Rock Festival

One thing that’s already quite clear is that this is an enormous country, and it has some capacious states in it, especially if you traverse the entire length or breadth of them, or both at once. In this case, Utah has proved to be quite the crucible in which we test the relative wisdom or folly of our flight plan. For a third day in a row we have driven for many hours (some in our party might argue too many hours,) and it has led to a high level of road weariness for one of us, probably exacerbated by going to sleep early and waking up way too early and staying awake no matter what. This may be a familiar scenario for some of our followers; I tend to go in the other direction, which is to stay up a bit late, mostly to finish this blog so I don’t let our thousands of avid fans down, and then I am a bit of a laggard come the dawn. Or even a couple of hours after the dawn. So there is a natural tension working here, based around sleeping patterns and waking hours. Combine that with eight plus hours of driving, and no matter how amusing the scenery, the regimen takes its toll.

The Long Canyon on Burr Trail

That being said, today was probably the greatest eight hours of driving in our family history. This was the day we tackled the Burr Trail, and I must say it exceeded all expectations. This is not a drive for those who are uncomfortable on gravel roads; there is a not-too-long segment that is (for the moment) very well maintained and drivable, but this road can turn on you in a moment should an afternoon thunderstorm unleash its fury on the bounteous unconsolidated soils and sands of the high desert. Another deal-breaker for many would be the apparently notorious Burr Trail switchbacks. I have learned that when you see ‘switchback’ on a Utah map, that basically means the road builders ran into a situation where a mesa terminated in a cliff, and they hacked a solution into the face of it that requires you descend in first or second gear, pumping your brakes so they don’t fade, and fighting your steering wheel, which is gyrating madly thanks to the washboard surface it is traversing. This is in good weather, mind you. Speaking of minds, the Versa occasionally had a mind to trade its front end for its rear on the gravel, but thanks to the teen years driving in snow, and country lane experience visiting John Daniel’s family cabin in the hills of Virginia, I instinctively compensated for the car’s ill behavior. This descent of a sheer face followed a cruise down the Long Canyon. If the U.S.A. were looking to create new national parks instead of privatizing the ones we have, the Burr Trail portion of Capitol Reef should be the first place to be included. This drive through walls and towers of red rocks, squeezing in from both sides, surpassed anything we have done in officially sanctioned parks in this country. And even before the Long Canyon, we had been treated to a vast variety of landscapes, colors, vegetation and eco-systems. On the way to the Burr Trail, Utah Scenic Route 12, arguably the finest scenic highway in the country, reached an altitude of over 9,500 feet, and stayed above 8K feet for miles and miles. Vista points stretched for dozens of miles in every direction. Who knew this would just be the warm up for the Burr Trail? Interesting statistic: Other vehicles encountered over 110-plus miles of driving. Answer: three cars, two bicycles. Empty country.

Andrea at Muley Point

After the switchbacks, the countryside became progressively less dramatic, though not without its charms, until we arrived at Lake Powell in Glen Canyon Recreation Area. If your idea of fun is to rent a house boat and sit on a captive lake for two weeks in 100 degree heat, this is your place! For us, the highlight was catching the ferry, a 25 minute ride across that was relatively bracing considering that the thermometer was somewhere between 104 and 108 degrees. We cruised through another panoply of environments until arriving at the turnoff for Muley Point, said by Ansel Adams to be the premier vista point in the country. He’s right. It is up so high, and the edge is so sheer (and unprotected) that I could not bring myself to more than eight feet from the edge (I do have an incipient fear of sheer drop-offs.) Even from my chickenshit post, I could see the goosenecks of the San Juan River folding back upon themselves; the distant view of the Monument Valley; the bizarre shapes of the denizens of the Valley of the Gods; and endless majestic red faces of the mesas, crumbling in their antiquity. It was fully worth the five miles (each way) on dirt roads. Notice the theme here: lots of dirt and gravel driving. It goes on. Rejoining Utah 261, we took a right and the pavement abruptly ended. What followed was Muki Dugway and a stomach wrenching mile-plus descent of another cliff face, with no pavement and 180 degree switchbacks, basically piled upon each other. At one overlook you could peer down and see the road curving this way and that, and finally ejecting itself at the base of the cliff across yet another expansive plain. But from the road looking up, the cuts were invisible. Perhaps some weird form of Anasazi voodoo, except I don’t think they practiced that.

One of the Gods

One of the Goosenecks. There are three next to each other

Any sane person at this point would have cut a beeline to the hotel in the Monument Valley, but I seized the opportunity to revisit the under-rated and lightly-trafficked Valley of the Gods. This is often billed as a junior Monument Valley, but in some ways it is far superior. You wind around on (you guessed it) dirt/gravel roads for a fairly tortuous 16 miles, but the trip is worth it. Like all these roads, they are impassable when wet, but there was no chance of that today. The Valley is filled with vertical columns worn into oddly human or animal shapes; there’s just no way you can perceive it otherwise. The road was full of roller coaster dips, and steep upswings that left you very uncertain of which direction the path would take at the top. The order of the day was: take it slow. And thus we survived. Yet another amazing piece of scenery. We had seen so much that scenery overload was building up. But what trip to this area would be complete without a stop at Goosenecks State Park, where the San Juan folds upon itself in deep canyons three times within a very short distance. Thanks to a handy guard barrier of rocks I was able to bravely stand right at the edge and take some shots, which required a much wider angle lens than my Lumix had to offer if I wanted to capture all three folds in one frame. Bring on the Photoshop.

OK, mission accomplished - - time to hie thee to the hotel in the Monument Valley. Leaving Mexican Hat you climb up a pretty steep hill, and it is made much less enjoyable by the fact that there are a succession of what appear to be gravel-hauling trucks with two trailers. The one in front of us was creeping up the long grade at all of about seven MPH, but we were mercifully able to pass it after just a couple of minutes. We arrived at the Monument Valley in about a half hour, and made our way to The View hotel. But enough for one blog; maybe Andrea can fill in some of the other details. If not I will blather about them at another sitting. Thanks to the lack of effective in-room internet, this post will probably not make it until tomorrow. I am sure all of you are feeling deprived of the nightly feed, but you all will just have to make do until we return to what we define as “civilization.” The Navaho Nation is not it, although it has its own charms.