May 1 to May 20, 2017
Moab, Utah
The weather in Wyoming and the plains being on the too-cold side, we decided on a bold course southward, to cross the US at a warmer latitude. Salt Lake City was the turning point. We could have turned left there and crossed into Colorado and Kansas, but it is a very mountainous pass that I didn’t want to drag the trailer through. We continued downward to Moab, Utah.
Very popular place this time of year, Moab is. The winter is too cold and the summer too hot, so visitors shoot for the few weeks in spring and fall to visit the wild and beautiful landscapes hereabouts. We managed to secure three nights lodging, at a steep rate of 50$+ per night. Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park were short drives away and we spent a day in each.
Arches features surreal redstone formations in a high desert setting. The most impressive, to me, are the giant ones—smoothsided monoliths rising straight up hundreds of feet.
The park derives its name from the arch formations of all sizes, of which the park has thousands. The downside of Arches is that everyone is supposed to stay on the narrow trails that lead to the formations, and when the park is crowded you are constantly rubbing elbows with fellow visitors. The park rangers are at pains to keep people on the trails because the desert floor elsewhere is covered with a thin crust of biologically active material that, over millennia, converts the sand and rock into soil. You can see it everywhere, and to step on it is to set it back in its work by thousands of years. So visitors drive from place to place about the park and march single file from parking lot to arch and back.
Returning from a fairly arduous hike I heard pounding footsteps behind. An agitated man passed me, looked about, and ran back the way he had come. A hundred steps later I found a little girl about to break into tears. “I lost my family.” “Did your father have short hair and wearing a purple shirt?” “I don’t know because I don’t speak English.” Her name was Emily and she was Quebecois. Brenda came along and I told her to hold the girl’s hand as we went back up the trail. Her family came in sight and they embraced and wept.
Canyonlands is much the same as Arches in trail restrictions but fewer people go there so the experience is different. And for my money the north end of Canyonlands park contains some of the most dramatic scenery in the country.
The park was created in 1964. The story goes that secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was flying over the land in a government jet with the official in charge of building dams whose name no one remembers. They flew over the junction of the Colorado and Green Rivers and the dam guy said he planned on putting a dam there and flooding the canyonlands. Udall thought, no, it would make a better park and lobbied LBJ to preserve the land which Lyndon did, like within a few weeks of Udall’s asking. Imagine these guys flying over the western lands like gods, deciding the fate of vast swaths of country.
New Mexico
Our planned course would bring us within a few hours of Albuquerque so we called and asked if we could visit again with the grandkids for a few days. That’s when the plot thickened. Hillary had a five-day conference starting the following week in Palm Springs CA (“Dermatopathology in the Desert” it’s called, legendary among dermpaths) and asked if we wanted to come along and help out with the kids (and the neighbor kids since the good friend neighbors were coming along too.) She had tried to hire babysitters in Palm Springs but hadn’t found any she was comfortable with. “Sure,” we said. So we committed to a fifteen day diversion.
I have to confess that the attraction for me was driving her Tesla to Palm Springs. They were all traveling by air and we would drive out. She has the D model 85S. There a few models above hers going to the 100S, which is the fastest production car on the road, going to 60 mph from a deadstart in 2.2 seconds. You heard me, 2.2. The Tesla is one bad motor scooter. I didn’t abuse its power, oh no, not me, but it is safe driving when you can put yourself in a nice little pocket of calm, with no other traffic around you, by the simple expedient of zooming to 100+ mph, briefly. Am I right or am I right? The vagaries of charging the thing are a little annoying, and make for a slightly longer trip, but to me it was a small price to pay for driving what must be the most well-designed and highest-functioning vehicle ever put on the road.
We stayed in Sedona AZ on the way out, and drove through Petrified Forest National Park. Both are worth the diversion.
We spent our six days in Palm Springs playing in the pool with the kids. Palm Springs was a Hollywood getaway of the 1960s and developed an atmosphere of libertinism. It is famous among architects for the concentration of mid-century modern design—low slung, angular buildings. There were some in the neighborhoods where I grew up and never considered them remarkable in any way (think sunken rooms, vertically-seamed exterior sheathing, sliding doors), but they are cool to see when altogether in one place and well-maintained.
The San Jacinto mountains rise up at the very edge of town on the west, and are the steepest mountains in the US, rising almost 11,000 feet from Palm Spring’s sea-level elevation over a mere seven miles. Snow and sequoias on the mountains, and 90+ degrees in the town.
Drove back through the Arizona mountains, through the copper mining region. What wild open spaces in this land, and what a short amount of time it took to rake it of its resources.
We left ABQ the day after we got back from California, picking up the truck and trailer from Tom’s RV shop where some mechanical issues were attended to.
Natchez, MS
Drove all day for three days to cross the Mississippi into Natchez yesterday, for a gathering of old-time musicians. Some of Brenda’s acquaintances from Augusta Music camp are here, as well as Harry Bowlick, the Missouri fiddler that we had met in Buena Vista music festival last September. I dropped her off at the festival while I explored Natchez and came back to camp with a pound of just-steamed crawfish from a roadside stand. Very hot and humid and storms threatening.
People in the south are so friendly you have to take it into account when planning your day. I bought some groceries before stopping at C&K Crawfish Steamers. The crawfish-steaming establishment was an old gas station/service station and they steamed the critters in big pots in the old service bays. Clay, the C of C&K, took time from his steaming to engage me. We shook hands generously and had an extended exchange while the perishables in the car earned their name.
Brenda and I took a guided tour of the small city in a glorified golf cart. It was worth the $20 per person as the guide was quite knowledgeable and the town interesting. Natchez is intact. It was not destroyed during the Civil War because the mayor surrendered the city to the Yankees after the firing of a single round from a Yankee gunboat. The Yanks were sailing down the Mississippi after pulverizing Vicksburg and the mayor did not want to see his city suffer the same fate.
The Mississippi was experiencing record flood heights when we were there. The 58 foot crest that was occurring when we were there had only been exceeded a few times in recorded history. No river I’ve ever seen shows as much raw power as the Mississippi in flood. It gallops. Detritus moves downriver faster than a person can run. Near the bank we watched numerous whirlpools, several feet wide and a foot deep, disappear and reappear.
Natchez is mostly built on a high bluff so little of the city is exposed to the swelling of the river. There is a little enclave at the foot of the bluff which was, historically, the location for brothels and bars. A few wooden buildings still stand there and we had lunch in one of them. A famous duel was held on a sandbar here in 1827. The duel denigrated into hand-to-hand fighting among a small group of men, one of whom, Jim Bowie, distinguished himself by skillful deployment of a large knife, known everafter as the Bowie Knife.
We’ll stay here a few days to rest up and make the turn towards home.