On the Twelfth Day of Vacation, my true love gave to me…
- Waking up to eighty-five-degree heat and approximately 100% humidity, next to the Colorado River. Ugh…but a beautiful, beautiful sunrise once again. (I’m seriously starting to wonder if there are ever any other kind.)
- Sitting down to breakfast at the counter at Smittie’s Steak House, between a cowboy on one side and a couple of neo-hippies on the other. (This is so Moab.) Good coffee, good eggs, good sausage…and the world’s largest cinnamon roll. No, I’m not kidding: it literally is almost the size of your head; it occupies all of a standard 10″ dinner plate. I got it in a box to go, ate about a quarter of it, and gave the rest away…it’s a meal for four. Yum.
- Stopping at a little turnoff, and finding someone who’s figured out how to sleep on the cheap in their truck. (See the picture above…) Oh, if only I could do that in my car. Unfortunately, bucket seats make such an experience profoundly uncomfortable.
- Dead Horse Point State Park. (Apparently they used to herd wild horses out to this point, fence them off, capture the ones worth keeping…and leave the rest to die of thirst. Ahh, the good ol’ days.) This is definitely one of southern Utah’s overlooked attractions…the canyons are stunning, the river goosenecks through the whole park, and almost nobody comes out here. If you get a chance to camp here sometime, you won’t be disappointed.
- Seeing a car with stickers from my alma mater (MSU) all over it…fun to see, here, so far from where I went to school.
- Canyonlands National Park. Southern Utah is one of the most beautiful places in the entire Southwest, and it’s packed with well-known national parks: Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Arches are the best-known, but there’s also the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and others. Canyonlands is one of the least-visited parks, which is one of the reasons it’s so great…the canyons are every bit as impressive as the other parks, but the fact that you can go anywhere and do anything without running into thousands of people just makes it all the better. Having said that, this is a place to do things, not just look from the road…I really wished I had more time here. It’s a place to take off for a few days, or a week, and go hiking out in the backcountry, up and down the canyons.
- U.S. 95 across the plateaus and canyons of southeastern Utah, down through the Colorado canyon to cross the Colorado River at Hite, UT, then back up…this is a drive you have to do: the red rocks, canyons, and desert plateaus are all around you, and the sheer change in the landscape from the high desert to the hot, humid environs of the Colorado River is astonishing. Words really just can’t do it justice — if you get the chance, go here. Definitely go here.
- Blanding, UT: possibly one of the poorest, and unhappiest, towns I’ve ever been to in my life. This may have a lot to do with the local Native American reservations and populace (see tomorrow’s entry for more details), but literally every single person I saw here looked like they were having the worst day of their life. I say this not to ridicule, but just to talk about how different some of these places are from the ones we all inhabit, and to open our eyes to them: this town is literally a hundred and fifty miles away from anything, and the people living there seem to have little hope for anything better or much to do with their lives there. Next time I get bored with my own life or have some kind of bourgeois uneasiness with what I’m doing, I would do well to look back on this time and place for some perspective.
- The Moki Dugway and Muley Point. If there are magical places on earth, these are among them. Let me see if I can explain: you’re driving up through the dusty, beautiful desert of southern Utah and turn down a local highway. Ahead lies an enormous bluff, over a thousand feet high. As you get closer and closer, you keep thinking, hey, the road must turn at some point, you can’t go up the side of that thing. But the road keeps heading dead straight for the side of the mesa. It’s when you get very close that you start seeing the warning signs: “10% GRADES. 5 MPH. SWITCHBACKS. NARROW GRAVEL ROAD 1 MILE.” Then it dawns on you…oh, my God, we’re going up the side of that thing… (For reference, this is UT 261, just north of where it branches off US 163, in the very southeastern corner of Utah, near Mexican Hat. I highly recommend coming at it from the south, rather than the north…descending it is amazing, but going up it is even more incredible.)
- The views from the route up are unbelievable — there’s just no other word for it. You rise quickly above the high desert plain; you can see the highways stretching far off like lines into the distance, and the road you just came up twisting beneath you. I pumped my fist in the air and yelled to a passing convertible coming down the road, just as they did the same: it’s the kind of place that’s so amazing that it fosters a certain camaraderie among those who have visited it.
- When you get to the top, there’s a sign there, plastered with stickers from visiting tourists (including from Japan, France, and Germany, judging by the languages)…and then a turnoff to the left, to Muley Point. If you pass this by, you’re missing one of the more surreal experiences of your entire life: a five-mile dirt road carries you out to Muley Point, liberally accompanying you with jackrabbits the entire way. (Don’t squash them!) You’re on the very top of the mesa, flats stretching around you with bushes and only the occasional tree out there, as you leave the main road far behind. When you get out to the end, it’s like magic: it’s the quietest place you’ve been in your entire life; you can hear only your heartbeat, joined by the faintest bit of wind every once in a while. You’re on top of the world, you can see for hundreds and hundreds of miles…and yet you’re alone, too, so small compared to the world all around you.
- I’d been up here once before, last year, when I saw several people camped off-road, on top of the mesa, among the bushes and jackrabbits.. That year, fear of an approaching electrical storm forced me off the mesa. This year, I wasn’t about to let that happen: I’d rather take the slight risk of dying in a rather spectacular fashion than miss something like this. I went all the way to the point, then back a few hundred yards, and pulled off the road…I was the only person on the entire mesa. It was then that I set up my tent in the last few bits of daylight. I got ready for bed, stepped out to the edge, looked out at the world, and could think of absolutely no words to express what this was like for me. There truly is no other place in the world like it. I fell asleep eventually, out there among the jackrabbits and me, on top of the world and alone in one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
Day 12: (Wednesday, August 15, 2007) The Colorado River canyon near Arches National Park and Moab, in UT, to Muley Point (near Mexican Hat, UT).
Miles: 4476.8 + 435.9 = 4912.7 total. Current distance from home: 952 miles.
Photos: 1,976 (26.5 GB) + 336 (3.03 GB) = 2,312 (29.5 GB) total.
Next up: Muley Point and the Moki Dugway at sunrise, the Navajo Nation, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and back to Utah…
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