Big Rock Country

We drove from Cortez, Colorado to the north rim of the Grand Canyon in a single day, winding around through the rocky desert country in southern Utah.  Continuing more or less south from the Million Dollar Highway, we hooked east a bit to go through Monument Valley.

To be perfectly honest, although I'm very good at finding places, especially if I have a map, I have no sense of "direction."  If you want to know where north is or what direction we're going, buy a compass or get a GPS - don't ask me.  (A compass is cheaper.)  The new Subaru we just bought has GPS, and it also has a compass display in the rear-view mirror that tells me what direction we're going; I'm not used to such precision.  The only place I can orient myself without devices is California, where there's usually a mountain range running north-south in view - and of course, there's that ocean.

We were in desert almost this whole day; I think there was a little cultivated area around Cortez.  Then the world ended, despite the fact that we were driving through and past Indian reservations.  Monument Valley is in a Navajo reservation.  Before we got to Monument Valley, we drove through an area called Valley of the Gods, which was (a) totally desolate, and (b) absolutely gorgeous.  Click on the photo to go to the full gallery for southern Utah and the Valley of the Gods.

 


Apart from the road, and an occasional fence, there is no visible animal life.  You have to stop and look to see the critters.  And Monument Valley is even more so. My diary notes that if you expect to need anything in Monument Valley, you'd better take it in with you; and if you're smart, you'll stop at the gas station in Medicine Hat before you go in.  We passed a single Navajo site selling jewelry, pottery and rings (we didn't stop); it wasn't clear whether they'd run to indoor plumbing or not.  The visitors' center was down an unpaved side road which we didn't think the VW Passat would really like.  We carried our lunch in, and eventually just pulled the car into somebody's farm road and parked it with its back to the sun.  The amazing thing was that there was a farm road.  You'll see the photos in the gallery below.



I defy anyone to drive through Monument Valley and not stop to take at least one photo - unless you simply don't own a camera or a cell phone!  But it gets overwhelming after a while.  I've never felt so small in my life; or so vulnerable.

In case you don't believe the colors, honest - they really looked like that.  I decided on this trip that you can't really understand southwestern pottery unless you've driven through those mesas and seen the colors of the rocks and soil.  My sister has given me several Native American pots from Arizona, and the colors make much more sense to me now.

After Denver

I seem to have stopped posting about this trip after describing our stay in Denver, probably discouraged by the deteriorating state of my knee.  Let's catch up - I have a lot more photos to share.  For one thing, we spent a day at the Denver Zoo, so if you like zoo photos, you may enjoy this gallery (click on the photo to go to the gallery):



I think this guy is my favorite shot from that trip, or, let's hear it for telephoto lenses:

 

I like this little fellow too, though:

After leaving Denver we made the long and arduous drive to - Manitou Springs, just outside Colorado Springs, where we stayed for a day or so.  We toured the Cave of the Winds  (links lead to photo galleries) and the Garden of the Gods, but the real reason for coming to Colorado Springs was the Pike's Peak Cog Railway, which we rode.  Given my asthma, the top of Pike's Peak, at 14,115 feet (4,302 m), is probably the highest ground I will ever stand on.  Click on the photo for the full gallery, it was a beautiful clear day and I got some gorgeous shots.

After the Pike's Peak expedition we set out for the Grand Canyon, by way of Monument Valley - I'll get those photos up later.  First, we went through the San Juan Mountains over U.S. 550, sometimes known as the "Million Dollar Highway."  With apologies to Ouray and Silverton, Colorado, this is the road from nowhere to nowhere - except that it goes through a mountain range that once had a whole lot of silver in it.  We weren't actually going to go that way, but in The Tattered Cover bookstore, in Denver, Jim picked up a copy of The Road That Silver Built, by David P. Smith, and decided to drive it.  Gorgeous country, though:

Click on the photo to see the rest of the gallery.  As you can see, the road has no frivolous extras like, say, guard rails.  At the bottom of the slope to the right is the Uncompaghre River.  The speed limit on this elegant route is 25 MPH!  

Even at that speed we were going too fast to get a photo of the mine entrance that opened right on the road, at the beginning of an outside curve - an evenly chiseled hole cut in the rock, going back into the mountain, almost large enough to stand in, about 3 feet wide, with an arched roof!  The arched roof was what startled me - it was so obviously man-made.  I almost thought I saw someone standing in it.

The Anatomy Class

While we were in Denver, we visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.  They were presenting an exhibit (it closed July 18) called Body Worlds - the story of the heart, which we visited.  Let's start with the short summary from the museum's page:

Dr. Gunther von Hagens, a German scientist, developed a plastination technique in 1977 that preserves the human body in motion. The anatomical exhibitions by von Hagens showcase the muscular structure of the human body, and have been exhibited in such far-flung locales as Singapore and Spain.

Click the next link for details on the plastination process, in as much detail as you want.  In summary, the plastination process removes water and fats from the tissues of deceased animals, including humans, and replaces them with polymers, which preserves them indefinitely from decay.  In color.  The Egyptians never dreamed of embalming like this.  The Body Worlds exhibits (this is the second one) take human bodies, and organs, which have been plastinated, and display them in motion, showing internal organs, muscles and sinews - in short, everything but the skin, which they normally remove for display.  And the full-sized display figures (the plastinates) are amazing - posed as in extreme athletic feats, like throwing a javelin, or jumping on skis. 

Human bodies?  Yes.  You can will your body to the Institute for Plastination, to be preserved in this way and used for scientific education.  You can choose to be anonymous, or not.  Because the entire bodies are plastinated, organs and joints can be sectioned to display tumors or other illnesses. 

Make no mistake, I was impressed.  The plastinate displays are astounding.  The details of organs, joints, the vascular system - all in details that even doctors rarely see.  You learn more about the human body in this exhibit than you do in most introductory anatomy classes.

And yet - it gave me the creeps.  It didn't upset my stomach - my stomach doesn't upset easily - but there were signs all through the exhibit to notify the staff if anybody in your party felt dizzy or faint, so I guess some people do get queasy.  But really - when you die, is this what you want done with your carcass?  To have it mounted in a museum display, down the hall from the stuffed antelopes?  I have very mixed feelings about the process.  I'm normally all for scientific education, I'm all for investigation and teaching; and the displays of individual organs and joints (all preserved through plastination and all originally human) were fascinating.  But the plastinate displays had a whiff of P. T. Barnum about them that disturbed me, and still does.

Death is the great mystery that separates us from animals, who don't know that they will die.  It seems to me that it should be treated with more dignity than this.

Dawdling Around Denver

We spent a few days in Denver, staying at the Castle Marne Bed and Breakfast in the upper Capitol Hill neighborhood.  This neighborhood is cool, very lively and urban, crawling with restaurants and coffee houses - and Castle Marne is also very cool.   It looks like a castle:

built of fieldstone with a round stone tower; it's been a Victorian home and a processing center for parolees, and several other things.  The interior is meticulously restored to its fussy Victorian greatness (that's a compliment, I like Victorian houses).  See more photos here.  They had the most delightful tea cozy I've ever seen:

The food was excellent, I really liked the staff, and it was a wonderful alternative to the corporate hotel (and it may even be cheaper, depending on the corporate hotel).  The weather was mostly nice, overcast but cool; we had one day that was overcast but 101 degrees!

Our first major excursion was an afternoon at the Denver Botanic Garden.  We didn't realize til we got there that they were having an exhibit of Henry Moore sculpture.  This meant that the gorgeous gardens were punctuated with huge abstract stone shapes:

I can never resist gardens, so I took quite a few photos, you'll find the rest here.  Take a look and rest your eyes.  I was especially pleased by the black-crowned night heron who posed for me in the Japanese garden:

 He posed for me several times and never even asked for a handout.

Green Deserts

You may have noticed this in the photos from Nevada.  All the deserts we crossed this year were really green, with lots of wildflowers ("lots" of wildflowers for a desert, that is).  We stopped at the Salt Wash Vista Point on Interstate 70 in Utah and took most of the photos in this gallery, Blooming Deserts in Utah. 

You say there's a lot of red rock showing?  It is a desert.  But we saw wildflowers like this:

and like this:

It was a long drive from Fallon to Fillmore, Utah - 448 miles.  Why Fillmore?  Take a look at the map of Highway 50 through Utah - we didn't have a lot of alternatives.  Fillmore had the most motels to choose from, and one of them actually had pretty good ratings. Given what the bed was like, I shudder to think about the others.

You can tell when you get into settled country in Utah, the sagebrush and creosote give way to irrigated fields, and you see buildings.  The water comes out of the Gunnison Bend Reservoir.  The first Utah town you come to on 50 is Hinckley, and we just rolled on through, it was closed, what there was of it.  By this time, though, it was around 6 in the evening and we were getting hungry, so we pushed on to Delta, which had something resembling a main street.  (It was Highway 50.)  A cruise up and down produced a choice of a soda fountain and the Rancher Cafe, part of the Rancher Motel-Cafe; everything else was closed.  Well, it was Memorial Day.  We took a chance on the Rancher Cafe and lucked out - the place is the local Chat 'n' Chew, I think we were the only tourists in there.  I had what I considered a good bowl of homemade chili (beans and meat, and not too spicy), and we chatted with the owner.  My husband didn't like his dinner as well as I did, sadly.  After dinner we drove on to Fillmore in the gathering dusk, past the mechanical irrigators spraying the crops.

The next morning we drove through Fillmore looking for breakfast.  The fast food joint next to the motel (Larry's Drive-in) did not appeal, but we found a family-style restaurant by the other freeway entrance.  Driving through Fillmore was odd - there were very few business establishments on the main drag, and a lot of beautifully kept houses, on huge lots.  And nobody on the road or out in the yards, at 8 AM, the place was empty.  I don't know where these people work.  I know where they eat breakfast, though, and so did we.

Breakfast over, we hit the road for Denver.  The drive took from 9 AM until 8:30 PM, but we stopped a couple of times, once to spend almost 45 minutes taking the photos in the gallery, and of course for lunch and dinner (dinner in Vail, very civilized after all the desert pullouts, even indoor plumbing).  If you've never driven through the red rock country in southern Utah, you really can't imagine it - Interstate 70 plunges between nearly vertical red rock cliffs rising (at a guess) 2,000 feet above the highway.  You're climbing steadily, but it looks like you're going down into a canyon.  It's overwhelming.  Sorry, I didn't get any photos of that stretch - the angle was impossible.  But this is a must-see for people who like road trips. 

The Rockies, of course, were green and beautiful but we just wanted to get on to Denver so we didn't stop for photos.  More about Denver in the next installment.

Driving Across Deserts

I've written about this before, on our 2008 vacation, and I think I described the experience well, so I'll just refer to my earlier post, called Basin and Range.  We drove Interstate 80 in 2008, which is a pretty busy road, all told.  On this trip we took Highway 50, and it isn't called "The Loneliest Road in America" for nothing. 

Highway 50 doesn't have the stately ballet of long-haul trucks and cars that I described in 2008, because it has almost no traffic.  On Interstate 80, you're usually in sight of at least a couple of semis and one or two other cars; on Highway 50, not.  So driving this road is a different experience.  You don't take 50 if you worry about breakdowns, or the fact that there's no cell phone service.

Note:  the photos in this post are just a sampling of the pictures at my SmugMug site, in the gallery called Crossing Nevada. You can see them all larger there, too.

Between Fallon, Nevada and the Utah line, there are exactly three towns, Austin, Eureka, and Ely.  However, 47 miles out of Fallon, where Nevada highway 361 peels off to the south, you'll pass Middlegate Station:

I wouldn't call it a town.  I'd estimate the population at maybe 10 (I found a 2006 post that estimated 19), plus some transient bikers and pool players.  This photo shows about 70% of Middlegate Station:

The rest of it is a motel, a gas pump, and a rusty propane tank.  And some abandoned vehicles. 

In all these photos, observe the crowded, built-up neighborhood.  Don't laugh too hard at Middlegate Station - it was a Pony Express stop.  Highway 50 was the Pony Express route.

It's 112 miles from Fallon to Austin, 70 miles from Austin to Eureka, and 77 miles to Ely - total driving distance 259 miles, and then it's another 70 miles to Garrison, just over the Utah border.  So for 329 miles, this is what you're looking at:

This may be why I tend to fall asleep on long desert trips.  I woke up when we stopped in Austin (pop. 340).  Highway 40 is the main street.

Since it's one of the only places in 329 miles with gasoline and rest rooms, everybody stops in Austin, including this elegantly turned-out biker dog we met at the gas station:

Between Austin and Eureka we passed the most interesting thing on this part of the trip:  the Sea to Shining Sea bicycle ride across America.  They were riding from Austin to Eureka that day, and we passed them on the road. All these guys are veterans and some of them are disabled, we passed at least 3 recumbent bicycles being propelled by the riders' hands and arms - and being "covered" from normal traffic by everything from other riders on normal bikes, to a SWAG wagon, to a local cop car.  We originally planned to stay in Austin the first night, but it was full of the Sea to Shining Sea riders, so we had to rearrange the trip.  I didn't get any pictures; I do occasionally take photos of mountains out the car windows but not of anything small and close like a guy riding a bicycle. 

My husband tells me we drove through Eureka (pop. 1,103), but I must have been asleep.  I remember stopping for lunch at the petroglyph site, where I took this:

I was awake driving through Ely (pop, 4,041), but I'm not sure why; this was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and the place was empty.  And empty is what the whole day continued to be, although we did get a glorious view of Wheeler Peak:

On the Road Again

Our vacation this year involved a lot of time on the road.  We began by driving from Oakland to Denver in 3 days.  The scenery was nice, because for this trip you don't take the infamous Highway 80.  We took California route 88 over Carson Pass.

Our trip to Carson Pass went through the Delta, always very pretty, and up into the Sierras, where there was still snow under trees and on north facing slopes above about 6,000 feet.  It looked like this:








More photos of Carson Pass are available at my SmugMug site.  The problem with all this snowy beauty, we discovered when we stopped to take these pictures, was that the only public loo in the entire pass was still buried under 7 feet of snow.  We couldn't even get back to the vista point where it sits.  Fortunately it wasn't that far to the Kirkwood resort, which is open year round and has public bathrooms. 

We had lunch at Caples Lake, which was just beginning to thaw - it's at 7,800 feet.

Caples Lake, I learned on this trip, is part of the East Bay Municipal Utility District holdings - it's the reservoir on the Mokelumne River - and therefore, my husband tells me, is "my water."  I responded that it's the water I drink, which is not the same thing at all.  We sat by the lake in the sun and it was very peaceful - not much traffic on Highway 88.

You come off Carson Pass into the Carson Valley, go up to Carson City where you pick up U.S. Highway 50 to Fallon, then east on Highway 50 across southern Nevada - "the Loneliest Road in America."  There are signs all along the road that say so, if you define "all along" as "in the 3 inhabited areas you pass between Fallon and Ely." We've driven Highway 50 before, it's about as desolate as you can imagine.   Normally, the irrigated pastures outside Fallon would be the last green green we'd see for quite a while; Highway 50 is desert, unmitigated.  But this year all the deserts were very green.

I'm always fascinated by the unmarked dirt roads that lead away from the highway into the distant hills - who goes there, anyway?  I'll talk more about the desert later, when I have some more photos up.