Back From Utah Part 2

Rainbow From Island In The Sky

 Would've written this awhile ago, but I really needed to finish the second section of the new---and final---Zorachus book. After I posted Utah Part One, we went down to Chincoteague, where I had a working vacation writing Z stuff a couple of hours a day, and I was doing Z stuff until about two days ago, when I came to a good stopping point. I think I'll post some excerpts, but you'll have to put up with some Utah travel biz right now. I'd better set it down while it's still fresh in my mind.

If you'll recall, the Rogers clan had just come back from an unexpectedly exciting---in both bad and good ways---four-wheel drive jaunt along the White Rim Road in Canyonlands, Utah. That was the last full day my daughter Soph was going to be spending with us...she had to fly out of Moab's tiny little airport about one o'clock the next afternoon. We decided, that since she still had one more morning with us, that we'd better spend it on cool stuff.

First off, me and Soph and Pat and Jeannie decided we should catch a sunrise at Grandview  Point, which is almost at the tippy-tip of Island in the Sky, and you can look down at the White Rim and Monument Basin, right where we'd been the day before, and a get a great idea of the lay of the land. We even thought we could pick out the White Crack Campground, which will always be one of my favorite places. Anyway, all that is especially good at sunrise, and there's an excellent footpath that goes down from the overlook proper, and along the eastern rim. If you follow it all the way down, you come to the absolute southern end of Island in the Sky, a nifty redrock knob that looks out towards a little butte that got separated from the big mesa. Me and Jeannie and Pat went to the top of the knob, although Soph had worn crappy shoes and didn't want to come up....having found a stupid little hole that nobody would've climbed that knob to take a look at, I told her that I'd  found something sensational, but, quite wisely, knowing me, she didn't fall for this, and we all went back to Dead Horse, Jeannie driving the Yukon too fast around various curves and cackling maniacally.

After breakfast, we hit the Gemini Arches. If you drive past the turnoff for Canyonlands on 191, you see a sign for them...and we thought we'd better go and check them out, especially since my son Pat said they're the kind of things that guys will drive their SUV's out onto, and then fall off the sides.

A Gemini Bridge

Well, there was the front way, which was the one we'd always pass, but we didn't take that, since we were already up at Dead Horse Point, which is a few miles past the back way way out to the Bridges. Almost all the way to the features in question (I'll describe the road beyond them in a bit), the road was pretty nice, no washboarding, not too rough, descending through a lot of  woodland with low roundish evergreens. Off on the right, you could see a gigantic canyon, and out to the left, some fantastic buttes rose up, named after the Monitor and the Merrimac...out in front, the land descended towards the Moab Rift (through which 191 slides into town) with Arches rising beyond that, and the LaSals rising beyond Arches...wonderful view. Finally, the road curved round to the right, towards that canyon, and we parked in a lot and went about three hundred yards towards the bridges. Ground got really stony, a great big bay appeared in the rock, there was a huge dropoff there, and the bridges jumped across it in parallel, separated by about six feet, as I recall, althought it might've been more. Seemed to me like you could've jumped it, but I didn't try, and nobody else  did either, which is probably one reason why we all made it home alive.  I was looking to see if there were any smashed SUV's at the bottom, but didn't pick anything out....sure wasn't any reason why anyone would've driven over the edge, on either bridge, because they were both plenty wide. We all made a point of crossing both spans, and there was a bronze plaque on the far side, saying that one Beau James Daly cashed in his chips hereabouts, doing something he loved, namely driving his 4X4, so I guess it's easier to drive off the bridges than I thought.

Between The Gemini Bridges

Past the bridges, there was a lot of good canyon viewing...never been to Canyon De Chelles, but it looked like pictures I'd seen...we scrambled around and expended a bunch more morning, then returned to our car. Theoretically, the road went to that entrance-exit we always passed on 191, and that proved to be the case, but it was really rough, and that didn't bother me and Pat too much in the front seats, but it was a different story for those in back, who'd gotten a bellyful of four-wheel drive bouncing and jiggling on the White Rim Road.

Near the Gemini Bridges---I Don't Even Know What This Canyon Is Called

There couldn't be any grousing about the scenery, however...fantastic Cutler formation stuff on either side, and one really memorable valley with what appeared to be a life-size sandstone Japanese giant monster, or kaiju, standing guard where you got out...you really had to get close to the thing before it stopped looking exactly like a huge guy in a rubber costume, and it was swell to get some idea of what it would be like to be a little tiny Nipponese person looking up at the creature about to stomp you. Practically justified the trip all by itself.

After that, the road rose in a long slope, taller than Murphy's Hogback and about as rough as Hardscrabble Hill, up and up towards what looked like a straight-down dropoff. But even as you reached that, the road took a really hard left turn, and we began a long descent, overlooking 191 and the Rift and Arches, down towards the highway, with the jounces moderating somewhat. We stopped at a gas and jerky and trailbike camp thing northbound on 191, and got bangwater and some food. Then it was time to take Soph to the Airport.

It was about five miles up the road, on the left...as I said, very small, and operated by some folks  called Red Tails Aviation...I bought one of their T-shirts. Tiny planes. Soph asked if she could have either an aisle or a window seat, and the lady at the counter said, "sure." There was only one gate, needless to say, and the waiting room was cozy, with much nicer furniture than you get at big airports;the soda in the machine was real cold, which I appreciated. We gave Soph some hugs and said goodbye, then got back in the Yukon and headed down to Moab to eat at the Macdonalds.

I had a chicken sandwich, which was tasty, but long about the middle of the day in late July, the Moab Macdonald's is really hot, particularly if the only place you can sit is right up by one of the big windows. Not the Mickey D's folks fault...It's Moab's, I suppose, and God's. But we really did get kinda skunked in there...if you want Macdonald's in Moab, go earlier or later in the year...

We'd been considering doing some stuff in the LaSals the next day, since DJ had never been up in any real mountains, and had expressed an interest, so me and Pat went to this Moab Trail Bike store that also duoubled as an information joint, and we asked the guy, who was very nice, about good hikes in the high country. But he informed us, in no uncertain terms, that the roads were blocked off up there, due to construction...bummer. Since we couldn't do any mountaineering the following day, I suggested we should go down to the southern Unit of Canyonlands early...for one reason and another, we decided not to, which occasioned some trouble for us... I'll explain later.

It was back up 191 after the info center. Pat had said we could get to the Klondike Bluffs, which are a little-seen part of Arches, although, oddly, the Bluffs were the original inspiration for the park. They're some ways off to the northwest of the most famous stuff, so we thought we might try getting there from 191, having spotted a sign for a Klondike Bluffs exit. Turned out it was for the Klondike Bluffs Bike Trail, which is, apparently, notable for some dino prints we never got to see...we got in there and didn't know which way to go, so we took the road that looked like it was maybe going to the Bluffs, which we could discern in the distance...well, maybe that road got there eventually, but it was getting nasty, and swinging farther from the Bluffs, and went down into a thing, and I sent Pat out ahead to see if he could get idea of where the thing led to...he came back up without the foggiest, and so we turned around and headed back out to 191, our new plan  being to take the long way round through the park, although it wouldn't have been the long way if we'd started there.

Anyway, we drove back down to the main Arches entrance, and headed on up those switchbacks, which is always wonderful, and went as if we were going to the Devil's Garden, although the turnoff  for Klondike Bluffs was a bit before that, and down we went. Road was washboarded and dusty, but not too bad...we had the western part of the Fiery Furnace and then the Devil's Garden off on our right, good viewing. We went about fifteen twenty miles through a lot of sagebrush, with a big wall rising on our left...some guys came ripping towards in an SUV, raising a whole lot of dust, looking like Robby the Robot on his vehicle at the beginning of Forbidden Planet. I pulled aside to let them pass...they were kicking up such a cloud that I couldn't see the SUV until they were within a hundred yards or so.

Found the parking-lot. There was no one else there. Trailhead was right off it...as is typical of a lot of good hikes, the toughest stuff was at the beginning, in this case a scramble up some boulders and ledges, actually fairly vertical. Got easier at the top...came out on the rim of a huge downtilted amphitheatre surrounded by giant red needles and columns. We swung down into it along the southern wall...on the right, along the northern section of the rim, was a pretty amazing succession of pillars, dubbed The Marching Men, which they sure looked a hell of a lot like.

The Marching Men, Klondike Bluffs

Still slanting  down along the southern wall, we reached the bottom of the basin, then started up sandy incline that was the second nastiest thing after that initial climb. It was well worth the effort though...pure gold at the top, big fairly scalable parallel blades rather like the stuff in the Devil's Garden. Our immediate goal was the The Tower Arch...it runs alongside a huge wall, and has a great hoodoo looming up from behind it.

Tower Arch

 We decided to halt there and hang out...everybody but Kate climbed up a tremendous fin, and got a fabulous view of a lot of other fins and more neat stuff.

Up On Top, Tower Arch

 And back down at the bottom, DJ, who'd seen 127 Hours and wanted to goof about in slot canyon, was able to insinuate himself into something similar, a long creepy fissure, the sort of thing that would eventually erode into a much wider gap between fins.

DJ In a Fissure

We all hydrated a lot and had fun in the shadows as those lengthened and got darker as the day cooled off. Then we started back, around to the basin, and up the sloping floor to the top. I'd been rather dreading the climb back, but it wasn't too hard...needless to say, the kiddies got out well in advance of me and the wife, but I found I was beginning to catch up with them before we reached the parking lot...by the end of the trip, I was pretty much keeping pace with them, particularly towards the end of each hike. Conditioning, of course...I wish I could spend a whole month doing this stuff.

View Through Tower Arch

Drove back through Arches in the sunset again, listening to more Miklos Rosza. Did some shopping in Moab and returned to the campground. Forgot what we had for dinner, but I bet it was good, since all of our cookouts were. Kate and Jeannie do a really fine job on this. After dinner, half the crew was pretty well fagged, but me and Kate and Pat decided to go up to the Dead Horse overlook because the moonlight was so bright. Could see well out over the Whie Rim and the Potash Road area, and there were these miles-long moon-shadows being cast by Island In the Sky and other mesas and buttes....I'd never seen anything remotely like it, except for, maybe, on our last Cali trip, the knifelike shadows of the Sierras, raking out across the Owens Valley at sunset. These weren't as big, but they were from old Silenus, and that rendered it triply special. Utterly, utterly wow-inducing.

Since we couldn’t get into the LaSals the next day, we had to go elsewhere, and the subject of the Corona Arch came up....turned out we could get there by driving up the Potash Road. The PR is a very handy highway which can take you to the White Rim and a bunch of great Canyonlands stuff....it’s nicely paved along its lower stretch, where it goes along beside the Colorado. If you’re coming down from Dead Horse, it’s a left turn off 191, and it climbs for a while, so you can get a very clear view—on your left---of what the river does when it crosses the Moab Rift. The Rift really widens out, and there’s a huge riparian zone, quite swampy, with lots of tamarisks fringing the river on both sides. Presently though, the river slides into the western wall through a huge gate, and the Potash road goes in with it, the gap between the road and the river narrowing, the road slanting downwards, hugging the righthand wall of the canyon. Once again, this is all mere Bureau of Land Management stuff, not even in a National Park, although it’s extremely grand, and would be a good cinematic stand-in for the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where you can’t see a lot of the higher walls because of the ledges. On the Potash Road, there are a number of pull-offs where you can camp, and there's a huge campground with a large pavilion and firepits in one spot. Having passed the trailhead for the Poison Spider Trail (it made my heart ache not to be able to stop for that), we went on up to the lot for the Corona Arch.

Corona Arch

Once again, it was one of those hikes where the very toughest stuff was right at the beginning...maybe it's just that you’ve always just gotten out of the car, and you have to start climb some swrtchbacks right off... whatever. We zigzagged on up, turned a corner to the right and headed along a rocky valley with high orange-sandstones walls...at the end of that, we came to the side of a canyon through which a rail-line passed...maybe the railroad is what made the powers that be decide that Corona wasn’t National Monument material. Anyway, we turned a corner to the left, and this gigantic bay opened out, and there, over on the other side, springing straight out from the back wall, was the arch, big enough for small planes to fly under...comfortably. They had pictures of guys doing this back at the airport. It was a bit of a climb to get closer to it....there was a ledge some way up, about halfway down the side of the bay, and reaching it involved at least one metal ladder which was bolted to the rock....the old legs got a bit rubbery. But going right underneath the arch was sure worth it. For one thing, there was a lot of  red light blasting up off the sandstone below, painting the underside of the span...for another, there was a guy preparing to rappel down from the top. Going to far side to get a better view of his descent, I slipped on some sand. You’d be surprised at how slippery sand can be. Both my feet went right out from under, and I fell straight sideways...would’ve landed on the side of my ribcage and really hurt myself, I think, if I hadn’t been carrying my great big waterbottle. Half the water got smashed out, blowing off the lid....all that orange stone went a much deeper reddish color....there were some people sitting under a ledge who saw the whole thing, and I bet they were pretty startled. Having provided them with some spectacle, I got up feeling like an idiot, and settled down to watch the guy lower himself. It looked like quite a rush.

Corona Arch From The Other Side

Afterwards, he came up to me and Kate and Pat and asked if Pat would take him a picture and email it to him in Germany. Pat agreed, and the Teuton went right back up, appearing atop the arch in a remarkably short time...he must really be in shape. Down he came again, and Pat snapped some snaps...the guy told us that that he would’ve had his girlfriend do it, except she was sitting back at the parking-lot because she didn’t want to watch him risk his life.

As for DJ, Nick, and Jeannie, they’d started up the route that the German followed to the top of the arch, and I couldn’t see where they'd, and they couldn’t hear me anymore...I went around the corner and bellowed for them to come back down, principally because I didn’t want to tell DJ’s parents if anything happened to him. They heard me that time, and started down, although DJ started to get creative, and took an iffier route than the way they’d come, and slipped eight or nine feet. I didn’t see this, but I heard the hubbub, and got pretty frightened for a bit. But it turned out that he was bruised but okay.

Headed back to the parking lot...the German had beaten us to it...his girlfriend was still in the car. I wondered if they'd had a fight, or if she was just sick of the West, or what. Anyway, I got to talking with him...he was a golf-course designer. I didn't say what I thought of golf, but it turned out we had a lot of common interests viz  the American West. He'd already seen quite a bit of it on this trip, and we compared notes...I told him some good places to hit.

We drove back to Moab, got some sandwiches at the supermarket...from this point the plan was to eat them on the way out to the Fisher Towers. Heading north out of town, there's a road called 128, that goes left along the southern bank of the Colorado, towards a thing called Castle Valley, which I already mentioned, briefly, in the first installment. For a short while on I28, you're in a mere municipal park that's another one of those jaw-dropping throwaways, more Grand Canyonish stuff.. We didn't stop at Negro Bill, which is a great side-canyon, but we'd been there before, and I recommend it highly. Has a nifty natural arch at the end. Wasn't called Negro Bill originally...it was named after a black cowboy named Nigger Bill Granstaff, who used to distill swill up there along with his amis Frenchy until the local Mormons ran them out. I don't think the name should've been changed...as an old Western moniker for a black moonshiner with a partner named Frenchy, it's just better. On the other hand, I guess it was pretty embarrassing for poor Moabites who don't want to be thought of as backward....I don't hold it against them.

Castle Valley

Stopped at a campsite halfway along 128 and ate our lunch...I had a big turkey sandwich and some chips. Pushed on, finally reaching Castle Valley. If you want to go up into the LaSals and loop back on down to Moab, you can start there, and we'd done that before...the valley itself is an astonishing amalgam of just about every sort of Western scenery you can imagine, all in a relatively small area. First off, you've got the canyon of the Colorado. It opens out into a bunch of sagebrush prairie with giant redrock bluffs looming above it. Rearing up out of the prairie are buttes and towers which could be right out of Monument Valley....there's also a whole lot of red badland. The snow-capped thirteen-thousand foot LaSals rise up in the distance, and much of this could be photographed in one, count it one, panoramic shot. Then there's stuff that's down out of sight, in an area called Onion Creek, which some people would swear is the best five mile drive in the whole country, a redrock phantasmagoria that's like something from some demented Disney cartoon set in the southwest, only wilder. Actually, they shot some of  the beginning of John Carter In Onion Creek, and up above too, when he's being chased by the Apaches. They also used some shots of the Fisher Towers, where we were going next.

Fisher Towers

These features show up in movies and TV shows all the time.. The titular bad guys in The Comancheros had their stronghold just below them, Richard Boone's cabin was right at their feet in Rio Conchos, and other sequences in that flick were shot in the general vicinity. The Towers were even used as a standin for Titan in some Science Channel thing, and even though they're not very much like that particular moon, they do look damn otherworldly. The biggest one is called the Titan, too.

The Titan

The Towers are more BLM property, overlooking Onion Creek. It's a bit of a drive out from 128 to the parking-lot, and you really don't get any idea of the size of the things from the road. The Titan is about a thousand feet tall, and it's strange looking even for a piece of western scenery, rather flat and bladelike, as are all the subsidiary towers...they're more Cutler formation redrock, and once again, look oddly manmade,as though somebody had made skyscrapers out of scarlet ice cream, and they were beginning to melt. Most wierd. The very top of the second tallest one is a bizarre tapering teetery-looking fantasy that seems almost Dr. Suessish...you might've seen a commercial with a female rockclimber getting to the top of it and looking out over a wonderful vista....well, that's a Fisher Tower, and that's Castle Valley below.

Oddly Manmade-Looking, Yes?

 Anyway, we piled out of the Yukon and headed on up. I'd taken that hike before, and I remembered it being rather more strenuous...I think I'm in better shape now. There were a number of people coming down, they'd been up as far as you could go, and one was a big guy carrying a chunky baby in a back pack. I wonder what that kid thought. There was a good deal of up and down, although soon we hit some switchbacks and it was all upslope through the blobby redrock.

Cutler Formation Wierdness

 Finally we arrived at a giant inlet that had that second-tallest tower on our side of it, and the Titan on the other. Kate decided to sit down and veg out and hydrate while the kiddies went up to the bend, where Pat climbed up about sixty or seventy feet in this scary-looking crevice. Once he came back down, we returned to the lot, thinking we'd really like a swim.

View Down That Crevice Pat Climbed

Now, even though the Colorado was close by, and you could get down to it, you really don't want to jump in. But it turns out there is good place in Moab....we'd gotten a map the day before, and finding the swimming hole wasn't too hard...the town's mostly a grid, and if you go east until the grid pretty much stops, and turn south, you come to something called Power Station Road, which is a dirt track that takes you out to this creek. There is an actual swimming hole, but it was pretty crowded, so we decided to head upstream along  a little trail, and finally found a nice spot, overarched by trees on both sides. The water wasn't too cold, but was still most refreshing, and we found a crawdaddy that amused us no end until we let it go.

Crawdaddy Waves Hello

However, we got some unsettling news as we started back for Dead Horse...Jeannie got a text from Sophie in Cali, who informed us that the Dead Horse Parks folks had called and informed her that our reservation was up, and that they were worried, because we hadn't vacated, that something had happened to us. Rushed right back there, needless to say. Everything turned out okay...we'd reserved two sites, and the Park folks had moved all our stuff onto one of them...the people coming in had only reserved one site, and as it turned out, there was still a site unreserved, and they chalked that one up to us for the night. Turned out our reservations were the one piece of paperwork we didn't have....I made the reservations, and maybe it was one of these things where I made a mistake on the number of nights I'd reserved, rather than days...on the other hand, the Parks guys had a reservation in the name of Mark Strong, who I am not. They also said that Reserve America, which handles their reservations, is always screwing up, and they were very gracious, and didn't treat me like an moron, although they sure could've. The people who we'd inconvenienced were very gracious too. The subject of Mark Strong came up, and I recommended John Carter.

But there was more annoying stuff the next day. We pulled up stakes for the Southern Unit of Canyonlands...decided to try the luggage rack up top to see if we couldn't get a bit more room inside. Now...even though I'd used ratchet straps before, on kayaks where we ran the straps through the insides of the car, I'd never done the rack thing with them, and I thought you hooked the hooks to those railings along the sides, instead of the holes in those whatsits that slide along the rails. Anyway, we put a bunch of bags up there, and it was a disaster waiting to happen, although once we got going, I halted several times to check on them, and we managed to get down to Moab and out the other side okay, a distance of about thirty miles or so. Then we were stopped by a Utah Highway patrolman on 191...there was some construction, and a watertruck was creeping along ahead of me, in a no-passing zone...I wasn't particularly in a rush, and I wasn't following him too close, but he pulled about halfway over, as though he wanted to let me by...there wasn't enough room for me to get round him without crossing the unbroken line, and the cop was lying in wait like a trapdoor spider.. I offered my excuse, however, and unlike a trapdoor spider, he let me go. Still, a bad omen...I wonder if he looked at my luggage-rack arrangements...if so, I wish he'd said something.

We continued southwards. We'd been hearing noises from the luggage off and on...suddenly, right before the road descended into a biggish canyon, Nick noticed that a bag was hanging over the side of the car. We got out, and I discovered those hole sin the sliding things, and realized immediately that that was where the hooks should've gone...also, that a proper arrangement meant a lot less luggage on the roof. We did what was needful, and drove off thinking everything was okay, none of us realizing that one of the bags was missing.

The rest of the ride was wonderful.The scenery between that canyon and the turnoff for the southern Unit is very nice, with buttes rather like the Monitor and Merrimac studding the landscape at intervals, and once we  started westward, everything got progressively more dramatic. With the Abaho Mountains on out left, we headed down a considerable distance, finally getting into a canyon formed by a smallish tributary of the Colorado that nonetheless had carved out quite a gorge. The walls was obscured by trees at first, but eventually the riparian zone gave way to a much wider valley with a ranch on one side and a lake on the other, all overlooked by tremendous Castle-Valley type cliffs...off west were a couple of matching volcanic-chimney buttes called the Six-Shooters, because they really look like pistols sticking straight up skywards out of talus mounds.

A Six Shooter

Long about here, I really got an intense feeling that we were way out in the middle of nowhere; Canyonlands'  Southern Unit is one of the loneliest and least-explored national parks in the lower forty-eight. It's also most unlike the Northern Unit, comprised as that is of Island in the Sky and the White Rim...everything in the Southern Unit is on a much smaller scale, although it sure has its own charms. It's also an extremely complicated area, something which had been very clear from the White Crack campground, which looks out towards it over the Colorado gorge. Whereas in the Northern Unit, you get these monumental geological structures, towers eight hundred feet high, and mesas that look like Atlantean Ruins, the features down south, such as the Needles, get about a third as tall, at most. The colors don't seem as intense, either...everything is paler, more pastel. But there are canyons upon canyons upon canyons, and most of the unit is extremely trackless. There's a big section called the Maze, and it's not called that for nothing.

Northern Unit, Looking Back Towards Island In The Sky

Well, when we reached the entrance station, nobody was manning it (I guess because the unit isn't well attended), and we cruised on over to the very elegant visitor's center, which is designed to blend in neatly with the surrounding landscape. There were some parks ladies in there, and I talked to them about the campground situation...we wanted to stay at Squaw Flats, and it's strictly first-come first serve, so they said we should get on over there right away, as there was half as much space as usual, because of construction.. Even though the park doesn't see too much traffic, the campground is pretty popular, and it's easy to see why...the sites are among the nicest I've ever seen, nestled under wonderful white-sandstone overhangs, with ledges you can climb and sleep on. Plenty of space, good firepits...there were only a couple of spots left when arrived, but we got ours and I began to relax.

However, the shit was just beginning to hit the fan.

As we unpacked, we realized we'd lost one of our big bags, and it contained the new tent that Kate and I had been using, pisser...it's kind of amazing that no one noticed when we rearranged the luggage. Well, even though all that was bad enough, I got into my bag and found out that my meds were missing, and I sure didn't want to take a rough ten-hour hike---like the one we had planned for the next day---without my pills. Last time I remembered seeing the kitchen-bag with the meds was back at breakfast, on the table...evidently I hadn't packed them, maybe because somebody had thrown them away. Really don't know what happened. But just on the off chance that the pills might've wound up in the Dead Horse Point dumpster, I thought I'd better run back up there and check.

Jeannie decided to come with me...given that the basic situation was so irritating, the ride back was surprisingly entertaining. As already noted, the scenery just outside the park was sensational, we were seeing it under different lighting conditions (big thunderstorms were rolling in), and I was pretty sure I wouldn't get busted for speeding since we were so far from 191...the road wasn't too twisty and turny, and so I felt pretty confident about letting the Yukon's big old eight-cylinder engine really rip. In addition to the extra velocity, we had some excellent musical selections, namely a Bollywood music compilation that Pat had assembled for the trip...he'd magic-markered Hindi Hell on the disc. Every cut on it was choice, songs from Aaja Nachle. Chalo Dili, Agneepath (an excellent score), Tanu Weds Manu, and a couple of golden oldies from Anjaam, the whole collection very up tempo, just the thing for cranking up real loud when you're bombing through the desert in a mastodonic SUV. I really really love Chikni Chameli from Agneepath, by the way. It's used in an amazingly hot Katrina Kaif item number.

Thanks to the music (not to mention the speed) it felt like we got back 191 rather too quickly. We slowed down after that, because I thought we might encounter some cops, but would've had to in any case, as a monstrous t-storm was plowing towards us off the LaSals, draping an extremely dark curtain of rain over the ground below it. When the lightning snaked down blue-white, it was real vivid against those shadows.

We kept an eye out for that lost bag, of course, but didn't spot it...it had our address on it, and if anyone picked it up, they didn't send it to us, shame on them. Not that I ever expected to get it back. As for my meds, we were setting up a plan B in case the dumpsters disappointed us...Jeannie managed to get hold of my doctor back in Delaware on her cell-phone, and we made arrangement to have my prescriptions sent to the supermarket in Moab. As we approached the aforesaid extreme-sports Mecca, I noted that the same cop was hanging out at precisely the same spot where the water-trucks were going back and forth.

We blew through town and up to the turnoff for Dead Horse. Once again guessing thast there wouldn't be any cops on the way up, I floored the pedal whenever conditions permitted...got back to the campground about 2 in the afternoon, I think. Our site had been cleaned out...the garbage was gone. I went to the visitor's center to ask if anyone had found a bag full of meds...no one had.  To my very great embarrassment, the ranger behind the counter was the same guy I'd spoken to about our reservations the night before. But he said they only emptied the dumpsters once a week, which was a relief.

We drove to the receptacles. Right in the first one, at the top, Jeannie found Jason and Sophie's garbage...we could tell it was theirs because it was all full of Diet Cherry-Coke Zero, which is what Jason drinks, and what Sophie drinks now too. Anyway, two dumpsters later, about halfway down in some fairly repugnant crap, I found the bag, and we took it to the camp bathroom and washed it off with handsoap in the basin outside. Then we went back to the visitor's center and told everyone that I'd found my pills. Don't know if they cared too much, but I bought one of their t-shirts, a very handsome tan one with a gnarly tree on it. Jeannie called my doctor back in Delaware and told him not to bother with those prescriptions.

She was largely conked out for the trip back, which I took rather easier. When we returned to the camp, everybody else had gone for a hike somewhere back behind the rocks...don't remember the name of the trail, but as I recall, they enjoyed it. We opted to spend the rest of the afternoon on another hike; since we were planning that big ten-hour one the next day, out through Chesler Park to the Joint Trail, I suggested we should wait till the heat broke, then familiarize ourselves with the leadup to that. We all snarfed some canned food (I had chicken and some Spaghetti O's, yum!) and set off.

Along The Chesler Park Trail

The Chesler Park trailhead wasn't far from the campground. Took the road to Elephant Hill (still don't know why it's called that); the landscape was basically White Rim stuff, thinner on this side of the river, with the Cutler formation below. But here, instead of giant hoodoos like those at Monument Basin, you got much smaller mushroomy white-capped ones, with the road winding through a canyon full of zillions of them. Huge parking-lot at the end, with an extremely vile fly-ridden crapper...didn't go in. Lot was surrounded by cliffs...yet again, the worst stretch of the hike was the initial fifteen minutes, in this case, up to the White Rim. After that, it was generally fairly flat, the stone broken up towards the edges. Off in the distance, there were various Needles...they looked like inverted red ice-cream cones, with pointy white caps...they're all over the place in the Southern Unit.

Some Needles

Slipped through a gap into a large sandy circular parklike area with peculiar desert vegetation and loads of cryptogamic soil, little towery-looking things which are alive somehow, and whose biology I don't understand. This round area was surrounded by more needles...we passed through another gap on the far side, and into another circular thing, all of this foreshadowing the much-larger Chesler Park, which we'd reached once before, on an earlier Canyonlands trip. Passing through that second park, we descended into a crack fairly similar to what we'd encounter the next day in the Joint Trail...we decided to take a break, and Jeannie and Pat chimneyed some way up between the walls. There was a lot of of rock in there that was great for chimneying and climbing, including excellent ledges down by the end, piled up like horizontally stacked red books.

Jeannie Chimneying

Once we got out of the slot, the path led even farther downward, and we came to a spot where the canyon intersected another, larger gorge whose floor was a grey-blue  and seemed most out of place...maybe it was Mancos Shale, Caineville stuff. Then we headed up the other side, into a fairly narrow tributary canyon that kind of corkscrewed to the right. I think we got about halfway up...would've been a great location for a gunfight in a western. I would've liked to have pressed on, but we'd said we were going to turn back after an hour and a half, and time was up...more importantly, it looked as if we had about an hour and a half of light left.

We retraced our footsteps, fairly agreeably; once we got back across that blue-floored canyon and up to the slot and to the top of that, it was pretty much all downhill to the parking-lot...passed a guy who was heading in, told him it was lovely up ahead. The next day, outbound to the Joint Trail, we met him again, inbound; he'd let the night creep up on him in those canyons, decided he'd better not risk returning in the dark, and had spent the night out there.

We got a bit lost on the final leg down to the lot, but by then we'd figured out enough about the terrain to wing it, and we struck the trail further along. I think Jeannie chanced the toilet, although I passed it up again. The bathroom back at the campground was really clean, although there weren't any showers or lights. There was a washbasin for dishes outside, and while bathing was strictly forbidden, we filled up plastic waterbottles and washed up in the toilet stalls, where there were drains on the floor, and I don't think anyone's ox was in any way gored. Had some more canned stuff, then sacked out pretty quick...I slept on a nice warm ledge under the overhang, along with Pat, Nick, and DJ, all of us on mats and more or less using sleeping bags as blankets. Kate slept in somebody else's tent, and Jeanie had her own, which had all the food in it.

We'd agreed that we were going to get a real early start, and got fed and going before the sun cleared the buttes out east. Brought a whole lot of hydration...mine was half Gatorade and water. Everybody had at least two sandwiches, and fruit. Drove to the Chesler Park Trailhead....we noticed that that guy's car was still there, wondered what was up with that, particularly because he hadn't been humping a pack or equipment. I told everybody that, because I was kinda slow, I'd just go on ahead...but it turned out that no paid attention, because I got some distance up that slope and out over the White Rim sandstone before I realized that no one was coming...got up on a ledge and waited around...still no one. Went back to the rim above the parking lot, and there everybody was, waiting around and wondering where I'd gone. I yelled, and up they came.

Repeated the hike we took the day before...before we got too far, we ran into that guy, who seemed pretty good-humored about the whole business. We wished him well. Should've offered him some water, didn't think of it, and he didn't ask, even though he must've been mighty thirsty. The air out there is very dry, needless to say. But we lucked out on this particular day...even after the sun cleared the buttes, it was covered by haze or clouds much of the time. The temperature might've cracked ninety, but I bet most of the time it was in the high eighties. Actually, we'd been fortunate with the weather the whole trip, even though I'd been expecting to get fried, late July in Utah, you know...but it just never got too bad.

Took another break in that slot, then continued...even though it wasn't too hot, I was conserving my water-and-Gatorade as much as possible...meant that my big damn clumsy waterbottle stayed heavy and awkward. We got to the place where we turned back the day before, but this time we went to the top. There was another of those needle-ringed places, although the ground was stony and ragged instead of sandy...there was a particularly large wall of needles on the far side, and we had a long scramble up a rather nasty natural stair...took another break at the top, then rounded an outcropping and looked out over Chesler Park.

Chesler Park

It's quite a bizarre piece of real estate, actually...some geologists think it's a meteor crater, in which case I guess that those other, smaller circles were chunks that broke off the big chunk and landed close by...apparently there's yet another place called Virginia Park that very few people go to. Chesler Park is much bigger than those smaller circles, surrounded once again by needles, with a big bunch of them lunging right up out of the middle, rather suggestive of those mountains that come up in the middle of craters on the moon. Apparently the whole needly rim is shot through with fissures, too, or joints, as in the Joint Trail....these fissures all radiate fairly out from the center of the park, and once again, this really suggests that something huge smashed down. If so, it must've been a very long time ago, with the crater being rather a fossil, a whole lot of erosion having worked on those fissures, forming the needles.

Chesler Park Wall

As for the floor of the Park, it's all covered with sand, relatively flat towards the middle, but piled up in biggish dunes, covered with scrubby dark vegetation, out towards the edges. The Joint Trail leads away to the left at first...we came to a gap in the needles, which overlooked a spectacular valley filled with hoodoos. There was another trailhead there, leading towards the Druid Arch and our campground, but we weren't going that way. Our trail snaked round to the right now....ground levelled out...the trail widened, and there was a low ridge up the middle of it...people bring their 4X4's out there sometimes. There was a gate for a 4X4 road back at the campground, and Pat says you can indeed drive up to Chesler Park if you want to, by that route, even though you'd need a winch. Apparently it's one of the most badass front-wheel-drive roads in the country.

We headed on past that little mountain range in the center of the circle...on the western side of it, there's a primitive campground, and some guys had pitched some tents there, under some trees. They waved at us, and we waved back.  It was another mile or so, I think, till we hit the joint part of the Joint Trail....it looked at first as though we were going to head right on into the needles ahead, but then the trail jogged farther to the right, and the land began to fall away, even though there had been no hint of that from a distance...we switchbacked on down, finally came to a stair that seemed to be taking us into the very roots of the needles, and that's just what it did. Oh boy.

Stairs Down To The Join Trail

 Basically, we found ourselves in a much longer, deeper version of that slot we'd gone through some miles back. DJ in particular was having a blast. We just kept descending, and at one point came to a sudden drop, and had to go down a slanting log...either someone had dragged it there and set it up, or it had washed down, as logs frequently do, in places like that....there were steps cut in it.

Joint Trail Corridor

We began to pass fissures that intersected the one we were in, ran straight across it...there are a lot of these on the Joint Trail, and you can get into some of them and go some distance...if indeed Chesler Park was formed by a meteor impact, these things would seem to express a different aspect of the big jolt, concentric rings of cracks, instead of cracks radiating at right angles from the center, like the trail we were in.

Looking Straight Up

As we went along, both sorts of fissure just kept on getting bigger, until finally we came to places where they all really widened out, and you had the radial cracks forming canyons, and the concentric cracks forming big cracks that went all the way through the walls in some places.

Cave Going All The Way Through

If you go online and look for Joint Trail pictures, you'll see a cave where lots of hikers have to stopped to make cairns, hundreds of them, some smaller, some larger, some tucked away in wierd places, or high up on the walls. Well, that's where the main route takes a jog to the right, into a cave that comes out overlooking this big canyon.

View From The Cairn Cave

Big downhill drop...after a five mile hike, with another five miles back, I decided I really didn't want to go down there and then back up...we settled down in the cairn cave to have our lunch. Magical place...looks like it was designed by Brian Froud.

Cairn Cave

Pat decided to do a bit of exploring, went some ways off on our left, and found another cool cave...after we'd finished eating, he led us over there. Most amusing. You could look clear along it to the next fissure over, and see another cave in the wall beyond that.  In addition, there was a very satisfactory natural arch that you only noticed if you turned around and looked back the way we came in. Then you saw it silhouetted against the light.

Natural Arch Cave

 I bet there was a great deal more wonderfulness along the lines already described, and it really would've been swell to have had the luxury of coming up along that 4X4 trail, so we could've just hung around and delved into things. But we had that return march, and we soon got to it. It was nice and shadowy and cool down in the joints, but I was expecting the clouds to have burned off once we got back up into Chesler Park...my big water bottle was still about one-third full, and I guessed I was still going to run through the remaining two-thirds pretty damn quick. Lo and behold, however, the weather stayed a bit overcast, just enough to blunt the afternoon heat...the return trip was a great deal more pleasant than ever imagined it would be, and I really got to admire the landscape...when hikes become slogs, I tend to look down and concentrate on just plain walking, but I didn't have to this time.

We crossed the level part of the park, swung to the right by the Druid Arch Trailhead, gave some directions to a couple of folks from Kansas...then we headed to the left, back up into those sand hills, and reached the pass that we'd come through. Stopped there, had a bit more to eat...a pair of ravens cawed, announcing their presence, and followed us for a while, hoping for something sensational like an applecore. When we headed down, Pat stayed back to watch them for a bit, and I think he might've flung' em a treat, but I didn't see him actually violate Park rules.

Descended that rough slope beneath the needles, crossed the firstof the three lesser parks, and headed down into that corkscrew tributary canyon. Took another break. A guy was coming up...he'd just arrived in the area, was going to work at the park, and was heading to the Joint Trail. Asked about the terrain ahead...I told him there was one last crappy section before you got through the pass into Chesler Park...he got rather huffy about my choice of crappy...seems I should've said hard or difficult instead, out of respect for the land, I guess. It occurred to me that I could've mentioned that sand-wash out of the Upheaval Dome...there was a crappy, downright evil place if ever there was one. But I didn't say anything.

The rest of the hike was none too stressful. When we got back to the car, everyone started talking about ice cream...I didn't think there was anyplace nearby...hell, the nearest town was forty-five miles away. But there is this place called the Needles Outpost, which is just outside the park, and we gave it a shot. Actually, we'd stopped there on the way in the day before, and I'd gotten some eight dollar a gallon gas from this incredibly old gas-pump...had to pay cash inside. Since there wasn't a sticker out on the pump, I didn't know what the price was,  and the lady inside, who appeared to be some sort of ageing hippy, said that other people steal her price stickers...then she accused me of stealing the latest one...then she cooled off immediately and got sorta flirty and took my money. Anyway...

Today we were looking for ice cream, and she did indeed have some...we got some other food too, and  firewood. But there was a little yappy dog running around the place, and before we could pay, the lady got down and started chasing the dog around on all fours, barking and yipping. It was even more disconcerting than her accusing me of stealing her sticker.

Everybody informed me the ice cream was good though. They had to eat it real quick before it melted.

Cave Spring Overhang

We returned to camp, puttered around. Still had a good part of the afternoon to kill, so we ate an early canned dinner, then drove back out to  do some cruising about, with the intention of taking a smallish hike if we spotted one, then finding a good spot to watch a sunset. After a bit, we came to the lot for something called Cave Spring, and that proved to be just thing for diehards who still had a little bit of energy left. It was under an overhang  that went much of the way round a big mushroomy white sandstone outcropping rather like the one that made our camp so memorable...the path led through some tall weeds and tamerisks, then took us under the overhang, at the back of which the spring trickled down, staining the rock black...there was a hanging garden and loads of spiderwebs, also some indian pictographs.

Cave Spring Pictograph

 Farther to the left under the hang, there was an old cowboy camp from the nineteen twenties or thirties in a remarkable state of preservation, with tables and chairs, a couple of cupboards, and some box-mattress springs, although the actual stuffing was all gone. Lots of bottles and empty cans. Yet farther to the left, there was a corral, where I suppose the cowpokes penned their horses. Very interesting.

Storm Coming In

Took a right after the overhang petered back, and the trail returned us to the lot over the over the top of the outcropping. Off in the distance, thunderheads were building up, but they were still at the stage where they looked brightly-lit and very colorful, a couple of hours from drenching us, if they did it at all. We thought we had time to take the official Scenic Drive right out to its end, and climb up on some nice warm rock and watch the day flame out. Went as far as we could, and found a good vantage, looking west across a multitude of pink needles towards Grandview Point and that butte cut off from the bottom of Island in the Sky. A big thunderhead was boiling up behind it all with the light squarely behind it, the clouds getting increasingly menacing and purply-black. Spent a good long while watching all that, and sparing the occasional glance back towards our campground...there was a big storm building up off that way too, and it seemed to be coming on real fast...the air began to smell like rain, the last patches of light on various needles and features went out, and we piled back into the Yukon just as the first few drops were spatting against the windshield. I'd been entertaining the notion of going back to Cave Spring with flashlights after it got dark, to check out the critters, since desert thingies really come out at night and make for water. But it was getting increasingly clear that even if the storm didn't last too long, there was going to be a lot of water everywhere, so we ditched that idea.

Continued to hope the storm would blow right over, though...it didn't. The sky just got darker and darker, even though it wasn't too late...there was a band of lighter sky down at the bottom, but it had this really-tormented and twisted looking black cloud-fringe hanging over it...lightning began shooting straight sideways, the thunder simply cracked, real close, simultaneous with the flashes, and the rain truly started to pelt down. We thought about getting into our tents or  the car, but since the overhang at the back of our site was so pronounced, we figured we could get in under that. Surely we wouldn't get doused...most thunder-storms pass pretty quickly after all.

But this one didn't, just hung right over the park. And while the rain didn't blow in at us, it began to crawl  under the end of the overhang, and though it couldn't get all the way to the back,  it started to drip straight down. I huddled up in my blue rubber mat for a while, and everyone else took similar steps, but it wasn't enough...not trusting the tents, we finally made a run for the car, and were in there a good hour I think, with the rain just hammering. 

Rain Coming Off The Overhang

Presently it started to abate, though...Pat decided we really needed a fire, because we had a firepit, we'd bought that wood, and we really hadn't any fires except the grilles for the whole rest of the trip, and the campfire was always a big deal on previous jaunts. In any case, we scraped together some kindling from junk in the car, and took some charcoal bricquets, and Pat managed to get a blaze going, even though the firepit wasn't under the overhang, and it was still raining somewhat. Very enjoyable fire...I sat under my mat watching the flames for about an hour before I finally packed it in...turned out Kate's borrowed tent hadn't leaked, so I slept in there with her.

Our Fire

Got up before sunrise yet again, had breakfast...everybody was moaning and shuffling about and hitting the bathroom, and since they could sleep in the car, and didn't really have to wake up, they stayed pretty groggy, except for Nick, who had to help me put the luggage on the roof. Once everyone hit the bathroom one last time and we were all wedged into the Yukon, we hit the road, and got back to the highway in short order. Stopped for some reasonably-priced gas in Moab, then blew on up to Route Seventy. Since we'd come through at night on the way in, it was very nice to see the desert east of Green River in broad daylight. Lot of Cainville Badlands type stuff. Then we hit the San Rafael Swell, and everything remained pretty mesmerizing all the way back to theWasatch Range, with every kind of geology I could think of on display. Stopped in Salina, had one last bag of chips. Then it was back on Seventy. Hit Fifteen and the Great Basin not long after. Listened to the score of Oh Brother Where Art Thou much of the way. Particularly enjoyed In the Jailhouse Now, Man of Constant Sorrow, and O Death.

I was feeling under the weather, by the way. Ever since we hit Dead Horse Point, I'd had sore throats in the mornings, and while I'd been coughing some, it wasn't too bad as long as I kept moving, and there had been a lot of that with all that hiking. Now, as we approached Vegas, I'd just been on a long car-ride and had a lot of air travel ahead of me, and the thought of being crammed into a little airline seat was seeming increasingly sucky. I was also worried that the rental company was going to get on my case because I'd dinged their car in a couple of places, but when we got to Hertz, they were all cool, because I had, of course, bought the insurance. But I was also quite contrite.

Hopped the Hertz shuttle back to McCarron. DJ wanted a big hamburger, so we took him to a place where he could get one. Then we got to the gate. Me and Kate let everybody hold down the carryons while we walked around a bit...I saw a store that sold diamond-encrusted skulls, and went back and told my kids, and this Asian lady across from me seemed to think that the idea of jewel-encrusted skulls was pretty funny.

My throat was feeling very tickly and scratchy by that point, so I was gobbling cough-drops, but I was still coughing pretty hard when I got on the plane. Jeannie was too...I bet everybody else hated us, and I probably gave some of them something...ditto on the connecting flight from San Francisco. Mea culpa, although we had to get home somehow. I've still got the cold, actually...it goes away, then comes back, and I've been having coughing fits from time to time, and taking too much Nyquil.

Overall though, few regrets aside from the choice of vehicle, rachet strap and med misadventures, and reservation confusion. Stupendous trip. Even the poor souls crammed into the back of the Yukon during the White Rim ride seem to have decided it was well worth doing, and that the White Crack was the best campground ever. Next time I go way off on a 4X4 road, though, I will have a more appropriate vehicle.

A Goodbye Cairn

Once again, the pictures were by Pat, and you should check out his Utah Blogs over at Even Fewer Goats...

Back from Utah Part 1

Redrock!

Went on a Utah vacation with the family, but we're back now. We got rather more adventurous than we usually do on these things, and it was all very exciting and intense and we saw a lot of spectacular stuff, but I for one got worn kinda ragged, as I am no spring chicken. Still, I'd been doing four hours of cardio a day to train for the trip, and that paid off...I managed to get through each and every hike. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

In case you don't know too much about Utah, well, it's got a ton of the best scenery in the USA, or for that matter, the world. Shows up in movies all the time. Certainly Utah has the most colorful stone...the redrock is completely in a class by itself,  brick red, blood red. Some of this stuff is so red it looks like it's just been washed in scarlet tempera, even though it's bone dry....incredible. Spread it out under a hot blue sky, and the effect is simply hallucinatory, and if you want the biggest, most extreme dose, you need to go to Moab and areas adjacent. Right next to each other, you've got two great National Parks, Arches and Canyonlands, as well as Castle Valley (where they've shot a lot of movies, like The Comancheros), and a whole lot of other wonderfulness that nobody even bothered to make into a park, including long stretches of the canyon of the Colorado. Oh, and leaving the redrock aside, the whole place is towered over by thirteen thousand foot tall snowcapped mountains, the Lasals...it's all so close together that you can get a huge amount of it into a single photograph. Delaware it ain't.

Now, this jaunt we just came back from was our third trip to Moab, although it's the first one where we really got to satiate ourselves. The first time, we were just passing through, and the second, we only had five days. This time we had a full week, not counting travel days, and I felt like I got a sufficient dose. Didn't exhaust all the possibilities...you'd need months. But I came away satisfied, as well as black and blue.

We flew out of BWI early on a Saturday morning, me and my wife Kate, my daughter Jeannie, my sons Nick and Pat, and Nick's friend DJ, who's so thin he looks like someone's put the wrong lens into the projector. We were planning to meet my Daughter Soph and her husband Jason at the Dead Horse Point Campground just outside Canyonlands...Soph and Jason were going to drive out from El Segundo in Cali with dinner and breakfast, because we didn't want to hassle with shopping after a long travel day. Theoretically, they were supposed to get to the campground first and register, although there was always the possibility that we'd arrive ahead of them, or at roughly the same time.

Stuffed into a an unusually cramped United coach, my contingent got to Houston and made a connection, then headed onto the Las Vegas Mccarron, where they'd made a lot of changes, including installing some trains between terminals...the airport is much bigger. The rental car place is different now too, all the companies located in one big building that's easy to get in and out of. Picked up a Yukon from Hertz...given what we had in mind, we needed the four-wheel drive. Having seen that the thing accomodated eight people, I assumed it was going to be roomy, seeing as how we only had six at the moment...but there was very little space in the back for luggage, and even though we had a luggage rack on top, we didn't have any straps. Anyway, everyone had to cram in tight with their bags...I was going to find that our ride was kinda unsuitable in other respects as well.

Got onto Fifteen headed for the Beehive State. The desert just outside Vegas isn't very interesting, but it gets steadily nifiter the farther east you go. You start seeing loads of Joshua trees, and canyons and mesas, and pass through Mesquite, which is the last town in Nevada before yout hit the Arizona Strip, and the first place where degenerate gamblers heading west can stop off and lose all their money. Once you cross over into the  Strip, you see some green stuff to the south, and that's the riparian zone alongside the Virgin River; some pretty massive mountains start to creep in beyond that, rearing up above an alluvial slope that extends so far out from the mountains that it's actually a puzzlement to geologists.

The scarp curves over in front of you, in a vast sheer wall, the road heading right towards it, and it looks for all the world like you're going to have to just stop, or crash...but there's actually a gate in there, hundreds of feet tall, although you can't see it until you're extremely close, because of a fold in the cliffs. Once you're inside, you climb steadily with the road slaloming back and forth between enormous walls, ledge after ledge, buttress after buttress, up, up, up. Visual dynamite. Very high quality stuff. But instead of being declared a national treasure, the poor old canyon of the Virgin River was merely relegated to highway duty, providing a ready-made route for the most expensive highway project in US history up till that point. Not that I'm knocking Interstates, mind you...people gotta get from point A to point B. But the more you bop around the American west, the more you're struck by all the first-class landscape that's mere throwaway. It just goes on and on.

Crossed into Utah and went through St. George at the top. Zion beckoned on the right...I think I could see the Altar of Sacrifice... but we weren't going that way this trip.Headed along 15, up out of  the deserty stuff towards the Wasatch range, things getting progressively greener. At Cove Fort, 15 turns into Route 70...it's nice enough country, but the mountains, at least along the interstate, don't get high enough to be really cool, at least as far as I'm concerned. There is some interesting volcanic biz, spatter cones and lava floes, long about this town called Richfield, which is this sprawling agricultural community in a big valley....even though the volcanic features have lots of tawny grass growing on them, there's still quite a bit of jagged black stone sticking through. I wonder how long ago those eruptions were, and if there's any hint of seismic activity at the moment. Sure would hamper the farming if anything started up again.

Beyond Richfield, you start seeing some crags sticking out of the mountainsides, and patches of badland, and the valley bottoms are drier...you'd probably better stop at a town called Salina for some gas (bangwater as it's known to the locals), because there aren't any services after that till you get to Green River, about a hundred and ten miles away. We suspected that Soph and Jason might be in the general vicinity...Jeannie started texting Soph, and just as we were getting on the onramp from Salina, we saw Jason's Chereokee pull into the truckstop we'd just left.

East of Salina, the slopes get rockier, and there are spectacular formations, particularly in the cuttings...way off on the left, you can see the Book Cliffs, which form the southern border of the Tavaputs Plateau, one of the least-explored regions in the lower forty-eight. Eventually you have to cross the San Rafael Swell, this huge whaleback of very dry rock that extends for scores of miles, cut through with slot canyons and all sorts of  other good stuff...bypassing the spectacular Black Dragon canyon (there's a good viewpoint there), you descend into the real, mean honest-to gosh desert east of Green River, and you really feel glad that you refilled your tank back in Salina. But even though it's a place where you really wouldn't want to get stuck, it's mighty beautiful when everything goes pink and purple and violet after the sun goes down, especially if you've got a fabulous cloudscape rearing above, with the tops of thunderheads still up in the light. Even as everything got darker and darker, and the sunlight faded, those clouds remained pretty luminous, silvery white against a very dark eastern sky.

By the time we passed Green River, which is the biggest town for quite some distance, it was getting on towards ten. We went another twenty or thirty miles or so and took 191 down to Moab. Since we'd been that way a couple of times, I knew we were going through some very choice scenery...191 descends into town through a great big rift walled with melty-looking scarlet Cutler Formation sandstone, but of course, I couldn't see any of that now. In order to get to our campground in Dead Horse Point, we took the Canyonlands exit...DHP is a wonderful State Park right before you get to the National Park. We suspected Sophie and Jason were somewhere nearby, had passed us, maybe...turned out they were waiting for us at the Kayenta campground, which would prove to be a very nice place.Actually, all the Utah state campgrounds we've been to, Coral Pink Sand Dunes, Goblin Valley, Escalante, have been choice. Kayenta  didn't have showers, but it did have a clean bathroom and running water, and you could just fill up plastic jugs and douse yourself, and the deserty air would dry you out in pretty short order. Also, all the sites had big raven-proof cupboards, which was a truly great feature.Got the tents set up...As I said, Soph and Jason brought the food, and it was canned stuff, but most welcome...we all crashed pretty hard afterwards.

Woke up with a little bit of a sore throat right about dawn...Pat and Jeannie had gone off somewhere, probably out to the Point. I went to look for them. Hadn't been able to see it in the dark, but there was a huge bay in the cliffs off to the south, and orange sunlight was already clipping the far side. Both Dead Horse point and Canyonlands are located on this thing called Island in the Sky, a big long mesa...thousands of feet below, there's a wide ledge or bench that goes most of the way around, called the White Rim (we were planning to drive that, and had reserved a campground), and way down below the Rim you have the Colorado and Green Rivers, which have their confluence at the mesa's southern point. There are lots of wonderful overlooks in Island in the Sky, but the NPS didn't manage to get its hands on one of the best, which is Dead Horse Point (which is either named after a white rock formation  on the rim below that looks like a horse lying on its side, or a bunch of horses that supposedly died in a snowstorm) ; the overlook is so good, as a matter of fact that moveimakers have used Dead Horse as a standin for the Grand Canyon, which NPS won't let you film movies in---Thelma and Louise drove their car off the Point, for example. Anyway, I spotted Jeannie as I was driving out, and we walked all over the viewpoint and admired the light picking out all sorts of far-off walls and mesas and turrets in the canyons below. Then we went back and made everyone else get up, because we are bastards.

The plan was that we should shop for ready-made sandwiches in Moab (there are a couple of good supermarkets) and then spend the rest of the day at Arches...Soph thought Jason really needed to see the best stuff there. It's much more famous than Canyonlands, and most of the visitors, including a lot of foreigners, get bussed in...when you buy T-shirts in Moab, there's lots of  Arches stuff, but no Canyonlands shirts at all, which is a pity. But Arches deserves its rep...whole lot of iconic wierd southwestern rock formations, and tons of arches, of course, all over the place, ranging from tiny to truly stupendous. If you saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, it figured prominently...much of that biz with River Phoenix at the beginning was Arches, at places like Park Avenue, and the Double Arch. A bunch of shots from that first Hulk movie were filmed there too.

Arches is right outside of Moab, and the drive up into it is sheer drama...you switchback up along a  towering redrock face and curve around past a canyon called Park Avenue. We didn't hit that, because we only had one day, although it's well worth while, an excellent walk between two big sandstone walls with lot of cool formations, including my favorite, right at the beginning on the left, which I've dubbed Nefertiti and Hand Puppet, although I'm sure the official name is different. Anyway, we headed off to the Double Arch, which is located in a huge outcropping that pretty much dominates the whole park landscape, looking like some sort of gigantic Middle Eastern or Indian hilltop citadel, complete with domes and turrets. Stretched out below is this big valley where all this salt was washed out from under, and the landscape just collapsed, leaving the sturdier structures looming above, carved into all sorts of columns and hoodoos. A lot of the columns are pretty phallic looking, and I asked my wife Kate if she thought the park should've been called Obscenity National Park, although she didn't think it should. Many Western landmarks bring untoward thoughts to mind, I'm afraid.

The Double Arch

As for the Double Arch, it appears to be all that's left of a sandstone dome that was eroded out from around the piers...you go right up under the arches and can just sit and stare, or climb around on some excellent sliprock under huge overhangs. There are a number of caves and hollows which are probably going to form big arches themselves someday, which is swell, because all the wonderful things you see are in the process of disintegrating, and it's nice to know that new arches will take their place, so that Japanese tourists can gawk at them in cowboy hats two million years from now.

Rock Scrambling Beneath the Double Arch

The Window Arch is in another part of the same big outcropping, and just a shortish hike away, up some stairs from the parking area...it looks east of a lanscape of orangy beehivey features towards Castle Valley and the the very blue snowcapped Lasal Mountains beyond. If you Google Arches images, you'll see a dozens of photographs taken through this arch...you actually have to be someting of genius to snap a lousy picture from this lookout.

Window Arch

 Ate lunch in the parking area under a broiling sun...my turkey sub tasted a little bit like sunscreen, but it was still pretty good...snarfed some nacho chips (one of the things I like about southwestern trips is that junk food is pretty much de rigeur, seeing as how you need the salt), and gulped down half a bottle of V-8 juice, which I find is better desert hydration than Gatorade. Then we swung on up to the Devil's Garden. It's right near the Fiery Furnace (which is highly recommended, a series of tight deep fissures between high fins that shoot up out of the ground like flames, and we would've done it, except you've got to sign up in advance) and what appears to be a nifty campground. As for the Devil's Garden, it's kind of a hodgepodge, more fins, grotesque formations, and of course, arches, one of which Jason needed to see, namely the Landscape Arch. This didn't actually make an appearance in Last Crusade, although, if you ask me, it seems to have inspired that bit about the bridge that you can only see from the proper angle...the thing is very very large indeed, but it's right next to this wall that it blends right into...you have to be extremely close to pick it out, and when you do, it's startling...you have to be nearly underneath before you can see the strip the of blue sky that separates the thing from the cliff behind.

The Landscape Arch

Didn't press too much farther into the Garden after that...we were saving the Delicate Arch for last, and felt we'd really better get to it, as the afternoon was a wastin'. The Delicate Arch, which is way up at the top of this long sloping promontory, and not particularly visible from below, is maybe the most famous piece of Utah scenery there is, and you see pictures of it everywhere in the Beehive State, on coffee cups and T-shits and airport walls. But despite the fact that it's such a big deal, it's not too easy to get to, and I bet most of those folks (if any of them) never get a chance to go up and see it. The hike is fairly strenuous, particularly on an afternoon when the July heat hasn't broken, which was the situation when we went up there this time...I had, however, been up there twice before, so I knew what to expect. You park near an old frontier cabin, and cross a bridge over a stream with a surprisingly number of fishies and froggies in it...that promontory, baking white sandstone, rises up rather intimidatingly  behind some low jagged ridges, and you can see little figures slogging their way up it. By the time they get to what appears to be the top, they are teeny-tiny indeed, and looking shagged as well as small, even a distance, but you know that if they can just stick it out from another twenty minutes or so, they're going to see something truly marvellous.

Actually, that long slope is really not as bad as it appears...the ridges in front of it are rather more of a pain, although they don't look like much...you get to the top of one, and then you have to surrender elevation, which I always hate, and then climb another slope. Actually, you go up a whole lot of the way on those things, although it isn't obvious. When you hit that white sliprock, and you realize you're you're a bunch farther along than you thought, it's rather a morale booster, and if you just take things slow and steady from that point, you get to to that false summit before you know it, although I for one needed a bit of rest, and much guzzling of fluids.

From that point on, it rather flattens out, with a little bit of up and down in small gulches with some vegetation...after that, things get steeper again, and you find yourself on the left side of the promontory, going along a ledge at the base of wall, with a steep drop-off to the side, down into a canyon between sandstone domes. Turns out you're following the outer wall of a huge natural amphitheatre...finally you come to a breach  and go into the shell, down a four-four step and over some remarkably benchlike rocks with spaces between them...the amphitheatre is centered on a large sheer-walled oval depression that has a pond in it sometimes and is open at one end. In that Hulk movie, our purple-panted protagonist ran around the rim while being chased by helicopters.

The Delicate Arch

As for the Delicate Arch itself, it's not very huge, but it sure is striking...once again, you can look through it, out towards the Lasals. Originally, cowboys called it the Old Lady's Knickers or the Old Lady's Britches, or something even less mentionable, but you don't have to think about that. The amphitheatre is a wonderful place to laze about after your long hot climb, and suck on hydration, and feel the heat off the rocks...I, for one, would really have liked to spend a couple of hours behaving like a big damn basking lizard up there, but alas, the afternoon was wearing on. A thunderstorm seemed to be threatening...as we went down, huge shadows were crawling over the landscape off to the east, but we didn't get rained on that day. Headed back through the park, listening to Miklos Rosza film music, which my son Pat had downloaded, tracks from Ben Hur, Ivanhoe, El Cid, Quo Vadis, and Julius Caesar, and they went real fine with the visuals as the sun descended and the lighting just got more and more colorful as it played over the sandstone.

Dead Horse Point Sunset

Back in Moab, we bought stuff for a fajitas cookout, and canned goods to see us through our camping on the White Rim. Caught a sunset at Dead Horse Point, where the main thing isn't look westward, but east, to see the orange light on the features down below and beyond. At the Kayenta campground, dinner was great, and we were all solidly stuffed and burned out, and got a good night's sleep.

Jason had to leave in the morning...originally, the plan was for him to come with us as far as the White Crack Campground, but he had to go early. Maybe just as well...he has a Jeep, and I assumed all Jeeps had four wheel drive, but no...also, even though I'd been told by Park guys, and other sources, that the White Rim road was basically a two-wheel drive road, except for a couple of four wheel drive places, it really ain't so. A whole lot of it is extremely rough, at least, as far as a wimp from Delaware is concerned...maybe folks from Utah just have different standards.

Anyway, Jason booked, Soph stayed with us, and we all wedged outrselves into the Yukon. The entrance to Canyonlands is just up the Road from dead Horse Point, and I went in to do the back-country register thing and talk one last time to a parks guy about road conditions. Once again, I was given a line about things not being too bad...I was warned, kinda vaguely, about problems with blowing sand on the Western side. In actuality, right before the end of the road, there's this nasty wash that's created by runoff from this thing called the Upheaval Dome...but more about that later.

The Schaefer Trail

Headed on over to the head of the Schaefer Trail. If you've ever seen pictures of this stretch of road, chances are they don't do it justice, and the one above is no exception. The trail's way steeper and scarier in person. Descending into a sheer-walled bay in the cliffs, right across from Dead Horse Point, it goes down about 1500 feet, very narrow and quite rough, with a lot of switchbacks with hairpin turns...there's a perpendicular dropoff beside it most of the way. Okay, so there's probably a bit of switchback underneath you at any given time, but if you went over, you'd hit after a long fall and bounce out further, just like a rock striking a ledge. Of course, the farther down you get, the closer you are to the bottom, and things get steadily less hair-raising, but it sure is suspenseful coming down the thing, and getting up it would truly be a test of nerve. Luckily, I wouldn't have to come back that way, and I'd been down the road before, on an earlier Moab trip, with my nutty brother-in-law Charlie giggling maniacally in the back seat. But I didn't remember it being so frightening.

White Rim Viewpoint

 Now, the last time we went down, we hung a left, onto the Potash Road, which takes you through some extremely scenic stuff, back to Moab. But now we hung a right, into terra incognita. As I mentioned before, the White Rim is a ledge partway down from Island In the Sky, white sandstone sandwiched between two different red layers, a big wall of vertically fractured Navajo sandstone on top, and gooey-looking Cutler formation stuff underneath. Towards the edges of the Rim, the rock breaks up, is isolated from the rest of the ledge, and forms caprock on top of increasingly huge hoodoos.

White Rim Hoodoos

At intervals, huge bays and gulfs have been chewed back through the White Rim, and you have to swing round them to the west....invariably, the trail gets a whole lot rougher as you skirt these elbows. I was driving, and my son Pat was sitting shotgun...we were kinda having fun with all the bumps, but everybody in back sure wasn't. Moreover, the Yukon wasn't ideal for this duty, even though the Parks guys said it would be okay...its clearance really wasn't high enough, the wheelbase was too wide, and the gigunda front end cut off a great of my vision. Anything ten feet out or less was screened right off, and about a third or a half of my view to the right was blocked. Pat had to tell me what was what over there, and sometimes, as we were about to crest a hill, he'd have to get out of the car and direct me. Even so, there were a lot of dips and bumps were didn't catch, and I dinged the right running-board (which is just made of plastic) and bent the left side of the front end piece that wraps around the grille...that piece was just plasticky stuff too,  and a bump straight down on a rock caused it to buckle and pull free of the rubber flashing on the wheelwell.

Needless to say, we couldn't go too fast...I bet, at best, we made ten miles an hour. There were some stretches where we were going through sand and sagebrush, and that was the easiest ground to cover...but always the road would take us back towards one of those bays and some more rough stuff. The bays were getting steadily more spectacular, however...about thirty miles out, I guess, we bumped to the end of Monument Basin, which is simply mind-blowing, and stopped the Yukon and all piled out. As I said, those Cutler hoodoos with the white caprock got steadily taller...well, at Monument Basin, I'd say they were

about seven hundred feet high, and there were loads and loads of  them, quite isolated from the cliffs...the ones farther out in the basin were smaller, because they'd lost their caps and were more susceptible to erosion. From the rim it was quite a drop, and there were many good rocks on the edge to urge over the side to toss over the side...falling from that height, they'd hit the bottom and turn completely into powder. Nick and DJ had a great deal of fun on the trip tossing rocks, although I don't know what the Park Service's attitude is towards such shenanigans.

Monument Basin

Finally we came to the turnoff for the White Crack Campground. The road out there was one of the rougher stretches on the trip, but the campground itself was worth all the trouble we'd been put to. Basically, it was just about at the southernmost point of the White Rim, where the road curves round Island In the Sky and heads back north below the western wall, with the Green River on the left. The campground is right at the landward terminus of a big promontory with Monument Basin on the left, and a vast swathe of the southern unit of Canyonlands directly in front, and on the right....you can't see the Colorado from the tip of the headland, but you can see across it, into the Maze, incredibly complicated and inaccesible country, and above that, the Needles, which as the name suggests, are big pointy things. To the right, there's another headland pointing at a different angle, and beyond that, the Southern Unit stuff spreads away as far as you can see.  Out at the tip of the White Crack headland (there's a big recent fissure in it, hence the name), you have this amazing panorama which registers as three-sixty, except, of course, for whatever's directly behind your head.

White Crack Promontory

We got set up, then did some hiking. DJ and Nick and Jeannie headed off towards Monument Basin along the Rim. The boys apparently did some choice boulder-tossing...you'd hear the rocks popping occasionally from quite a way off. Me and Kate and Soph and Pat went out on the White Crack headland, appreciated the view from the end...then Soph , who was out in front on the way back, announced that she'd seen the "greatest thing ever." Somehow we'd overlooked some potholes, filled with rainwater, on the way out, and they were full of extremely prehistoric-looking Tadpole Shrimp, multi-legged crustaceans that look kinda like horseshoe crabs, but have life-cycles like brine shrimp. They hatch out during the rainy season, come to maturity real quick, mate, lay eggs, and die...swimming all around, they give you an impression of incredible business. There were big ones, which I bet were the females, constantly tangling up with ones half their size, which I guess were the males. There were also little black tadpoles, and a slew of snails.

Tadpole Shrimp

We ate dinner out of cans, then went out to the end of the promontory and watched the sunset. The sky had clouded up somewhat, but the sun broke finally through and flooded the Maze and the Needless with wonderful rich color. Sensational. Just about everywhere you looked, there was something to astound the eye...I don't think I'd ever seen such a vast-looking sky, and wierdly-shaped thunderheads of tremendous height filled it up nicely.

White Crack Sunset

I was hoping the sky would clear up totally, so we could watch the stars...no such luck. I still decided to press my luck, and sleep outside on the rocks. That worked okay for a while, but it started to rain, and then I compounded the wetness by knocking over my waterbottle upslope from me, and it drenched about half my sleeping-bag...took me a while to wake up fully and realize what was going on, but when I did...yuccch. Decided to try and go to sleep in the Yukon, but that was not to be...got comfortable enough in the reclining front seat, but then I began to hear something scrabbling around in back. It sounded like some sort of animal had gotten into the car and was trying to claw its way out. Using a flashlight, I went back and concluded that wasn't the case, but I kept hearing the noise...evidently the whatever-it-was was inside the wall of the car, rear wheelwell maybe. I went back up front and opened the door, whereupon I tripped all the alarms...the designers of the Yukon, in their infinite paternalistic wisdom, had put in a feature that wouldn't let  you get out of your own damn car. Finally I managed to shut the thing up, and went back to the wheelwell. Sure enough, there was something in there...put my ear against the side of the car...I could hear it. I'd awakened my son pat with all this tomfoolery, and he heard the critter too...since there wasn't a chance in hell that I was going to get back to sleep with mousey having conniptions in the wheelwell, I just decided to stay up and watch the sunrise, and sheepdog everybody else into getting an early start.

Eventually the rodent or whatever it was either died or escaped, the little shit.

As day broke, everybody else began to stir...more breakfast out of cans, although I don't really care. I'm perfectly happy eating cheap crappy stuff, although everybody else prefers my wife's approach, which is to make a big cookout production out of dinner, including salads and vegetable courses along with the viands. However, when you don't have a firepit or grille, as in the White Crack campground, everybody acknowledges that you have to make do, and we're all troopers, good travellers. That includes DJ.

White Rim, West Side

Struck the tents and squoze ourselves back into the Yukon. Once again, Pat was riding shotgun. We rounded the point of Island in the Sky, or rather, the broken-off bit of mesa that's south of the point. It was very different on the Western side...if anything, I preferred it. Those chewed-out bays in the White Rim were a whole lot larger, and the Rim itself was much thicker....the hoodoos, such as the stupendous Turk's Turban (I thought it looked more like a Turk's Vanilla Ice Cream Cone) were less frequent but even huger than the ones on the eastern side. There was a great deal of white sand with hummocks sticing out of it...in general, the road seemed rather less rough. But I knew there were a couple of really steep four-wheel drive stretches ahead, and about midway through the morning, we approached the first of those, Murphy's Hogback.

Murphy's Hogback

A couple of bikers in full plastic armor came up behind us, the first people we'd seen since we passed a couple of touring cars not too far from the Schaefer Trail...I pulled aside and waved the bikers on ahead, and parked to watch them go up. I'd say it was a mere four hundred feet high, but it sure was steep...helluva grade. Not certain how good the road was going to be, and queasy about everybody going over the edge if I screwed up, I told the others to get out and go up on foot after I made my run. They stayed at the bottom, and afterwards, Kate informed me it was mighty exciting watching me. On a Yukon, there's a little handy dial that switches you over to 4X4, and I twirled that, then crawled to the foot of the hill then hit the gas. The incline was mucho intimidating...I couldn't quite believe the way the Yukon clawed right on up. Very different from driving my Dodge Minivan, let me tell you...whatever bitching I've done about various features on the Yukon, the powertrain worked just dandy. Just about when I began to decide that i was really jazzed by the experience, I was at the top. The Bikers were still up there.

View From Murphy's Hogback

"Murphy;'s Hogback, I take it?" I asked, and one of them gave me a thumb's up. A bit of discussion followed...they'd come down the Shaefer Trail just that morning...the one guy had done the Rim several times before. He seemed to think I was sorta funny, and was startled that I'd brought a renter out there. I replied that I'd gotten the insurance, and that I'd been misinformed about how rough the road was...he said I'd probably do okay at the next four wheel drive section, Hardscrabble Hill, but that I'd better watch out at Mineral Bottom. The Parks guys really hadn't warned me about that...but the biker dude didn't really explain, and since  I had no idea what we were going to confront, I wasn't too apprehensive.

The Green River

 There was another nifty campground there...the road descended after that. We sojourned for a bit in a shortish side canyon that went down into one of those bays. Things were getting sandier...we sighted the Green River, and the road took us down towards it. It's green and muddy, but farther out, it turns deep blue reflecting the sun....there are dense belts of tamarisks on either side of it, some burned black (under what circumstances I don't know), and some brilliant green. On the far side they're bordered by red bluffs, and far beyond those, you see a line of magnificent cliffs, pretty much the same sediments you've been encountering all along, but much taller, and with an additional layer of Zion-type white sandstone at the top. For my money, the view is more colorful and awesome than any single wall in either Zion, or Yosemite or the Grand Canyon...although out there, it was just another throwaway, a nameless stretch of the northern part of the Lake Powell Recreation Area. Man, in Utah, the  sensory overload gets piled on sensory overload until it just tips over and forms a new pile.

We got right down beside the river after a while, but we.couldn't see it for all the tamarisks. We came up at a campground called Potato Bottom; don't know why it's called that. It was quite wierd...a parking lot, a bathroom, bare redrock on one side, and dead tamarisks on the other. There was a little dry dead bat on the floor in the bathroom, and ants were eating it. A path through the trees led off towards the river...very scary trees, not much of a path...the tamarisks were all black and dead (I think), and very tangled. The words Tulgey Wood came to mind. It was all very convoluted and complicated in there, with lots of branches encroaching on the path...I was real glad I had my sunglasses on, because otherwise I would've been poked in the eye by blackened twigs twice...blundered into one of them so hard it knocked by head back. I never got near the river, never ever saw it through all the tangled stuff. The kids had gone on ahead, and they reported that you couldn't get down to the water at all. So we headed on back. But that horrible riparian zone was without a doubt the creepiest bunch of woodland I'd ever been in...if you photographed it at the right time of day, and put in some fog, it would've beaten those evil woods in Snow White and the Huntsman all hollow, and those were damn fine creepy woods.

Got back in the car. Coasted through more deep white sand, whereupon the road entered some outcrops of the sandstone layer beneath the Cutler formation...it's red too, but very different. Sticks up all over Utah...it produces these towers that look like hex-or-sextagonal blockhouses, made up of stack of very thin sediments, and it's extremely crumbly. The road began to climb...nearly missed a key turnoff because I thought the actual route was blocked by a horsegate, but I was mistaken, and the gate was actually open...drove into a dead end, turned around, climbed some more. Since we'd passed Potato Bottom, and I'd heard Hardscrabble Hill was just past that, I assumed we were on that next four wheel drive stretch, or just about. The road grew extremely steep and narrow, and there were a number of hairpins, with the wall on the right and the rim on the left both pretty rotten. Couldn't see past some of the turns, didn't know what to expect, and dropped everyone but Pat off...thought he'd better spot for me. Turned on the four wheel drive again, and hardscrabbled on up. It struck me as much nastier than Murphy's Hogback, which was basically a long straight pull, albeit extremely steep...wanted to go faster because of the incline, but didn't dare to, since my forward view was so limited. Was much more frightening than fun, and I was glad to get to the top.

View From Hardscrabble Hill

Pat and I got out...I told him to to go on ahead, past a bend, and do some recce, while I walked down to meet everyone toiling on up.I think they were about halfway along when I came round a curve, and I went back up with Kate. I called Pat back...he'd found some petrified wood. We stood around for a while, looked south along the river...excellent, excellent view. Then we got into the Yukon once more for what I guessed would be the final stretch.

I'd  actually gone to bed thinking that the second day was going to be a seventy-mile trip, but I'd made a mistake when I was looking at the map at the entrance station...turned out it was only about as long as the first day's trip, and we figured that out, and everybody was real pleased to know that we only had about ten miles to go rather than forty. But we were still on Hardscrabble Hill, and still had a bunch of scrabbling to do. The road got even narrower, and there was a lot of up and down, and the left shoulder was distressingly gouged with little gullies. Moreover, the popped-out flashing on the wheelwell got more deformed with all the bumping, and it was scraping the tire, making a real obnoxious noise, and I had to stop and get out and screw around with it to keep it from doing that.

Nevertheless, after a lot of anxiety, we started to descend steadily, and came down next to the river once again, in a stretch with live oaks rising up out of some tall weeds, particularly on our left. On the right, looming about the weeds, there were some redrock cliffs, but they were receding eastward...Pat informed me that we were nearing the riverbed where stuff vented from the Upheaval Dome during storms. For those of you unfamiliar with Canyonlands, the Dome is a gigantic feature that no one can quite account for...folks have their theories, but who knows. Some hold that it's a collapsed Salt Dome...others that it's and ancient meteor crater, where an visitor from space crashed into Island in the Sky, tens of millions of years ago, before it was a mesa. We didn't hit the Dome this trip, though we'd taken a look at it before. It gives you a very disconcerting vibe, a profound impression that something of unimaginable violence happened there. It's much wider and deeper than the Meteor Crater in Arizona, and it's actually got a collection of jagged spires rising up out of the center of it, rather the way craters on the moon do...the rim was lifted up with such force that a huge circular crack opened all along the base of it, and when you go down inside that crack, on the Syncline Trail (whatever happened, it seemed to have casued a gigantic syncline, tilting the whole landscape westward, down towards the river) you can see that all the surrounding rock is shot through with cracks that break it into triangles. We never got as far as we would've liked into the Syncline Trail, but if we'd gone all the way to the west, a huge gap opens up in the wall of the mesa, and the crater drains out through that.

Now, that drainage, as it turns out, is a major hassle for the Park people...the White Rim Road crosses it, and people are always getting stuck in there. The area's called Mineral Bottom, and it's what those bikers had warned me about...I guess that's also what that Park guy meant when he mentioned drifting sand. But I had no idea at all about the real situation, namely...that after we passed the trailhead to the Upheaval Dome Gap, going along fat dumb and happy, we were about to come upon, quite without warning, because of all the weeds and the twisty-turny road, what appeared to be a dry riverbed full of sand. The sand looked pretty deep, but I'd seen worse, or so I'd thought. I had to turn to the right, couldn't see where I was going, but didn't know there was a problem...I got right out into the wash before I realized I couldn't see the entrance to the road on the other side. Worse yet, that sand was just a coating, about six inches deep, I guess...underneath, there was a whole lot of real wet mud., and we started to fishtail and lose traction. Knowing that we'd get stuck if I stopped, I hit the gas before spotting the road. There were a few seconds there where all I could see was an unbroken bank full of weeds. As it turned out, the gate was well over on the right, and it just seemed to open up before me...I just barely managed to swing on in...in the back, the kids all thought it was pretty funny, and I did find it kinda thrilling, and I was proud of myself yet again. But if I'd known there was anything like that on the trail, I wouldn't have gone. I bet that wash is nowhere near so bad at other times of the year, but it's a mess in the rainy season, and the parks guys should go out of their way to make it clear that there's a problem.

Went along through some more weeds after that...the road firmed up, and the redrock closed in again to starboard. Under an overhang, we caught a glimpse of an old horse-corral, then shot on by. We went faster and faster, up to about forty miles an hour, I guess...there was no more real excitement after the wash. We passed the gate for Island in the Sky and were back on BLM land. Finally came to a boat ramp on the left, and broke out our lunch  next to the river. We could get down to it on the ramp, but even though I'd nurtured some hopes of jumping in, I didn't like the look of that water close up...it was all green and opaque, and was clearly deep and sliding along at a pretty stiff clip, with lots of little eddies, even though it had appeared quite placid from a distance.

Lunch concluded, we went up the side of the mesa on the Horse Thief Road, which was unpaved and steep, but nicely hardpacked. As we were climbing some switchbacks, we saw, across from us, on a nearly-vertical talus slope, a severely mangled blue car about a third of the way down, partially buried...I can't imagine anyone survived. Very chilling...there were some other wrecks, looking older, poking out of the rubble elsewhere on the incline.

Got over the lip of the mesa, into the sagebrush up there. Since we hadn't had any recourse to running water for a bit, we ran back to our campground at Dead Horse Point, and got as clean as you can get by  filling gallon-jugs and tossing it over your head...actually, there are drains in the floor in the restrooms, and you can even soap yourself up in one of the stalls if you've a mind to. But I don't think you're supposed to do that.

Hung around the camp for a bit, ate some more, then drove down to Moab to do some shopping and get some pizza. Bought the pizza at the place we'd bought pizza from the last time. Even though I'm a Jersey Shore boy with definite ideas about pizza, and we were in the middle of isolated and Mormonland pies were really quite passable....we had some bag-lettuce salad to go along with them, and it was most agreeable. Extremely glad that we weren't in the car any longer, we did some sky-watching and faded out. Once again, I slept out in my sleeping-bag, and this time there were no overtipped waterbottles or trapped infuriating scrambling whatsits...

I'll relate the rest of our adventures shortly, although I've got to go and do some writing on the final Zorachus book, which I'm about 120 pages into.

By the way, Pat took the photos you've seen here...he's posted even more on his blog, Even Fewer Goats, which is also on Blogspot, and you should go over there and taker a gander.

Dark Knight Rises Review

Just got back from a midnight show of The Dark Knight Rises.I think most of the audience enjoyed it more than I did...by the time I got up and uncricked my neck and limbs, I felt as though I'd been in the theatre for four hours, although the movie only runs about two hours forty. There are a lot of things to like about it...for one thing, it's very right wing, and that appealed to fascistic me...the villains give off a distinctly Occupy Wall-street vibe. For the first first two thirds, I was enjoying it rather more than I enjoyed The Dark Knight, and compared to either Tim Burton Batman flick, or those Joel Schumacher  abominations, it's a masterpiece. But I thought it hopped the track pretty seriously after a lot of good buildup, and turned into a typical mass of mass of big loud and dumb.

It begins with a nifty action sequence (the film's best, unfortunately), wherein arch-badguy Bane (Tom Hardy) kidnaps a Russian thermonuclear specialist from a plane in midair. The staging is great, and Bane immediately impresses one as a badguy to reckon with...he's big and bulky and most threatening, and he wears a mask that looks at though he's got a tarantula trying to force its way out of his mouth. So far so good.

We shift to Gotham city...Batman, having been blamed for Harvey Dent's death, has retired from the scene...Bruce Wayne (Christian Slater) has become a Howard Hughes-like recluse/gimp, all messed up by all his encounters with bad guys, as indeed, I expect he would be. But an evil cabal, having figured out that he's the Caped Crusader, sends in the Catwoman (luscious Anne Hathaway) to get his fingerprints, so that they can get accesss his stock portfolio, and make a lot of bad futures calls, thus destroying his empire, and defanging him in case he decides to put on his cowl again. Wayne tracks down the Catwoman, and some romantic sparks fly, but he's also getting kinda involved with Miranda, (Mila Kunis lookalike Marion Cotillard), who's invested heavily in an apparently failed fusion reactor that Bruce, with the aid of superscientist Fox (Morgan Freeman) was trying to develop. To cut a long story short, the heavies want this technology, because they'd like to make a nuclear device out of it and blow up Gotham City, for pretty vague reasons. In the meanwhile, Bane is doing sinister things underground with his legion of henchmen...as the atmosphere in Gotham gets funkier and funkier, Batman talks Catwoman into leading him to Bane, and gets into an epic fistfight with him. But Bane beats the crap out of him, then flies him to Jodhpur, India (don't ask me why) and imprisons him, then  raises all kinds of explosive hell back in Gotham, collapsing tunnels and trapping a lot of cops underground, letting a thousand convicts loose, carrying on like a big left-wing lunatic, and planning to detonate the reactor after five months or so.

Got that?

Now, if all that sounded extremely convoluted and nonsensical, it is...and I was leaving out all sorts of stuff involving butler Alfred (Michael Caine, of whom there's rather too much, and oddly, not enough), and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), and a young cop who we spend way too much time on, but turns out to be important in the end. Still, I was going with the program for quite a while...there's a bunch of smart dialogue and characterization early on, the first few dust-ups are good, and Oldman, Freeman, Hathaway (who looks swell in her cat-suit) and Hardy work just fine...as a matter of fact, I found Hardy's big meaty Bane to be considerably scarier than Heath Ledger's Joker. Cristopher Nolan is a good director, and the film looks cool. But after all the blowings-up that cut Gotham City off from the mainland, (the special effects are wonderful, by  the way), everything gets progressively more and more goofy....and boy is the grand finale  unsatisfactory. Let me tell you, that poster from the move is considerably more apocalyptic and chilling than what winds up on the screen.

For one thing, once Bane takes over the city and launches his revolutionary reign of terror (with what seems to be a mere couple thousand guys), the story stretches out over five months or so, because that's how long it's going to take for the reactor core to "decay" and get explosive. In the meanwhile, we're asked to believe that all those cops would survive underground all that time, somehow receiving food and water, apparently from Bane. Huh? Why? What? As a matter of fact, all the details about this occupation of Gotham are completely ludicrous...the power stays on, even after all those blasts, which would destroy the grid, and the whole population is being fed, by relief trucks from somewhere, even though all the bridges but one have been cut.  Bane is holding the federal government at bay by threatening to detonate the device. Well, why the hell doesn't he just do it, seeing as how his whole purpose is to...do just that? As a matter of fact, given the resources that his criminal organization seems to bring to posses, why didn't they just get themselves a nuclear weapon from somewhere and skip all this incoherent rigamarole about Bruce Wayne's thermonuclear reactor? The stuff about nuclear and thermonuclear technology is particularly ill-informed....the scriptwriters use the terms as though they're interchangeable, and it grates.

Aggravating matters is the fact that Batman just pretty much disappears for about a quarter of the movie, except for some strange biz in the prison (run by whom?) back in Jodhpur...he needs to have his back whacked by the resident chiropractor, and get back into shape, and climb out of a pit, but we'd much rather see him actually running around in cool vehicles, and ass-kicking. The structure of the film just kinda collapses...and the climactic hoo-ha is  no good at all. For one thing, once the cops are freed from their subterranean prison, they advance in a column pointing pistols at a column of Bane's men holding assault rifles...to paraphrase Gian Maria Volonte in Fistful of Dollars, when a man with a pistol meets a man with an assault rifle, the man with the pistol is a dead man. But the cops don't get mown down, and nobody shoots much of anybody, and everybody gets into an interminable fistfight, Batman and Bane included. Now, I hate to have to point this out, but given how dark and brooding these movies are supposed to be, they'd be a whole lot better if the violence actually had some teeth...no such luck. There's a twist that's sorta surprising, but it diminishes Bane completely, and then he gets dispatched in a really uninteresting way....if you're longing to see him greased in properly spectacular fashion, you're going to be real disappointed. Ultimately, the movie degenerates into some villain-less suspense biz of a sort you've seen in a hundred films, starting with Goldfinger. The stuff after the climax is actually rather good, but by then, I was past caring.

I suppose I should admit that I'm not a very big fan of  superhero movies. I did like The Incredibles, and I liked the first Iron Man...but I've had big problems with most of the other films. Thought the Cristopher Reeve Superman movies just didn't work, primarily because the special effects were so lackluster...as for Tim Burton's Batman, I thought it was the biggest miracle of hype that had ever come down the pike, unsurpassed until the advent of Obama. I almost enjoyed the second Burton Batman movie, principally because of Michelle Pfeiffer, but otherwise, forget it. As for Sam Raimi's Spiderman movies, once again, the FX weren't up the challenge, and the director of the Evil Dead movies is overqualified for such material. I should also say that I generally can't get past superhero costumes...they almost invariably look profoundly ridiculous on the live-action screen. Also, in the final analysis, comic books are just sort of...juvenile, and treating the subject matter as though it's Shakespeare, which is what you have in Cristopher Nolan's flicks, is just completely wrongheaded. There's just no way to rationalize the material. In The Avengers, the Norse God of Evil, Loki, engineers an invasion of aliens from another dimension, and everything devolves into a giant fist-fight, albeit on flying jet-ski things. Hell, we could invade the earth better than those aliens...

Actually, we could do it better than most movie aliens...