Denver-Rushmore-Canyons, Part 2

Continuation of our trip from Denver to National Parks in Utah and Arizona. Part 1 is here.

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Tuesday, August 16

Per Stewart’s suggestion, we headed to Arches National Park in the morning and oriented ourselves at the visitor center.

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Our first stop after the visitor center were the canyon views near The Organ and Tower of Babel, a preview of the type of spires and buttes we would see a few days later in Monument Valley. From there we headed to the Balanced Rock, a landmark at the heart of the park with easy access from the road. Time for photos!

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Next we headed to The Windows, a dual arch. A chance to walk the trail for a closer look.

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We also walked to the nearby Turret Arch.

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We decided to forego the three-mile hike to Delicate Arch, despite Stewart’s recommendation, and drove to the Devil’s Garden area. We took the shorter hike to the beautiful Landscape Arch, the longest arch outside China. Hiking is not high on this family’s activity list, but this one was worth it.

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There were definitely more sights we could have seen at Arches but most of them involved longer hikes than we were prepared to take. We followed Stewart’s suggestion and headed to nearby Canyonlands National Park and the Island in the Sky visitor center for some great afternoon vistas.

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After getting some food and depositing the girls in the motel, where perhaps they took a swim, I headed back to Arches myself to see the sunset around 7pm. I was able to find a roadside pullout with a big view of sky near the Petrified Dunes viewpoint. I stood alone (save for a few bikers) for more than an hour enjoying the shifting light, nearly full moon and a bonus thunderhead roiling in the distance…but not close enough to get me wet. The photos give only a hint of the grandeur. I had a fabulous time up there on my own, appreciating all of creation but not sure whether to look east, west, north or south at any moment.

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Wednesday, August 17

We headed south out of Moab to tackle more of Canyonlands National Park.

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We went to The Needles visitor center and took a hike to Pothole Point. We were the only ones there for a good while. The rocks were great for Allie to explore. Barb was convinced we could slip on the rocks, die and become dry bones before anyone would find us.

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We left Canyonlands and drove a bit further south, stopping at the Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument. The petroglyphs there date back as much as 2,000 years though most are from the last millennium. Still, they document centuries of human habitation and story telling. Sadly, the stories are now lost and can only be imagined.

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A couple of hours later, we made our way to the Natural Bridges National Monument. We were a bit arched out at that point but we hit the visitor center and drove to locations where we could see the bridges without wandering far from the car.

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We ended our day in Bluff, Utah, (population 320) where Barb’s cousins Stewart and Ann lived part-time in an Airstream trailer when they weren’t at their primary home in Flagstaff. We checked into the Recapture Lodge at their recommendation (I think it might have been the only motel in town at that point).

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We had dinner at the Lodge and stayed for a nature lecture. I don’t think there was TV or Internet so the lecture was the entertainment for the evening. It was not Barb’s favorite night of the trip.

Thursday, August 18

We decamped from the Recapture Lodge in Bluff and headed south to Monument Valley. The iconic landscape of the valley has been featured in many films, TV shows and commercials and become perhaps as emblematic of America as the Statue of Liberty. I felt our initial view of the valley warranted a roadside stop and photos. The girls, not so much.

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Once we got to the visitor center and approved overlook, the ladies showed more interest. There was surprisingly little for effete Eastern tourists in a rental car to see or do in Monument Valley beyond the visitor center. Partly this was due to being in the Navajo Nation reservation with their restrictions on where we could wander. Partly it was due to (an entirely reasonable) lack of paved roads through this sacred landscape. There were a number of possible off-road drives or guided hikes but we were not up for those, neither in time nor temperament. So we took our obligatory photo and moved on. But the valley was undeniably beautiful and I’m sure magical as the sun and sky’s daily light show plays upon it.

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We crossed into Arizona and drove for a long time through the dry and forlorn Navajo Nation reservation. Monument Valley is within the reservation, and the reservation as a whole is larger than 10 states, says Wikipedia. We drove for several hours, stopping for gas and a taste of fry bread, which Barb remembered from childhood visits to Aunt Leona and Uncle Larry. I’m afraid we didn’t appreciate the full cultural significance of fry bread — Barb and Allie wished it had more sugar like a funnel cake. I think the quote from the Smithsonian article is probably true: “frybread has killed more Indians than the federal government.”

At Barb’s urging, we also stopped for a small exhibit in Tuba City on Navajo Code Talkers during World War II. Recognition of the code talkers was relatively fresh in 2005 but Barb knew about them and we all learned a bit more at this exhibit.

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Somewhere along the way, miles between gas stations or restaurants, Allie developed an urgent need for a bathroom break…but there were no bathrooms. After several miles of increasing distress (and no cars to be seen), we stopped at the side of the road where she found a small scrub bush for privacy. Perhaps Allie’s closest brush with nature.

Our next real stop was The Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park. We started at the Painted Desert Visitor Center at the north side of the park, then drove to several of the main overlooks. The Painted Desert in the middle of the day does not really display its full majesty, but we got the general idea.

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We drove through the park to the petrified forest area and the Rainbow Forest Museum and Visitor Center and the Giant Logs Trail. The museum and the petrified logs were of greater interest to us all. I hadn’t really thought of petrified wood as a fossil, but that’s what it is, which helps explain why it’s such a rare thing to find so many fossil specimens of such size in one place. The museum did a good job of explaining things and also included an extensive collection of geodes, which I also find fascinating.

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It had been a long day of driving and sights, but we still had nearly two hours to get to Flagstaff for the night. On the way to Flagstaff we passed signs for Meteor Crater which I’d always wanted to see. It was too late in the day, but we made a note of it and would visit on Saturday.

We made it to our Hilton Garden Inn room and gave Leona and Larry a call. We paid them a short visit at their new house and I think we all went out to a hibachi dinner together. They had recently moved to Flagstaff from Prescott mainly so Leona would be closer to healthcare and Stewart. Leona and Larry were both pretty old at that point and not in great health. I’m afraid it was the last time we would see either of them.

Friday, August 19

This was Grand Canyon day. We kept our motel in Flagstaff as a base and drove 90 minutes to the canyon’s South Rim Visitor Center. We parked at the Visitor Center, got oriented, saw a film and found one of Stewart’s books prominently displayed in multiple languages.

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We took the bus to the South Rim Village of hotels and views, stopping in the El Tovar Hotel and Kolb Studio.

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We took the Hermit Road out to Hermit’s Rest and snapped more photos of the canyon. I’m not sure which photos are from what overlook, but they were all impressive. At one point, we encountered a squirrel taking in the view, two of my favorite photos.

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Despite Stewart’s recommendation, we didn’t venture down into the canyon other than maybe a few feet down a trail. We were daunted by the prospect of walking back up. Sorry, Stewart.

Eventually, we made it back to our car and drove to the Desert View Watchtower where we took in more grand vistas…that is, until a rainstorm headed in.

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Along this route we also encountered some wildlife, including a coyote casually trotting down the road.

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The rainstorm made any thoughts of staying for sunset moot, so we eventually headed back to Flagstaff for the night. I think we spent some more time with Leona and Larry, and maybe it was this evening we did the hibachi dinner…what with it being a Friday and everything. In these years, Barb had a hibachi dinner nearly every Friday at the Sakura Japanese Steakhouse at Enchanted Forest near home.

Saturday, August 20

We headed back to Meteor Crater before heading south to Phoenix. I’d long seen photos of this 50,000-year-old impact crater and was glad to spend some time exploring. The small, privately owned visitor center was actually pretty informative and we spent quite a while there.

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The crater itself is impressive but once you’ve taken in a few views from the rim there’s not a whole lot else to see. Still, I’m glad we did it.

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We headed down the road to Phoenix, checking in at our hotel, The Buttes, near the airport. I had stayed there a number of times for work and figured Allie and Barb would enjoy the pools. They had time for a dip in the afternoon.

In the evening, we went to dinner at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. In all my trips to Phoenix, I had never been to this landmark and wanted a visit. We took this photo by the Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window design that was added in 1973. Though the hotel has many of Wright’s influences, it was actually designed in the 1920s by Albert Chase McArthur, one of Wright’s draftsmen and brother of the original owners. I don’t remember the specifics of our dinner, but it was a fine capstone to our vacation.

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Sunday, August 21

We turned in our trusty Ford Taurus Dollar rental car having put a couple of thousand miles on it, I think. We caught an 8:42am United flight back to Baltimore, via Denver, and returned to our realities.

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Afterword

I feel like we accomplished a lot on this trip, ticking off a number of sights, giving Allie (and us) a sense of the grandeur and great distances of America’s West. It was a lot of driving, and not a lot of actual encounters with the outdoors, which I know is not everyone’s idea of a Western vacation but it seems to suit our family.

I enjoyed going to Denver a week early with Allie, getting some time to play golf with Joe and then taking our jaunt to Mount Rushmore. I’m not in a big hurry to go back to see Crazy Horse or Mount Rushmore, but I’m glad for Allie’s and my sake that we saw them. If anything, the bison at Custer State Park were even more impressive.

There’s something to be said for the serendipity of running into oddballs like Jackie the Bear Lady, but also something to be said for avoiding driving around late looking for a room and only coming up with an offensively smoky room in Cheyenne. I prefer doing some research ahead and choosing our lodging.

If we went back to the eastern Utah national parks, I would spend more time exploring Arches. I’d also like to see more of the territory around southwest Colorado, Canyon de Chelly, and New Mexico. There are also more parks in Utah like Zion and Bryce Canyon that I’m sure are worth seeing. I don’t especially need to camp out under the stars, raft down the Colorado or rent a boat on Lake Powell.

I feel like we’ve missed an opportunity to get to know more about Stewart and his adventures. He’s still around for the time being, but I don’t see a visit in the cards anytime soon. I could reach out electronically, of course. Will I?

I first compiled the posts for this trip based on the photos only, thinking I could do a decent job from memory — this was, after all, one of my favorite trips and not all that long ago. After thinking I was done but also not sure of some things, I searched for our folder of brochures and documents from the trip and ended up fixing and expanding many details. I had several whole days completely wrong. I now wish I had taken even better notes. It’s a reminder that the photos and our spotty memories are not enough to tell an accurate story.

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Denver-Rushmore-Canyons 2005, Part 1