Springdale, Utah

At one point during the drive from Kayenta to Springdale, one of our backseat teens was heard to murmur, “The desert has a beauty all its own.” And yes, there was a whinge of sarcasm in her voice. Having left the Grand Canyon and the dust of the magnificent Monument Valley in our wake, we certainly weren’t bored, but we were becoming hard pressed to summon a feeling of “awe” with each new appearance of yet another marching line of mesas and buttes, or of the almost uncountable number of delicately coloured layers between their bases and their caps. I suspect that even though the country remained a fascinating vista, our passengers could likely have been forgiven for allowing the thought “When does it change?” to enter into their heads.

Then there’s that line about “Be careful what you wish for”.

As we neared a town that our map told us would be Page, Arizona, we crested a hill. Laid out before us was a vast valley. On our right was yes, yet another long plateau, culminating in a brief series of mesas and buttes. And in the distance on our left, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, was this:

http://www.trainweb.org/southwestshorts/bmlppowerplant.html

The Black Mesa / Lake Powell Generating Station (BMLPGS) takes long trainloads of coal gouged from nearby Black Mesa and converts it to electricity. In a wonderful example of closing the loop, the train is actually a single-purpose railroad – officially known as the Black Mesa – Lake Powell Railroad, or BMLPRR – with no connections to any other ribbon of steel between where it begins and where it ends. It’s the US railroad’s version of the Galapagos Islands. Built solely for the purpose of transporting this coal, the six locomotives are electric and their 50,000-volt overhead power line draws its electricity from the very plant to which it carries the raw material for electrical power production.

But when the plant first fired up beginning in 1974, it promptly ticked off a lot of people whose goal is to keep that part of the country attractive and interesting to tourists. Because the BMLPGS, you see, operating at full output burns the staggering total of 13-14 million tons (!!) of coal annually. In the process, the plant produces roughly 25,000 tons of nitrogen oxide and 14 million (!!) tons of carbon dioxide every year. And prior to the installation of the scrubbers to remove a large portion of the toxic gunk from its emissions, the plant emitted an annual average of 72,000 tons of the bad stuff every year. That was a lot of air pollution and much of it, apparently, found its way into the Grand Canyon, trapping a permanent haze in the vista between the Canyon’s north and south rims.

The Grand Canyon Trust (not surprisingly, given their name) was representative of several groups who were exceedingly unhappy with the BMLPGS. Eventually, they persuaded the Bush White House to grudgingly enact a practical application of its election promise to “clean up the air”, and this from the man who campaigned in part as “The Environmental President”. A nasty little very public release of several caustic faxes finally got Mr Bush to implement the clean-up that was agreed in 1991 and, nearly a decade later, finally led to the installation of water scrubbers and the reduction of emissions to their present volume of 6,000 tons annually.

But the bottom line for a tourist is this: the plant’s stacks still belch significant plumes of steam into the air, which when combined with the coal-dust blackened surroundings (that the low angle photo linked above conveniently blocks out) make for a most unattractive visual blight on a vista that combines the sparse desert landscape with the shoreline of Lake Powell. It’s a huge, ugly vapour-spewing behemoth that is visible for dozens of miles in all directions, sitting as it does near the low point on the floor of the surrounding valley.

Shortly after we crossed the BMLPRR and left the BMLPGS behind, we crossed another dam that, in Canada, easily would have qualified as the country’s biggest. But here, not too far from Hoover Dam, the Glen Canyon dam, behind which sits Lake Powell, earned an “Oh, that’s interesting” as we pressed on once more into Utah without really even slowing down. I felt a twinge of sadness, however, as I noted the roughly 40-foot high white border ringing what we could see of the lake’s shoreline. This land is experiencing a drought, and the visible evidence of that fact is the distance between the present waterline and the shoreline’s demarcation of where it has been in wetter times. Being Canadian, I occasionally am given to musing about just how far the US government might go to “negotiate” the acquisition of a portion of our still-vast reserves of fresh water if circumstances in the western US, especially in population-heavy California, should ever begin to creep into the red-lined zone labelled “desperate”. Everything old, it seems, is new again: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p121_HNAC.html

The roadside homes began to look a little more affluent and it became apparent that we were approaching an area that, in all probability, seemed to hold some attraction for new home development.

Settled by Mormons in 1870 at the specific direction of Brigham Young himself, Kanab, Utah, is smack in the centre of another area that has held a huge attraction for directors of western-themed entertainment, television in this case. According to one article I read, its environs saw the taping of dozens of episodes of The Lone Ranger, Death Valley Days, Have Gun Will Travel, Daniel Boone, Gunsmoke and, more recently, The Six Million Dollar Man and Grizzly Adams.

Since we got there shortly after noon, we decided to have lunch in a roadside restaurant called the Three Bears Creamery Cottage, hands-down winner of last year’s “Name Most Dripping with Saccharine” Award. But on the other hand, they also whipped up the thickest milkshakes I have ever been served, anywhere. These things had the consistency of ice cream when you allow it to thaw slightly and then stir it to remove the lumps. It had to be consumed with a spoon because a straw big enough to draw any amount into its vacuum would have had to be too big for a mortal human mouth to envelop.

We pressed on to our next destination, one I had been particularly looking forward to. Zion National Park is the Grand Canyon in reverse. At the latter, as you’ve already read, you’re perched at the edge of the Canyon, a mile above its floor. With Zion, you actually drive down into the canyon, eventually to find yourself looking up at its soaring walls of rock.

The road through Zion to Springdale is definitely a passage you want to take in daylight, if only because you have to travel something akin to the already-described switchback paths along which the Grand Canyon’s mules carry riders down its cliff face. In this case, of course, you’re in your car, but the feeling is no doubt similarly unnerving. The roadway also travels through a tunnel over a mile long, something both our teen-aged travelers pronounced to be one of the trip’s highlights. They even developed a spontaneous backseat “tunnel dance” with vocal accompaniment which they decided they had to perform for the entire duration of our sojourn in the rock-encased darkness. (How long can a mile possibly be? Oy, let me tell you…)

Then suddenly, we exited Zion’s south end, which simultaneously serves as the front door to the town of Springdale. And among the very first of Springdale’s businesses we encountered was our home for the next couple nights – Flanigan’s Spa.

Flanigan’s, to me, was just a very nice place to stay. Their spa-ing is something I really wasn’t ready to buy into – but if I were, they would quite happily immerse me, we were told on arrival, into an array of New Age experiences like Qigong massage, external Qi healing, “Singing Bowls” audio therapy, “dermalogica face-mapping skin care”, aromatherapy, “spiritual journaling” to the accompaniment of Native American flutes, eyelash tinting, exotic body wraps, Shiatsu…

Singing bowls? Eyelash tinting?

(Googlegooglegoogle…)

1. “Following in the tradition of the ancient Tibetan sing bowls and bells, it can be used to balance the physical energies and harmonizes body, mind, and spirit. Many scientists, musicians, doctors and health practitioners are discovering that quartz crystal bowls create a sacred spiral energy which can be used for healing and empowering, calming the mind and intensifying meditation experiences, balancing the human energy system, cleansing the auric field, awakening creativity, creating or bonding relationships, manifesting abundance, and expanding consciousness.”

Okay… maybe. Lord knows it’s been years since I cleansed the wax from the ol’ auric field with a turkey baster and warm water.

2. “This Monday, I had my first experience with eyelash tinting. So naïve. I think, bravely, how many nerve endings can an eyelash have, anyway? It’s just an eye fringe, really. Well, lots… When sailors were punished with ‘twenty lashes’, I think I know how they felt.”

Oooooo-kay. Maybe not.

Flanigan’s also has something called a Meditation Labyrinth perched atop a hill on their property. With visions of the Hampton Court Maze in our heads, my wife and I hiked up only to discover a representation in concrete of the spiral symbol that almost seems to serve as Flanigan’s logo. It’s here: http://www.outdoorutah.com/flan_labyWR.jpg and yes, it does look like something the Ontario Provincial Police would lay out in an elementary schoolyard the day they bring their “How to Ride Your Bicycle Safely” mobile unit to Show-and-Tell. My wife and I sort of paraded around it, goofing around and skipping over its boundaries after a while, but really just taking in the gorgeous surroundings while chatting happily away, rather than engaging in any sort of meaningful contemplation.

Later, when we were reading the spa guide in our room, we read that the labyrinth was intended as a place for deeply meditative moments, that it should be approached in silence, most especially when walking its narrow spiral pathway. The guide even went so far as to counsel passing other walkers very carefully and respectfully, so as not to disrupt their personal meditation. (Fortunately, we were the only two present during our visit to the hilltop, otherwise I have no doubt we would have been voted out of the spa entirely.)

Springdale essentially served as our base while we tripped through Zion and, on a different day, drove to Bryce Canyon. Here, in brief, are a few of the next couple days’ highlights:

Zion’s geology: It is a geologist’s Nirvana and a summer in Zion apparently features a wide variety of opportunities for field geology camps, or flora and fauna-based – or truly spectacular photo-shoot – camping experiences. Just Google “geology of Zion National Park” and you’ll discover the highlights of its 240 million-year old history. From the non-geologically-trained tourist’s point of view, it is a breathtaking array of sheer vertical surfaces, scarred by some often surrealistic patterns. We paused at something called “Checkerboard Mesa”, an enormous formation whose sides are criss-crossed by far more vertical and horizontal lines than one would find on a checkerboard, but it’s easily clear how the game board provided the naming inspiration for this unique tower. If the link works, it should open up as the very first picture right here: http://www.eastziontourismcouncil.org/znps.htm
You can be forgiven for thinking, “I hope that giant sleeping rhinoceros doesn’t wake up!”

The next day, on a somewhat longer scenic drive into the canyon, we would pause for a short hike up something called Weeping Rock, a waterfall beside which is a sheer rock face that does indeed seem to weep water. Once again, it’s explained by the geology as ground water from the canyon rim far above leeches through the strata, easily passing through the softer, more porous layers, to be squeezed out when it runs into a harder dam of an impermeable rock layer farther down, leaving some rather striking run-off patterns after thousands of years o’ tears:
http://www.zionnational-park.com/images/albums/pages/weeping-rock-s_jpg.htm

Bryce Canyon: In Bryce, we were actually defeated somewhat by that huge snowfall a few days earlier. “Somewhat”, because it didn’t keep us from driving the canyon’s rim road, which had been beautifully cleared. But the viewer overlooks had the distinct feel of fortress ramparts with snow that reached as high as the tops of their rail fences. We have a great photo of our teen travellers standing atop a snowpack that had to be at least 12 feet deep, its boundary defined by the line where what must have been a simply enormous snowblower had worked to clear the visitors’ parking lot. But all of the canyon’s scenic side trails were completely blocked so there would be no rimwalk hikes on this visit. (Aw, shucks!) Bryce Canyon also includes a formation called the hoodoos, eroded columns that are eerily humanoid in form and reminiscent of that Chinese archaeological dig where they unearthed several thousand terracotta warriors. Compare for yourself:

http://www.sights-and-culture.com/America/Bryce-Canyon-hoodoos.html

vs

http://www.chinavista.com/travel/terracotta/warrior01.html

I especially like the caption’s reference to the “No.one pit” under the photo of the warriors. It reminded me of Ulysses’ encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, who cried out that “No One is hurting me!” after Ulysses had introduced himself as such, and then poked him in his one eye to make good his escape when none of Polyphemus’ brothers came to his aid. (Baby Duck: it’s not just a cheap wine; it’s a Classics education!)

Buffalo burgers: Just outside the northern entrance to Zion National Park is an enormous farm that is home to domesticated herds of mule deer and buffalo, both of which we saw in considerable numbers. At one point along the perimeter fence, there is a small café with a large sign advertising “Buffalo burgers!” On at least one occasion as we drove by, there were some 30-40 of the huge critters grazing placidly scant feet away the sign. To my mind, it was the meat-eater’s version of a restaurant lobster tank. (“Yeah… give me a half pound ground off the haunch of that big shaggy guy over there, please.”) Fortunately none of them could read, otherwise I suspect they might have trampled the rather casually constructed building, along with anyone who happened to be in it at the time, into the Utah dust. They are frighteningly large animals!

Polygamy Porter: We were, after all, in Utah. And some waggish brewery – Wasatch Beers of Park City, Utah – has actually managed to parley a not-too-bad dark beer into a brilliant bit of marketing. (And successful! I returned with a t-shirt emblazoned with a Rubenesque portrait of a man surrounded by many women, and the caption: “Why stop with just one? Bring some home to the wives!”) I also have an empty PP bottle, and even found time to try it from the tap in its draft version while waiting for our take-out pasta ‘n’ pizza dinner one evening. And yes, it offends the Mormons. But the brewery’s owner has rather pragmatically addressed the concern from a totally unexpected point of view. In at least one interview, he agreed that he had been worried about marketing the now hugely popular beer, but not on religious grounds. No, he said that he understood that practising polygamists marry women in many cases when they’re still well underage, and was worried that he might be charged with targeting alcohol-related advertising at minors!

What makes a teen-ager laugh?: After hiking up yet another occasionally cliffside trail to something called the Upper Emerald Pool (How “cliffside”, you may wonder? At several places you are warned not to dislodge any size of rock, because it could fall on hikers somewhere else on the trail a switchback or two below), we decided a late lunch at the Zion Park Lodge was entirely deserved. As we waited for a break in the moderate traffic, one kind driver in a very large SUV stopped and waved us on. As we started across, suddenly a heavily amplified voice boomed out loudly from speakers located somewhere behind the grille, commanding us to “Enjoy your stay, but watch out for falling ducks!” We gave the whole cluster of passengers a big wave and the warning set our youthful co-travelers off for probably an hour. It was also immediately made clear to us, as parents and vehicle owners, that it would be “So cool!” to have a speaker system and microphone just like that installed in our car once we got back home.

And speaking of food: We ate bumbleberry pie at The Bumbleberry Restaurant in Springdale! I don’t know if the place is the namesake of the dessert, but if you believe their own promotional material, it is (from a review in The New York Times, no less): “One mile south of the park boundary, this family restaurant is known far and wide for its patented bumbleberry pie. What's a bumbleberry? The waitress will be more than happy to tell you.”

I’ll spare you the suspense – children and the feeble of heart please avert your eyes: there is no such thing as a “bumbleberry”. But the pie indeed exists, and its “ingredient” is in fact a most happily baked blend of (usually) apples, raspberries, blueberries and rhubarb. Oh, and a whole bunch o’ sugar. Ontario residents might in fact be interested to note that Loblaws sells a pretty darned good facsimile of it, perhaps not quite so “raspberry-ish” and augmented with chopped pears, but it’s just fine if you’re looking to approximate the original bumbleberry taste experience without having to cross the continent.

(I could make a career of this – Baby Ducklings with especially long memories, or no life whatsoever, might recall that during last year’s Spring Break, we enjoyed key lime pie at the Key Lime Bistro on Captiva Island, Florida. Maybe next year, we’ll visit the Sandwich Islands.)

Up next: Finally bringing an end to the story that has taken five times longer to tell than the trip actually took: Back to Las Vegas and consigning Spring Break 2005 to the memory file.

Monument Valley

“Around her neck
She wore a yellow ribbon,
She wore it in the springtime
And in the month of May.
And if you asked her
Why the heck she wore it,
She said 'It's for my lover
In the U-S Cavalry'.”

Refrain:
“Ca-val-ry!
Ca-val-ry!
She wore it for her lover
In the U-S Cavalry.”

For full effect, picture that John Ford adaptation of the old folkie staple being sung by a near Mormon Tabernacle Choir-quality baritone chorus as, onscreen, a long line of dusty, mounted cavalry troopers plods along. In the background, gray towers of rock (it’s a black-and-white movie; in colour, the towers are rust red) rise hundreds of feet from the floor of the sun-blasted desert, its surface mottled with clumps of sagebrush and scrubby little bushes that seem to need only the faintest of gusts to be converted to the rolling tumbleweeds that have themselves become the subject of many a fireside camp song.

Welcome to Monument Valley.

“She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949) is the second of three John Ford movies that have come to be known collectively as his “Cavalry Trilogy”. The other two are “Fort Apache” (1948), and “Rio Grande” (1950).

This is one brief part of what one reviewer had to say about “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”:
“[It] is one of those glorious westerns, luminously photographed by director John Ford. It stars John Wayne as a widower living at a military outpost with the cavalry and features some of the most gorgeously photographed exteriors ever captured on film. Monument Valley becomes a place of quiet, stoic beauty and The Duke never gave a more impressive performance than he does here.”

“Quiet, stoic beauty”… Well yeah, I suppose. But when you’re traveling with two 14-year olds who scuttle under the edge of a boulder the size of a four-storey building and pretend to be twin “Charlotte” Atlases, “quiet” and “stoic” are not in evidence (said, incidentally, without a shred of regret. What minds but those of 14-year olds could look at The Mittens – more below – then quickly set up a shot for you in which each has a hand pulled into her sleeve so that both are now immortalized in our home photo album as they stand with silly smiles while each appears to be “wearing” one Mitten?). So you don’t miss “quiet” or “stoic” one little bit, because you are left with beauty and, in the early evening’s setting sun, Monument Valley provides more than enough of that.

If you scroll down a bit here: http://www.tcf.ua.edu/Classes/Jbutler/T440/FordIllustrations.htm
you’ll see the master actually directing scenes in the Valley. The image with the little railroad trolley car features a formation in the background called The Three Sisters, a trio of stark and wonderful fingers of rock. Immediately below it on the left [right under the words “Stagecoach (1939; left)”] is a beautiful black-and-white shot, taken at sunrise, that captures two similar formations in the left and centre background that together are called The Mittens (because that’s what they look like).

And here is a stunning colour sunrise photo of one Mitten casting its shadow on the other. http://www.monumentvalley.com/Pages/english_homepage.html

Given the distance between the two and their near match in height in this photo, this camera’s shutter had to have been tripped at almost the precise moment the morning sun first rose above the horizon. A minute and a half later would have been too late. While you’re “there” (virtually, I mean), click on the Photo Gallery to see a few other equally gorgeous shots. This is obviously a photographer with a deep reverence for this place.

I doubt there are many people with a lifetime spent among American movies who haven’t seen some part of Monument Valley onscreen at least once. I found one website that lists some 33 major film titles whose screen images have included parts of this magnificent setting. And not just westerns. “Forrest Gump”, “Easy Rider”, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “National Lampoon’s Vacation”, “Back to the Future Part III”… all included Monument Valley scenes. The Valley’s “Totem Pole” formation even doubled for part of the Swiss Alps in the Clint Eastwood movie, “The Eiger Sanction”. To that list can be added a bunch of television shows – ranging from old classics like “The Lone Ranger” to the modern ultra-high-tech helicopter adventure, “Airwolf” – and countless TV commercials. No wonder I felt a sort of kinship the moment we crested the first hill on the dirt road that winds through the Valley after you leave the Visitors’ Centre. It seems I grew up here!

Ever since Mr Ford first scouted locations for his early signature film, “Stagecoach”, and decided that Monument Valley would fill the bill, the setting hasn’t been just merely associated with the mythological “American west”, it _is_ the mythological “American west”. Ford himself said, "I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land." The gift shops and souvenir shelves in this area are liberally stocked with books about the films of Johns Wayne and Ford, and the impact of Hollywood on shaping the modern perception of the American west.

Look closely at that photo of Ford directing from the railroad trolley. The lead horseman in the cluster on which he is focused – the man carrying a rifle, buckskin-wrapped to shield it from the dust – is John Wayne. Heck, even the Navajo-themed souvenir store in the Best Western Kayenta was selling books about the Indians’ perpetual silver-screen nemesis, cowboy John Wayne.

(This story might be apocryphal, but there is allegedly a scene in one of the many Hollywood westerns where a line of Indians sits poised on a ridge, waiting for the order to attack a hapless wagon train passing by far below. As the camera pans the war-painted “savages”, suddenly one of them, obviously the chief, turns to his warriors, raises his rifle high in the air, and shouts fiercely, “Ya’a t’eeh!” (pronounced “YAH-te-hay”) which triggers a howling charge.

Thing is, “ya’a t’eeh” is Navajo for “Good morning”. One can almost see the weary scriptwriter, hunched over his morning coffee at Kayenta’s Amigo Café after having been up all night, tasked with producing a final re-write before shooting was to begin a little later in the morning. He inserts the one word of Navajo he’s heard – probably every morning at the Amigo Café, in fact – then bundles his much-overwritten script pages together and rushes out to the Monument Valley location to tell the director, “OK, I’ve got it!”

But this following delightful note isn’t apocryphal. It appears in an article documenting how Navajos have been portrayed in movies:

“One evening at the Elderhostel I was attending in Phoenix, a young Navajo man who makes traditional flutes played for us and told us religious stories of his people. He also enlightened us about John Wayne and director John Ford, who are appreciated by the Navajo because they made movies with the Navajos playing the Indians.

These movies introduced the public to Monument Valley and brought tourists to their reservation, where they proceeded to buy souvenirs, thus helping the Navajos build an industry on their rugs and silver items.

Only after 1980 did movies come onto the reservation, allowing many Navajos to see these old westerns for the first time. Because locals had been extras, the audience became very emotional when they saw themselves or their parents as young people. On first viewing these movies, people often cried.

Several of our presenters emphasized that the Navajos have a strong sense of humor. During the making of the westerns, Ford would tell the Indian actors to talk to each other in Navajo. This they did, and what they talked about was how silly white men’s ways were and what a strange person this John Ford was. Watching the movies and understanding the language the Navajos would break out in raucous laughter, to the bewilderment of the whites in the audience.” (from The Columbia Daily Tribune travel section, March 6, 2005)

The first thing that struck me about Monument Valley is that it is a surprisingly compact space within which to drive a loop sufficient to take it all in. Onscreen, it always seemed to me to go on forever, with dozens of miles between buttes and hundreds of miles across its vast floor. But in reality, it’s fractions of a mile between buttes and a couple dozen miles across. Maybe surprisingly, that actually helps make it that much easier to appreciate that you are in a very special place as every turn of the wheel brings you face to face with yet another breathtaking tower of wind- and sand-blasted sheer rock faces.

At one point, my daughter, surely risking arrest, snaffled a small bag of the rust-red soil that makes up the floor of the Valley. I had some trepidations as I thought ahead to the inevitable encounter with Customs officials, but fortunately I recalled that most of the contraband responsible for raising their ire and suspicion usually assumes the form of a white powder, not ochre-coloured dust. Our bag of dirt proved to be no problem whatsoever.

The “monuments” in Monument Valley are all apparently possessed of deeply meaningful names rooted in Navajo spiritualism, but good luck trying to find them. I did discover that Monument Valley itself is known as “changing of the rock” – “Tse' Bii'ndzisgaii” in Navajo, a stream of letters that to me suggests that when spoken should immediately be followed up with “Gesundheit!”

But ever since the first white traders arrived and realized this was a place worth a diversion, they labelled the structures with much more mundane titles, but each strangely applicable to the object suggested by the stone’s shape. “The Mittens” are perfect examples.

Others include The Three Sisters, Owl Rock, Elephant Butte, Camel Butte, Totem Pole Rock,
Rabbit Rock, Castle Rock and King-on-his-Throne, to name just a few.

(And oh yes, don’t think for a minute the 14-year old minds in our company didn’t trigger combined fits of giggles the first time a small sign appeared pointing to “[Anything] Butte”. Camel Butte and Elephant Butte just about did them in.)

I forget who asked and answered the question, but never let it be said that we pass up an opportunity to add an educational component to our travels. Our journey into the Valley, as noted, saw us occasionally confronted with the name of yet another “butte” or “mesa” and, somewhere during our trip, we found out that what makes a plateau, mesa and butte respectively is simply a matter of size and age.

Start with the point at which flat land falls away at a cliff edge, and the land approaching that cliff is a plateau. As erosion and weathering work their way through a different part of the plateau, isolating a large, flat-topped stand-alone feature, like an enormous inverted soup bowl, that’s a mesa. Add a few more millennia, mix with countless days of stoutly blowing winds and rainstorms; combine with perhaps the work of a river inexorably grinding away at its base, causing sheets of stone around the edge of the mesa to fall away, landing as rubble, eventually to be carried away or further eroded to smaller rocks and dust, and the smaller, usually more dramatic formation is a butte.

So when you finally do appear on Jeopardy, and get the chance to say, “I’ll take plateaux, mesas and buttes for $1,000, Alex”, send me a thank you card.

Oh, and 5% of whatever you win.

Up next: Off to Springdale, our longest stay anywhere this trip, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, bumbleberry pie, Polygamy Porter and back into Sin City.

The story of Spring Break 2005 continues as our intrepid travellers leave the snowy terrain of the Grand Canyon behind, and drive eastward and downward towards our next destination: Kayenta (which, as will be seen, is apparently Navajo for “You really don’t want to be here!”).

The highways in this part of the world are amazing! Maybe it’s because there is not a lot of obvious industry other than that which caters to tourists so considerable federal, state and local tax dollars are expended in an effort to minimize the wear and tear on vacationing motorists’ shock absorbers. Or maybe it was the fact that we were driving a car that rental agencies classify as “full-size”, with all the attendant near-luxury features lacking on our own car sitting in the garage at home. But whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes, he stood there on Christmas Eve – HATING the Whos!... (Oh wait, sorry, got sidetracked there. Where was I?) But whatever the reason, when we were travelling in open country, we found ourselves gliding along beautifully-paved surfaces almost everywhere we went.

It might seem like old hat to some people but, until this trip, I had never driven a car on cruise control. So please indulge me while I… what’s the word? Oh yes – digress about this miracle of modern motoring.

After descending below the snow line and coming down onto the much flatter, drier land below, we crested several gentle rises, each followed by a long shallow drop into yet another valley. After the third or fourth of these had produced as the road’s only deviation a slight arcing to accommodate the curvature of the Earth, my wife suggested I switch on the cruise control.

“Huh?” I responded in my gender’s typically articulate means of expressing a need for further information. She pulled the operating manual out of the glove compartment and quickly found the directions for turning over control of the car’s speed regulation to the HAL 9000 computer embedded in the dashboard. It was a two-step process, both involving buttons mounted on the steering wheel. First, you pushed a button that essentially alerted the car that it was going to be switched to cruise control mode. Then you accelerated to the speed at which you wanted to cruise and pushed a “cruise lock” button.

(Then, I assume you remove your shoes and socks and make pencil sketches with your toes, since your feet no longer have any purpose connected to controlling the car.)

At first, it was incredibly unsettling. As soon as I pressed the cruise lock button for the very first time, there was a small but noticeable acceleration as the car received a burst of gas to lock it at the requested speed. Now I, of course, am a guy – that is, a rational, calm driver that motorists the world over admire. So immediately I thought of Stephen King’s “Christine” and promptly thumped my foot against the brake to counteract what I was sure would be runaway acceleration, ending only when we ran over Buddy Reperton. As everyone in the car lurched forward as the result of my braking, my wife said dryly, “No, it’s supposed to do that.”

The second time, I waited after that initial minor burst and, sure enough, the car’s speedometer sat as solidly as a rock at precisely the speed at which I had pushed the lock button. Now I felt like Wile E Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, when he first tried on rocket-powered sneakers and proceeded to flash from point to point with his new high-tech toys (coincidentally in very much the same sort of country through which we were now cruising… controlled).

It really takes some getting used to. When I drive on an unknown road, no matter how well paved it is, I am in the habit of easing off the accelerator just slightly when approaching even a gentle turn if I’ve never before encountered what is on its other side. 99 times out of 100, the road just straightens out and back onto the accelerator will go my foot. (I’m talking about a drop-off of no more than 3 – 5 km/h here; and it’s probably more the need to feel psychologically in control if it should ever turn out – that one time out of 100 – that a cow is lying mid-road in an advanced state of insulin shock at the other end of the curve.)

Other times, I would find myself approaching the rear end of a slower-moving vehicle like a camper or semi-transport faster than I felt was comfortable. Despite needing just a simple nudge of the steering wheel to drift me over to the passing lane, I would instead put just a slight bit of pressure on the brake and immediately the car would kick itself out of cruise control.

So I cruised for a time, but while it’s a nice option it’s not on my list of required standard features when next I buy a car.

We were now entering what a local map that I bought called – apparently without a shred of political incorrectness – “Indian country”. (Try publishing anything under that label in this country! Dateline Canadian Press: “Representatives of several nascent aboriginal autonomous self-governing First Nations National Assemblies of native indigenous peoples societies continued their third day of occupying the federal Minister of Cartography’s office to protest the department’s 2005 edition of ‘Canada’s Indians Welcome You!’, which band / tribe / nation / society / leaders claim is deeply offensive to their heritage. The leaders are demanding $110 billion in compensation, title rights to all Canadian land east of Tofino, BC and have agreed to meet with federal representatives at Algonquin College, Ottawa.”)

Roadside signage, in a marked change from the symmetrically-lettered National Park Service style, gave way to often crudely hand-lettered sheets of plywood promising “turquoise”, “silver”, “Chief So-and-so’s Indian Souvenirs” and the like, “Just ahead!”

And I noticed something else, especially when we crossed the border of the Navajo Reservation, but by no means exclusive to those boundaries. Among Americans, there is often a pride in just being “American” that goes way beyond the Patriot-Lite “I am Canadian” chauvinism that we know up here. Down there, they live it. In the middle of some of the most ungodly pieces of parched roadside desert land I would occasionally see a structure that looked no more functional than a northern Ontario duckblind, fronted by a flagpole from which would be flying a large and always brand new American flag. Every second car, it seemed, was decorated with a magnetic ribbon-shaped sign commanding any of a dozen variations on “Support our troops!”

You hear the word “heartland” used to describe the basic set of conservative patriotic values that propelled the current Bush back into the White House. But the evidence of that heartland rides the highways and bi-ways of desert country in Utah and Arizona, flies from its flagpoles, beams from its billboards, professional or hand-made, especially on the Indian reservations. The Navajo, to take just one example, clearly are strenuous supporters of the US troops and the present foreign policy that has placed so many of them in Iraq. (The cynic might also take note of the many dilapidated homes dotted among the countless small towns in this part of the country and conclude that, for many families, the US army might well be just about the only employment opportunity that their children have. Thus, “Support our breadwinner.”)

But the Navajo nation also provided a truly unique unit to the US forces in WWII. Known as “code-talkers”, they gave the American forces an unbreakable code to use in radio transmission when they simply used encryptions based on the Navajo language to speak to one another over the airwaves. At the time (and for that matter, today), Navajo was a language largely spoken – very little of it was written – and spoken exclusively by a specific indigenous group that a cultural anthropologist would describe as “linguistically autonomous”. It wasn’t a language, in other words, with a translating dictionary available for purchase in Imperial Japan’s better bookstores.

The code-talkers were awarded a special unit citation by President George W Bush on July 26, 2001. The President called them men who “in a desperate hour, gave their country a service only they could give.” (“Wind Talkers”, a 2002 movie starring Nicolas Cage as a soldier tasked with protecting a code-talker – or shooting him should he fall into enemy hands – is now on the rental market. It tells the code-talkers’ story within the framework of a not-so-bad war movie.)

And as you drive in Navajo country, you will occasionally encounter a sign proclaiming a small town to be the home of “So-and-so, WWII Navajo Code-talker”, and more than one museum dedicated to the unit.

As we continued our drive, I often found myself baffled, wondering what originally motivated a home builder or a town founder to decide that a house, or settlement, should be built on a particular patch of apparent desert nothingness, vs an identical patch anywhere within a visible 15 mile radius. In some cases, a single home had sprouted a couple miles off to one side or the other of the highway, creating a “driveway” of Odyssean length. (This was brought home late that afternoon when we watched a child disembark from a school bus to begin what looked like about a three-mile hike up a “laneway” – which in Ontario would qualify to be its own Concession Line – to his home, just visible on the distant horizon.)

Our destination this day was a hotel we had booked in a town specifically because it is located a short drive from the next major scenic attraction on our itinerary.

Kayenta, Arizona is a somewhat nondescript windblown town on the Navajo reservation. It straddles a dusty junction just about where Arizona meets Utah. That it exists at all seems to be due solely to its proximity to Monument Valley, Utah.

While searching for confirmation of its spelling, I discovered its official website and found myself reading material that I think really merits a few minutes of closer attention here to its more… uh… colourful (or being American, I guess that’d be “colorful”) features.

The Kayenta website, which is still “Under Construction”, greets you with an unimaginative photograph of the official green and white highway sign emblazoned with its name, and what appears unsettlingly to be a bullet hole or two. Directly underneath it is a wide-angle shot of the town itself, which looks either like it was taken from the window of a distant car racing by at about 60 miles per hour, or was shot just after the atomic bomb was tested very close by.

Right from the site’s introductory message, the writer seems to throw up his cyber hands and wax philosophical, “Kayenta may not be a fun place to live if you are a picky person, but if you aren't, Kayenta is perfect.” There is, unfortunately, no further explanation about just how not “picky” one needs to be before you’ll find Kayenta to be a “fun place”. (Personally, after reading most of this site, I suspect this webmaster thinks that about six ounces of José Cuervo Gold straight up oughta make you just about “picky” enough.)

If you follow the “Images” link, you’ll be rewarded with additional snapshots of such attractions as “A dust storm”, a grainy, long exposure of “Burger King at Night” and, believe it or not, a photo of the town’s new traffic light as it “turns red”.

Among its “Coming attractions”, the growing site promises that it soon will showcase “Pictures of the Prosecuter's (sic) Office after the fire”.

The featured link to “The Movie Theater” is something you just have to read for yourself.* It is plainly intended to encourage visitors to stay in their hotel rooms and order up a video. (A brief excerpt: “The exit signs weren't on, but we all knew where they were. The entrance to Cinema One wasn't working right and every time it shut, it slammed a little. There were many kids in the theater and they all seemed to talk at once. I could hear the movie, but I could also hear them, and it wasn't fun.”)

Another link, cheerily entitled “The problems”, showcases several further highlights that contribute to the town’s charm: “According to some studies, there are over 55 gangs on the Navajo Reservation. Kayenta has its share of problems and recently a gang called ‘OFA’ or ‘OFAK’ has begun tagging the town. The letter (sic) stand for ‘Out F-ing Around’ or ‘Out For Another Kill’ and the gang originated in Los Angeles.” (“Tagging” by a gang is analogous to what a dog does to a neighbourhood fire hydrant to delineate its territory. The only difference is that the “tag” in question is not canine urine, it is spray paint and the mark the tagger leaves is a gang logo. In Kayenta, gang tags are sprouting up all over the place but the website advises helpfully, “Tagging is a serious problem and the only way to get rid of this ugly problem is to clean it up.”)

Other problems? Stray dogs: “If you go to a shopping center, you're bound to see some and tourists feed them. Do not feed these dogs! They may seem like they need help, but they are only adding to the overpopulation of stray and rabid dogs on the reservation.” (This caution accompanies a grim night-time photo of a trio of glowing-eyed dogs that look like they belong more on the set of “Hounds from Hell” than on the streets of a small town.)

Most cities avoid any mention of local crime worries. Not Kayenta. Referring to a regional realty webpage that provides a safety rating of neighbourhoods for prospective buyers and investors, the writer notes: “On a 1-10 scale, 10 being an ‘extremely high risk’, none of the crime possibilities fall below an 8! This site makes Kayenta out to be a very dangerous place to live and it seems like it tries to scare people away from moving here.”

If you do hear an ambulance or police siren, get out of the way, please: “They are most likely driving to a drunk driving accident, domestic violence case, or some other problem that happens daily on the Navajo Reservation.”

And finally, if you’re thinking of heading into the desert for a breath of fresh air, think again: “Pollution. Every town on the Rez has this problem. People dump their trash everywhere they can, and now that they closed the landfill, the problem is even worse.”

Remember this is a public visitor’s website!

The virtual “welcome” listlessly concludes, “This Web site may not update too frequently because Kayenta is a small community, and there is not much news to report on.”

I can’t but think that if this staunch member of the local Business Improvement Association is ever asked to add a music link to his site that best captures the spirit of Kayenta, it’s going to be a little something that goes a lot like this:

“The window's dirty
The mattress stinks
This ain't no place to be a man
I ain't got no future
I ain't got no past
And I don't think I ever can

The floor is filthy
The walls are thin
The wind is howling in my face
The rats are peeling
I'm losing ground
Can't seem to join the human race

Yeah…I'm living in a hell hole
Don't want to stay in this hell hole
Don't want to die in this hell hole
Girl, get me out of this hell hole

I rode a jetstream
I hit the top
I'm eating steak and lobster tails
The sauna's drafty, hoo
The pool's too hot
The kitchen stinks of boiling snails

The taxman's coming
The butler quit
This ain't no way to be a man
I'm going back
To where I started
I'm flashing back into my pan

Yeah, that's what I'm doing
And why not?

It's better in a hell hole
You know where you stand in a hell hole
Folks lend a hand in a hell hole
Girl get me back to my hell hole”

(“Hell Hole”, by Spinal Tap)

* I’m still not entirely sure there isn’t at least some tongue-in-cheekery happening here. But the site is as described, and appears in all its “glory” at: http://www.angelfire.com/az/rez/ The webmaster himself shows up in the photo essay about what seems to have been the greatest single moment in Kayenta history – the night “Windtalkers” opened at The Theater. He looks a little like an over-caffeinated Tim Curry, so who knows?

Such was our home for the night. And despite my in-depth coverage of the peculiarities of Kayenta’s web presence, after all that, to be fair, the Best Western Kayenta is a most pleasant (and unlike many of the “attractions” highlighted on the town’s official website, I can add a most “un-Kayenta-like”) place to stay. It was staffed, as nearly as I could determine, entirely by pleasant Navajo women each of whom sported a beautifully woven vest with a distinctive Navajo-looking pattern. In fact, it was so attractive that my wife mused about buying one for office wear, and we actually inquired about where and if they were for sale. But being Best Western corporate wear, they weren’t. However, we could find something similar, we were told, if we were willing to drive about 50 miles north. We weren’t.

And not too far from the junction (with the traffic light!) is a great little Navajo restaurant called The Amigo Café. We had two meals there. In one I tried a Tex-Mex platter that included a chimichanga stuffed with cornmeal that actually tasted like ground corn. Later, I opted for a “Navajo burger” that varied from a traditional burger in that it was stuffed into something called “Navajo fry bread” instead of a bun. Ottawa natives need only hear “Beavertail” to achieve a perfect understanding of what Navajo fry bread is. For everyone else, suffice to say that every recipe I have subsequently found includes the words “deep fry” in its instructions.

Diet food, it ain’t. But delicious it is!

Up next: 58 choruses of “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”; Monument Valley; Johns Wayne and Ford; three sisters and an elephant butt.

I think I must have still been running along metabolically somewhere just east of Toronto because, with no help required from an alarm or wake-up call, I woke up about 5:15 am on Sunday morning. At that hour, there was a distinct scarcity of daylight, made all the more noticeable by the near blackout-quality of the heavy drapes drawn across the window. And also in our room, there was a scarcity of lounging-around furniture. So I pulled the bathroom door almost fully closed, leaving a thin crack for light, and sat on the carpet just outside the bathroom, reading for almost an hour.

Finally, by about 6:15 am, I noticed that enough daylight was seeping in around the periphery of the curtains that an early morning walk would actually reveal something of the Canyon. My wife by then was also awake. Our teen co-travelers, however, were sleeping like… well, like teenagers. We had mentioned to them the previous night that if they awoke and found us gone, we were just out for a stroll and had not, in fact, sleep-walked our way over the Canyon rim in the dark.

We had already been fore-alerted to the fact that the Canyon presents its very best face under the glow either of an early morning sunrise or an early evening sunset. (Actually, I suppose “early morning sunrise” and “early evening sunset” are both kind of redundant, given that neither event has happened at any other time since the dawn of humankind… but I digress.) That morning, the cloud-free sky definitely promised a sunrise.

It is no exaggeration to describe our accommodation as being located mere steps from the Canyon – about 25 to be exact. The South Rim’s Canyon Village is perched literally on a sweep of exactly what its name suggests – the rim of the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon is honestly something you simply have to see for yourself to fully appreciate. A bit later, I’ll describe a safety lecture by a mule wrangler, but one point he made is worth inserting here: there is no such thing as a photograph that does the Canyon justice. To that I would simply add, neither is there a collection of words that even comes close. As previously noted, the Canyon – where the Village is located – is about 10 miles across and roughly 5,000 feet deep. It was that boundary that framed the vista that greeted us as we strolled to the rim wall (a man-made stone wall about two feet high). And at this point, fully every linguistic superlative in my possession deserted me.

In early morning, the softer light casts an infinite range of shadows on cliff walls and buttes both near and far, imparting both a visual depth and a stunningly rich palette of colours to the hundreds of layers of rock that define the geology of six million years of patient carving by the Colorado River.

From where we stood, the river was not visible. But I was already experiencing considerable difficulty trying to grasp the idea that however wide and how fast it could possibly be, it could somehow have been responsible for creating this massive terran cleft, no matter how many geological epochs have transpired since the river began its work. This carving runs over 250 miles in length but the river has also worked enormous meanderings into its pathway through this rock. When we finally did get to a viewpoint that enabled us to see it, it was a tiny and distant dirty brown stripe. From a mile up, it looked laughably languid. That ribbon wore this Canyon? Pull the other one!

So I’m not going to even try to describe the Grand Canyon. But if you’ve ever harboured a wondering about whether it’s worth the trip – it is. Like we did, go at a non-busy, cool time of year. Spring break is probably ideal. I understand it’s blisteringly hot at the height of summer. The nice thing about Spring break, as these notes will reveal further on, is that we caught the Canyon rim in a completely different mood on the second day of our stay.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On a previous visit, my brother-in-law had taken a day-trip on muleback down into the Canyon. My wife and I had long ago decided that he is a far braver soul than either of us would be should we ever have occasion to visit. But he had told us, even if you’re not going to take a mule trip, if you can possibly find the time to do so at least get over to the mule corral early in the morning when that day’s ride is assembling in order to hear the lecture that the wrangler gives to the riders.

So here we finally were and, as luck would have it, our sunrise stroll had indeed taken us to the corral. When we saw the train of saddled mules being led in, and noted that standing outside the corral was a cluster of bleary-eyed souls sporting yellow rain slickers emblazoned with large black lettering on the back, proclaiming each to be a “MULE RIDER”, we immediately decided to hang around. What followed was a combination stand-up comedy routine and safety lecture. By the time it was done, I’m not sure I could have gone through with the exercise of mounting up, even had I booked a trail ride.

In the Grand Canyon, the mules’ “trail” is a narrow path adhering to the Canyon wall. It follows a long series of switchbacks (points along the wall where the trail reverses direction 180 degrees) over the course of its long descent. At many points, so narrow does the trail become that the rider’s Canyon-side foot appears to be hanging out in space between where he sits, and the floor of the Canyon far below.

Riders are also cautioned to keep their mules close to the mule immediately in front. Apparently a mule likes to remain part of the group when he is on the trail and riders were warned that if their mule found himself falling behind, he was going to sprint to catch up. “And you don’t want to be on the back of a mule when he hits a switchback turn at 35 miles per hour,” the wrangler deadpanned.

Another point on which he was adamant was the need to whack the mule with the rider’s switch. And here he bore down on the animal lovers in the group. “These mules are my life and my source of income,” he began. “I am NOT going to tell you to do something that is going to hurt them.” Mulehide, he stressed, is incredibly tough. As a result, there is no way you can hurt one simply by thwapping him firmly with the switch. But in consequence, it’s also precisely why you have to hit the animal so hard. Apparently, you don’t get their attention if you swing your switch like you’re swatting flies.

To demonstrate, he took a switch and slapped his own leather chaps. The authoritative crack snapped across the corral in the early-morning air. “Now this,” he continued, inverting the switch, “is how the English hold their ‘riding crops’” He paused. “Don’t do this. You have to hold it like a tennis racquet, and you have to swing it hard! Besides,” he concluded, “if the English could do anything right, we wouldn’t be celebrating Independence Day every fourth of July… Anyone from England here?”

He went on about the need to sit up straight, because mules will adjust their load balance with a shake if it shifts too far one way or the other to the side, and about the need to drink lots of water because having riders pass out or throw up due to dehydration was the single most frequent mishap they encountered during their guided rides.

Then he delivered the kicker. They would be stopping at several rest and viewpoints on the trail – both on the downward and upward halves. At every stop, he stressed, “before you do anything else, you turn your mule so his face – and yours -- is looking into the Canyon. Now we don’t do this because we want you to get the pretty view. We do this because a mule, by nature, when he is startled, jumps backwards. So if we’re stopped, and your mule is standing a few feet away from where a small falling rock lands, or God forbid a large one, he’s going to jump backwards. So what direction do you NOT want his butt to be when that happens?”

He continued with his blend of comedy and simple common sense that, when all was said and done, left absolutely no doubt that for all the rules, each rider was in for an incredibly memorable, if occasionally terrifying, day but that they were all in very good hands.

The riders then were nervously matched to mules. The wrangler added that this was not an arbitrary process. He said that had been watching them all during the lecture, and he had a pretty good idea whose temperament went with what mule. “And besides, somebody has to ride ‘Widowmaker’,” he concluded with a wink.

By the time the day ride group was headed out of the corral, I still couldn’t quite fully shake the thought that their bright yellow jackets were solely to make it easier for the rescue helicopter to spot them on the floor of the Canyon.

Once we got back to the hotel room, the kids had awakened and were in the process of doing a little exploring on their own – to discover what channels the room’s TV pulled in. We persuaded them to drag themselves out for a look over the edge. They did so – in their pajamas – and pronounced themselves to be suitably impressed.

Once dressed, they rejoined us adults to make us once more a quarter of explorers and we opted for a ride via shuttle bus out to a place on the rim about 11 km distant called Hermit’s Rest. Interestingly, I have since spoken to people who visited the Canyon several years earlier, and they also took the Hermit’s Rest trip, but by private car. The system now in place has closed the route completely to private motor traffic. But the fact that there is a shuttle every 15 minutes and travelers are free to disembark and re-embark, as often and after however long they might wish at a single viewing point, means that one doesn’t need private transportation to follow a flexible schedule. The shuttle is more than flexibly accommodating.

Along the way, we found one point where two shuttle stops were barely a kilometre apart, so we decided to hike along something that our little tourist map innocuously named the “Canyon Rim Trail”.

I can’t possibly convey what the Canyon Rim Trail section we walked was like, but I have no doubt that parts of it probably made the earlier-referenced mule trail seem like a four-lane highway. My daughter was sporting a broad-rimmed black stetson and, at one point, while she and her friend were happily strolling along blathering away about the latest plot development in one of their shared-interest Japanese anime shows, I shouted back from my position in front – apparently to completely blocked ears – to duck in order to clear a low branch from a tree overhanging the trail. Daughter abruptly became aware of the branch when she clanged into it.

A few minutes later, there was a point where a minor bit of water erosion had nicked a small V-shaped run-off intrusion partway into the path. As I stepped across it, I glanced at the depth of the channel the water had made and suddenly realized that where it ended at the edge of the trail path, what began was approximately 800 feet of clear air began between us and the next bit of visible land far, far below.

I have no doubts the kids would happily have hiked the entire rim trail had we asked them to do so but that was the proverbial all-she-wrote for me. The thought of leading two kids whose attention was happily fluttering along in “I’m on vacation” mode any further on a path that had shown itself fully capable of adding little attention-diverters to its route when one was occasionally no more than half a second removed from a whole lot of nothing but gravity was all I needed to steer everybody up to the nearby rim road instead of carrying on along the right-out-there rim trail.

(I know – “Buck buck bac-CAW!” But the view didn’t go away for our few feet of removal to a paved roadway, and I felt a whole lot better about our collective footing. Plus the only hazard we had to watch for was the passing shuttle bus and its noisy motor gave us a lot of warning.)

Another travel note: take your binoculars. At home, I have a lovely little pair that collapses into a package about two-thirds the size of a pop can. But for all my pre-trip thinking, for some reason (“brain fart” I think is the correct term) the thought, “plan for long-range views” never even made it onto my pre-trip to-do list.

It was at one of the many points along this route where we got our first view of the river responsible for all this magnificence, and where we also paused at a monument to the ill-fated Powell Expedition, a ten-man group who apparently were the first whites to travel the Canyon from beginning to end. Along the way, they met water wilder than anything they had planned for, which wrecked two of their boats and wiped out no small portion of their provisions. In consequence, they came close to starving. Overall, Powell lost four of his expedition along the way, one who simply decided partway through the Canyon that he’d “had enough of the adventure” and dropped out after a month when the expedition stopped to visit some friendly Canyon-dwelling Unita Indians. The three others left the expedition in disgust together, sadly just a day before the others unexpectedly reached their goal. Climbing out of the Canyon, apparently they were killed by Indians in a reprisal killing when they were mistaken for miners who had raped one of their tribe’s women.

As one brief synopsis of just one of the published versions of the story (“The Exploration of the Colorado River and its Canyons”, by John Wesley Powell) captures the three harrowing months: “On May 24, 1869, ten men in four boats pushed off at Green River, Wyoming. On August 30, six men in two boats down to their last ten pounds of moldy flour, fifteen pounds of dried and re-dried and re-dried apples and a few pounds of coffee, came out into open country at the mouth of the Virgin River - blackened, bearded, emaciated, in rags - and saw three Mormons and an Indian seining for fish in the shallows.”

In an unintentionally hilarious typo to wrap up this synopsis, the bookseller adds breathlessly, “This is a griping tale of the first trip down the Colorado River.”

Small wonder!

As the day wound down, we four took an evening stroll once more along the Canyon rim walk (NOT the trail) that ran behind our accommodation area. The growing overcast, unfortunately, pre-empted any hope of a sunset, much to the disappointment of the busloads of tourists who were collecting around the observation area behind the main building and restaurant.

As we moved towards the clutch of short-term Canyon-watchers, we noted that a great many of them were Japanese high schoolers, complete with school uniforms of grey trousers / skirts and jackets, and a white shirt / blouse, topped off with a plain necktie for the boys. My daughter and her friend are big fans of people and things Japanese, even to the extent of earning high school credits by taking language classes every Saturday morning throughout the academic year. It was at this point that I cemented my status as embarrassing parent when, as we proceeded through the group, I gave a small cluster of them a cheery wave and said, “Ohio!”

Their reaction was to wave back and burst out laughing. (I had recalled from our houseguest Hikana’s visit last summer that “Ohio” was a form of greeting.)

But as we cleared the group of visitors from afar, our two mortified teenagers made it clear to me in no uncertain terms that “Ohio” is correct until noon. It means, “Good morning”. “Konichiwa” is apparently the Japanese “Hi howareya?” that is valid all day.

We ended the day by visiting several of the local souvenir stores. While I was waiting outside one for the representatives of the female gender in our group (in other words, everybody but me), who were inside shopping for turquoise earrings, I noticed some birds circling high over the Canyon in such a way as to be backlit by the last few fading bits of day-end glow from the sun as it settled behind the clouds. I recalled my brother-in-law’s telling me that he and his family had actually seen condors on their visit.

These birds were close enough that, at first glance, I knew they were the ubiquitous Canyon ravens. But as I looked closer, I noticed that among them were two massive soaring birds. (Being an Air Force brat, I immediately drew the metaphorical comparison of two bombers flying under fighter protection. Certainly the size difference helped suggest the image.) One of the store proprietors was a few feet away lowering the US flag from the store’s flagpole and I asked her what the larger birds were. “That’d be your condor,” she replied.

I told her of my brother-in-law’s experience on his previous visit and how lucky I felt that we were to catch a glimpse of the rare creatures. She confirmed that “rare” was the word for it. The two we could see were a part of a total Canyon condor population of some 34 birds, and her husband was involved in the census and banding of newborn condor chicks. Fortunately, the earring shoppers emerged in plenty of time to also watch the pair soaring along on the Canyon’s updrafts – they never so much as flapped a wing the whole time we watched them – eventually disappearing into the distant day-end haze somewhere far into the gap between north and south rims.

The next morning, my biology was still running on Ottawa time because I awoke at 5:15 am. Outside, it was still dark, so once again I did my bathroom-as-reading-light routine until deciding a Canyon rim path stroll in the dark in order to catch the sun’s very first nudge into the Canyon might be fun.

As I stepped out the door, I realized instantly that this would not be a sunrise morning. The previous evening’s clouds, in fact, had actually been harbingers of something considerably more than simple overcast, because the whole area was now blanketed by a 3 – 4 inch overnight snowfall! And more was falling as I watched. I was obviously the first one to be making the stroll this morning because I noticed I was leaving footprints on a completely pristine pathway.

It was eerie, and a little reminiscent of my first night’s experience standing by the wall staring off into the nighttime void. Except this morning the light values of the void moved progressively from black to very pale grey. But void it was. Had not the pathway and immediate Canyon rim been clearly visible, I might as well have been standing on the East coast shoreline somewhere around Cape Spear, Newfoundland, waiting for a break in a “pea-soup” fog.

But it didn’t take long for things to begin to clear up. Soon, breaks began to appear and it became apparent that the storm’s cloud line was right flush with the top of the Canyon. Through progressively wider gaps, I caught an occasional glimpse of a nearby butte or even the North rim, but because of the surrounding cloud, the land – whether near or distant – always appeared as a floating island in each random opening in the clouds.

Once again, my wife awoke long before our teen co-travellers and together we walked through a literal winter wonderland. For the next hour or so, the cloud progressively went away entirely, leaving a Canyon awash in new definition as the layers in the cliff walls were delineated even more clearly by the white strata of newly fallen snow. The trees and shrubs clinging to the rim or to Canyon walls also took on completely different appearances. No wonder, I thought, that so many artists and photographers find a lifetime’s inspiration in a setting like this. It’s a place whose mood can change seemingly with each new hour.

Today was also moving day, but the overnight snowfall left me wondering about the driveability of area highways. Checking with a local news channel, we were astonished to watch coverage of a huge freak winter storm that had dropped a staggering two feet (!) of snow on Las Vegas and closed the very highway we had travelled when we left the city to come here to the Canyon. However, we were headed east and the storm’s track had carried its worst weather not far to our south. Driving to our next destination, at least, was not going to be a problem.

Before we bid a final adieu to the Canyon, we made one more stop at an observation point called the Watchtower, which appears in a stunning photograph here: http://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np-image.grca0706.html and here are some whats and wherefores about how it came to be:
http://scienceviews.com/parks/watchtower.html

Despite looking like something ancient or, at its most recent – medieval – that Peter Jackson might have set atop a mountain just north of Helm’s Deep in his second Lord of the Rings movie, the Watchtower was actually built in 1932 and intended from the get-go to evoke, rather than recreate an architecture common throughout the area. It is a marvelous pause, and its view of the Canyon’s eastern end also overlooks a broad bend and a delta of the Colorado River where the area’s oldest human habitation remnants (to date) have been found. Its interior includes flights of rough stairs that line the inner walls and travel up some five storeys to an enclosed observation level. Interior decorations evoke petroglyphs (drawings on stone walls) and millennia of native mythologies. Once one gets away from the ubiquitous souvenir section on the main floor, one almost feels as though the place should be approached more like a shrine than like a tourist port-of-call. On warm, non-windy days (today, sadly, was neither), there is also an outdoor observation platform that is open for a truly panoramic overlook of this part of the Canyon and, far beyond to the north, The Painted Desert.

It was a perfect place for our final encounter with the Grand Canyon. After a last pre-drive pause (Not for us the “You should have thought of that BEFORE we left!” admonition), we re-boarded our Kia Amanti and pointed its nose east.

Up next: Eastward Ho! Cruise Control! On to Kayenta, Navajo burgers and red dust!