn through a tear in the space/time continuum that had landed us on Mars. It took a while to realise that the people, although many peculiar, were in fact Earth-ions and it was just a freakishly out-of-this-world looking place. They even sold gold-infused bread in the convenience store...at least we assumed it
was gold-infused as it cost $6.
Bryce is a mass of crooked, warped and distorted sandstone pinnacles, that are being eroded away underneath a hard white limestone layer on the top. The capping limestone makes the views ultra-cool as it gives the individual finger-like peaks a consistent layer. I still doubt whether this was actually a landscape on Earth. We managed to wake up before sunrise one morning and watch the light create shadows over the terrain, it was a stunning sight, as Andy accurately put it, “majestic, but ass-clenchingly cold”. Top tip of the day: Don’t underestimate the warmth that can be gained from tucking upper layers of clothing into your trousers. It’s an amazing little hidden secret of uncool that keeps the torso mighty toasty.
Travelling between Bryce and Capitol Reef National Park was a long haul, but the radio busied us with pop classics including the Spice Girls, with which Andy looked less than impressed. We soon lost this station and were forced to settle with the familiar Country and Western tunes that seem to inhabit the less-populated areas of nothingness. Not intending to offend anyone, they all seem to be sung by the
same bloke...it’s actually impossible to tell one male C & W voice from the next. We do have our favourites though, ‘she thinks my tractor’s sexy’ and ‘whisky makes my girl a lil bit frisky’ are both tunes we are particularly fond of.
Capitol Reef is a buckle in the Earth’s crust and consists of more weird towering cliffs in the middle of a desert wilderness. It was slightly different from what we’d seen so far in that you can actually see the diagonally slanted rock folded over itself. Utah is Mormon land, 70% of the population are apparently Mormons (not ‘Moomins’ or ’Mermen’, big disappointment). In Capitol Reef several Mormon families founded a town called ‘Fruita’ around the 1900’s and planted orchards of apples, cherries, apricots, peaches and pears. When the fruit is in season you can pick and eat as much as you like for free. We just missed the season, but did get to imagine ourselves picking from the trees, almost the same.
Next to our campsite in Capitol Reef they had a little ye olde shop which sold lush fresh bread, homemade ice cream, pies and lots more. I’m pretty sure they even whipped,
then plumped the clouds above the shop every morning, it was that kind of a place. We ate their bread for almost every meal whilst we were staying there. We had a loaf of supermarket bought bread that needed using, but considering it was still completely mould-free after 3 weeks (I wish I was exaggerating), we figured it would keep a couple more days. In hindsight I wish we’d kept it as a scientific experiment to see how long it would last, but we used it a few days later. I think the outcome would have worried me anyway, some things you just don’t want to know.
When we had extinguished every possible excuse to stay longer and chug down bread, we drove to ‘Goblin Valley state park‘, attracted mostly by the name and the prospect of seeing real-life goblins. It had been a hard week, I’d already discovered Moomins and Mermen where fictional, now goblins too. Despite the lack of short ugly men (although there were a few) it was still a really weird place. The ‘goblins’ were upright hoodoos, naturally sculpted from red sandstone into creepy shapes, some with human-like features, although most resembled giant mushrooms rather
than people. It wasn’t the kind of place that would appeal to people to go exploring and get lost, Andy’s fault of course...
. I made a mental note that sliding down steep rock surfaces is a lot easier than trying to scramble up with nothing to use as a foothold. I tried to keep Andy happy by throwing in the word “adventurous” every couple of minutes. Fail.
We considered using a ball of string on the drive towards Canyonlands National Park as I was doing the orienteering, which meant we might need to retrace our path. We couldn’t rely on footprint trails this time, so I was relieved when we ended up in the right place. The name ‘Canyonlands’ is pretty much self-explanatory, it’s much lesser known than the Grand Canyon although possibly because it’s not as easily accessible. We actually preferred it and not only as the weather was better, although this was a big factor! It was much quieter with less people and the views were more expansive with a lot more going on, after all mountains are like the ‘cherry on top’ of any view.
Canyonlands is split into 3 bits with a long drive to get from one to another, and a daylong hike to reach the third section. The first part we visited is called ‘Island in the Sky’ where you’re looking down on the canyon, and the second one called ‘The Needles’ was nestled down in the canyon itself. I know that many of you who know us well will find it hard to believe that we’ve been doing actual hikes...miles, up-hills and all! We’re working our way up to the ‘strenuous’ category, currently middling on the ‘moderate’, but thinking that if we do at least one strenuous hike it makes us appear super-fit. We’re still a little unprepared, but the temptation to climb up to a 7000ft viewpoint, then change into flip-flops just before the peak to anger other hikers is very tempting. Despite this, we still gave the day-hike to section 3 of Canyonlands an undoubtable miss.
We were starting to get to grasps with the geology side of things now, Andy summed it up when he said “the more geology I learn, the less I understand.” The basis is not all that hard as the conclusion is almost always the same, which makes me doubt if they really know or just pretend to. Simple, they start every geological explanation with: ‘Millions of years ago, this area was a sea’, and no one questions it. Of course, there’s always the backup option in the rare case that the sea theory just doesn’t fit, and that’s to blame a meteor. If this is all it comes down to I think I’d be rather good at being a Geologist. Why is the rock purple with yellow spots? “Meteor”. Sorted.
‘Arches’ was the final National Park in Utah and it was the result of a thick layer of salt deposited by an ancient sea (or so they say). The land is prone to giant sandstone arches, and we did indeed see many arches, so we weren’t disappointed. We met a lovely couple from New York who’d been on the road for about 47 days, who I mentioned in the first paragraph as also having a travel blog. We bumped into them at every trailhead thereafter, it’s really nice swapping details of places to visit with the people we meet, as our plans (plans??!) are so flexible this has been a big attribute to our trip. At this point we still had no idea we’d be visiting New Mexico in just over a weeks’ time. This was probably a good thing as the ‘Albuquerque’ song which we sang constantly for a few days drove us crazy, it definitely didn’t need prolonging.
We stayed in the backyard of a hostel after visiting Arches, in a town we’d heard was really cool called ‘Moab’. We’d heard wrong, it was a cesspit of bumholes. Though, being a Friday we were fortunate to have somewhere to camp (everywhere else was full, we checked!) and nothing bad happened so we should count ourselves lucky. Plus it was only a few landfill sites and car-part-graveyard fields from Arches, the reason we were camping in Moab in the first place. In the morning we stopped by a small supermarket to get some food and other boring essentials. As we opened the van door about 8 beer cans fell out which made a huge din, and people turned to look. This would just have to happen in the one state which has really strict drinking laws, we looked like alcoholics! Andy covered our backs by calmly saying “Well, this doesn’t look good.” Smooth.
We left Utah and arrived in Colorado to visit Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde was awesome, and like nothing we’d seen so far, which made it all new and exciting. It showed the development of ancient dwellings which date back from AD 600-AD 1300, as they progressed from ‘pithouses’ that were dug into the ground, to above-ground stone and clay multi-storey villages, often protected in a cliff’s alcove. The National Park service actually organise tours around the 3 biggest or best preserved cliff dwellings. We did a tour of ‘Cliff Palace’ which was the biggest village and had 150 rooms in total for sleeping, working and worshipping, plus a courtyard, main street and rubbish tip which doubled up as a graveyard (nice). All the dwellings spread around Mesa Verde were abandoned in AD 1300(ish) although the boffins aren’t entirely sure why. They say it could be a reaction to a long drought or they were forced away by enemy tribes, although there’s very little evidence to support either which left us to draw our own conclusions. Andy and I decided it was obvious, either invasion by cheese tossing badgers or some form of meteor. The sea card won’t work here, gutted geologists.
The next day we visited the ‘Four Corners National Monument’ which is the point where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet. We joined a few other photo-hungry tourists and took our turn to lie down with a limb in each state and jig on the point marker, whilst being sniffed by scruffy-looking dogs with one eye (belonging to the Indian Americans that run it, or strays, we’re not too sure). Back on the road I had a flid moment and managed to delete all the photos on the camera, including about 15 which hadn’t yet been put on the computer. Upsettingly the Four Corners photos were amongst those. After much self-aimed anger and “bumhead“-ing I figured it wasn’t the end of the world as my jeans zipper had been well and truly undone in the photos anyway! I was quite sad to have lost the photo of the Wal-Mart car park we’d stayed in the night before, parked unknowingly behind a ‘No Overnight Camping’ sign, it was a good picture.
In New Mexico we visited Santa Fe, a pretty town with approximately one million jewellery shops then drove to ‘Bandelier National Monument’ which wasn’t far away. Bandelier had a collection of ancient cave dwellings in close proximity, which date back to about AD 1400. In contrast to Mesa Verde, the rooms had actually been carved into the crumbly volcanic rock using stone tools, and many were still accessible by wooden ladders which made me feel like a little caveman! One thing worth noting is that we saw our first (alive) rattlesnake!! Now we’ve properly seen one, we’ve both agreed we’re quite happy to not see another. Please?
After recommendations from a couple we met in Capitol Reef, we spontaneously went to Albuquerque. We visited primarily for the 2.7mile tram which drops you off atop Sandia Mountain at 10,178ft but also to go to the Museum of Natural History and Science. The Museum was awesome, the exhibits ranged from space to the development of computery things, with dinosaurs and cheese squeezed in between. Hell, they even had a scorpion on display that doesn’t sting humans; it just sprays you with vinegar! Chuck some salt in there and you’ve got the perfect pocket-sized pet that doubles up as a lunch seasoning. I want one, Andy’s not so keen. After the museum we were greeted by a recurring theme on our travels - thunderstorms, but thankfully it only lasted a couple hours before the sky turned back from death-black and back to a much friendlier blue.
So we’re now in the land of Texas, and have realised that when people have told us it’s a big state, they weren’t just saying it for fun. I always thought the cowboy theme was a stereotype, it’s not! After driving through Amarillo (which shifted the ‘Albuquerque’ tune and turned it into Tony Christie, I miss Albuquerque!) we’re now on our way to Austin, which we’re really looking forward to, we’ve heard nothing but good reports of music and beer. Just our kind of thing!
We’ll speak to you all soon, love and gloves Leila and Andy 😊 xxxx
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Phil and Nancy Williams
non-member comment
Too much fun!
I've finally had time to get caught up on your blog. You've certainly covered a lot of ground. Sounds like things are going smoothly for you----thankfully. I enjoy your writing so much with your humor and your take on all things American. You two are making memories of a life-time. I glad you're getting to do it while you're young. I'll be following you as head east. Safe travels. Nancy