Honeymoon Day 26: Jerome

After leaving the Grand Canyon, my yin and I spent the night in Kaibab National Forest. As with Yosemite, the campgrounds were full at the North Rim, but campers were allowed to take advantage of "dispersed campsites" in the forests outside the park free of charge. The nice thing about this was that it allowed us to sleep in a totally isolated area – no drunken college students (Big Sur), no singing Boy Scouts (Bryce), no screaming children (Zion).

The unfortunate thing was that it dropped down to almost freezing that night, and my yin and I woke before dawn to the sound of chattering teeth. We later confessed to one another that each of us had secretly tried to imagine how long until the sunrise because it meant we could finally break camp and get out of the freezing cold. The upside to the hypothermia, however, was that we got an early start that morning. Soon found ourselves entering another country:

I'm still not clear on exactly how the whole reservation system thing works, but I do know that it felt a little odd driving through the Navajo Nation in northern Arizona. I once heard Angela Davis refer to our treatment of Native Americans as "the great American apartheid", and what I saw seemed to confirm her analysis. Far from the apparent wealth of the tribes that have built and licensed casinos throughout the United States, all I saw driving down Highway 89 was poverty.

It saddened me, and the giant rock outcroppings of the Marble Canyons inspired snippets of verse:

Navajo reservations:
life in the mesa's shadow
(the silhouettes of)
vermillion cliffs
monsters in the daytime
and ghosts in the night.

The camera even got into the act, and the image below perfectly surmises the contradiction between the material poverty of the reservation, the majesty of the natural landscape, and the spiritual poverty of the nation surrounding the Nation:

(the billboard also shows why we chose not to go to the South Rim)

Eventually we came to Wupatki National Monument, which is about an hour or so north of Flagstaff. This was another of our unplanned stops and allowed us to glimpse both social and geologic history:

an Anasazi pueblo from the 12th century

lava flows not unlike those at Craters on the Moon

the San Francisco Mountains as seen from Sunset Crater

There was also this strange flower called Apache plume. The encounter with new plant species was one of the most consistently (and unexpectedly) rewarding parts of the trip for me, especially considering the fact that I can hardly tell a chickpea from a garbanzo bean:

Apache plume is without medicinal use, but does help prevent erosion

This was also the day that took us across parts of Route 66, which, once upon a time, connected Chicago to Los Angeles:

yes, that is our car antenna – the dangers of windshield photography

Much like Kerouac's On the Road, Route 66 was rendered a work of nostalgia by the advent of the interstate highway system, and now all that remains of its former vitality is a series of ill-kept marquees and billboards:

not exactly sure what the "European hostess" is meant to imply...

I wonder what "kicks" lurk inside this fine establishment?

After passing through Flagstaff, we followed Oak Creek Canyon down 2,000 feet into the stunning red rocks that surround and define Sedona. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, and there were cars lined up along both sides of the road. The entrance signs to the state parks and national forests along the way warned travelers "No Parking" and "Campsite Full", and my yin and I were a little nervous about the fact that we had no reservation.

Miraculously (or at least fortunately), we were able to secure a site at Manzanita Campground, and the park ranger told us that this was the first time since April that they hadn't been booked solid:

our campsite alongside Oak Creek

We told her we were hungry, and she directed us into Sedona:

our eventual destination

This restaurant, Sedona Chocolate, is the city's only purely vegetarian eatery (vegan actually), and most of the menu items are raw as well. Other than fruits and salad, I'm something of a skeptic when it comes to the whole raw food movement, but the Thai noodles I had were quite tasty:

noodles not pictured

They also had what appeared to be a giant orgone accumulator, or some other quasi-Reichian device that Burroughs undoubtedly endorsed between nods and hallucinations. It had a good look to it, though, and I suggested to my yin that she step inside so she could tune up her mojo:

With both her mojo and orgones in good working order, my yin and I headed westward towards the small town of Jerome, Arizona:

It was Saylor, back in San Francisco, who first told us about Jerome. At the start of the 20th century it was a booming copper town:

this lowered workers into the mineshaft

this is me, imitating said miners

When the price of copper fell, maintaining the mine became unfeasible and Jerome soon became a ghost town. It remained that way for more than fifty years, but during the last twenty it has become a haven for artists and artisans. Why they chose Jerome I have no idea, but my yin and I speculated that it was the overflow from Sedona as it grew more and more expensive.

The result is that Jerome is now half ghost town:

And half faux-Williamsburg:

Buddhas and hogs live side-by-side:

And prostitution has become a synecdoche for everything:

Even the post office (still in operation) is an accomplice to this ironic, quaintly contrived nostalgia:

Nonetheless, the downtown affords spectacular views of the old mine as well as the valley between Jerome and Sedona:

And I met a madman named Gabe who makes custom sundials:

my hand, not Gabe's

I was unable to ascertain whether he was:

A) a mathematical genius
B) completely insane
C) both answers A and B

But this is beside the point.

The point is that we returned to Sedona before sunset, and of all the towns we saw along our way it has to be the most beautiful. The earth is red, the sky is blue, the trees are green, and the white clouds float across them like dandelions in the wind:

to be continued...

Honeymoon Day 25: Grand Canyon (North Rim)

With some reluctance my yin and I left the state of Utah on a Saturday morning, and I have never been so wrong about a state – not even Idaho – as I was about Utah. In terms of sheer physical beauty and variety of geographic features, it's hard to imagine a place that is so beautiful in so many different ways in so little amount of space. Nonetheless, we had other places to be:

Given the arc of our trip, it would have been impossible to pass up a chance to see the Grand Canyon, but everyone we knew told us that we should go to the North Rim rather than the South Rim. Besides being a thousand feet higher in elevation (and therefore cooler) the North Rim is much less developed, and our friends and family thought this would appeal to our collective sensibilities.

But this is beside the point.

(Probably.)

The point is that the North Rim of the Grand Canyon was far and away the least populated National Park we visited, and there is a single road (closed in the winter) that leads in from the small crossroads of Jacob Lake. Arriving at our destinatIon, we ducked briefly into the lodge and found a giant kachina doll in the corner:

These figures are somehow connected to Native American cosmology, but I'm still not sure exactly how. We saw them throughout Arizona, and at some point I intend to learn more about the symbolic meanings of the various totems and weaving patterns. But, considering that they had a bronze donkey on the other side of the room, the lodge didn't seem like the best place to inquire about the kachina's spiritual significance.

Instead we took a short hike down into the canyon, descending a half-mile or so to:

Which gave us a view to the south:

And allowed us to see geologic striations called "lacquering" on the western canyon wall:

One thing that surprised me about the Grand Canyon is that it's not just a single giant gorge carved out by the Colorado River, but rather a whole series of ravines and canyons converging from numerous directions.

As we did the day before, my yin and I spent a couple of hours shuttling around the extremities of the park looking out from various overlooks. One of the coolest was this view of Angel's Window:

Viewed from the right angle, it frames the Little Colorado River:

At one of these stops we ran into three English "blokes":

One of them scaled a fence to pose for this picture.

Like us, they had been to Zion a few days before, and one of them told us that they had "run up Angel's Landing" so they could get around "the pansies." How much of their banter was braggadocio I'm uncertain, but I do know that they were three of the most colorful characters we met along the way.

The next morning we ran into them again at the Jacob Lake Inn where we had all stopped at 6:30 to get a cup of morning coffee. They were on their way back to St. George to return their rental car, then going on to: 1) gamble in Las Vegas; 2) rent motorcycles and ride them through Death Valley; and 3) spend a day on the beach in Santa Cruz before flying back to England.

i
m
age
miss
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After our encounter with the blokes, we went to Cape Royal, which affords stellar views of Vishnu's Temple. Many of the rock formations in the Grand Canyon are named after mythological and religious entities (Buddha, Confucius, etc.) thanks to one of the park's early surveyor's who had an interest in Eastern philosophical traditions. I can't remember his name, but here is a photograph of my yin practicing Vishnu Mudra in front of Vishnu's Temple:

We also came across come cacti on Cape Royal, which surprised me because it is more of an alpine rather than desert climate. I wondered to myself why it was I felt so drawn to these plants, in which I never had much interest prior to our trip. I think it has something to do with their underlying metaphysical implications (sukha and dukkha), which were brought into focus with the help of our 50mm lens:

pleasure

pain

After leaving Cape Royal, we stopped at Walhalla Point to examine Anasazi ruins. Apparently the Native Americans who once lived in this part of the world were farming people, and they lived in stone pueblos. This is all that remains today:

About 100 yards away was this tree, which had the most interesting shape:

It looked even better, though, with my yin standing in front of it:

When we got back to the main section of the park, my yin and I were on our way to the general store when we saw a building that contained pay showers. At this point, we hadn't bathed in days, and you have never seen two people any more pleased by running water and tile floors. As my yin put it, "That was the best $1.50 I ever spent."

i
m
age
miss
in
g

We went back to the lodge for sunset and made a few calls to our family and friends. We had been without cell phone service for even longer than we had been without showers, and it was nice to touch base with everyone. Also, the views weren't bad at all...

Honeymoon Day 24: Bryce Canyon National Park

It's only 90 miles from Zion National Park to Bryce Canyon, and my yin and I left soon after sunrise to insure a campsite. Along the way we stopped at a Subway restaurant that, for reasons unknown, is not only open before 8am but also advertises free WiFi on a roadside billboard. So we stopped to use their internet and picked up two veggie subs for later in the day.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that we reached:

someone else's memory

in plenty of time to secure a campsite, stop by the visitor center, and journey to the park's principle attraction well before noon:

Bryce Amphitheater

For more than two-thirds of the year, Bryce experiences nights below freezing and days well above it. As a result, the floor of the canyon is covered with thousands upon thousands of hoodoos, which are tall cylindrical formations created by erosion resulting from this freeze/thaw cycle. These massive limestone pillars are unlike anything I've ever seen:

although my yin appears smaller than these hoodoos,
her mojo is actually much larger than theirs...

Even during our stay, which occurred in the most moderate part of the year, the temperature difference ranged from 80º+ during the day down to sub-40º that night. This was also the highest elevation at which we camped during our travels:

The wild thing about Bryce is the range of colors and shapes and shadows. We took a hike down from Bryce Point into the Amphitheater to get a better view of things, and I was shocked to see the colors sedimented in the limestone:

"Nature comes in this color?" I asked my yin.

As well as brightly-colored pine trees in bloom:

"What type of tree is this?"

Walking amongst the hoodoos is like walking in an unfathomably large sculpture garden, with the background, foreground, and lighting constantly shifting not only in composition, but also in intensity and proportion:

different colors and elevations

trees framed by hoodoo windows

windows on top of windows

windows inside of windows

There were also an inordinate amount of French-speaking people along our hike, which served to remind me of how little retention I have of the language. Nonetheless, I did obtain permission from this artistically situated couple to capture their image:

they may or may not have understood the question.

As we came towards the end of our hike, we came across this ominous sign before entering a part of the Navajo Loop Trail known as "Wall Street":

We continued on...

This section of the trail was truly impressive and led straight into a narrow canyon whose source of water had long since disappeared, although I imagine it would be a bad place to be caught in a rain storm:

my yin approaching Wall Street

Coming out of Wall Street, we saw "Thor's Hammer":

And my yin overheard a park ranger saying that they no longer name rock formations because the natural processes of erosion render the names nonsensical over time. In my mind I heard the voice of a former professor, "The breakdown of signifiers..."

From our exit point I was able to clearly see the Aquarius Plateau in the distance, and the haze in the canyon (caused by the heat) gave it an eerily painterly quality. From the camera's perspective it looked almost as if someone had combined an oil paining in the foreground with a watercolor background:

Bryce Canyon and the Aquarius Plateau

Wanting to give our feet a chance to heal, my yin and I spent the remainder of the day checking out various vistas along the twenty-mile road that runs through the canyon:

my yin at Rainbow Point

Unfortunately, we didn't see any of the endangered prairie dogs we read about at the visitor center. Of course, on the upside, we also didn't run over any of them:

We returned to our campsite before sundown:

And I, in an act of manliness, built a fire:

Whose chest-thumping, beard-growing benefits were immediately undone by the roasting of marshmallows:

We played gin rummy in our tent that night, but as was the case the previous night my yin soundly walloped me. We fell asleep before it got too cold and woke the next morning to an unbelievable sunrise over the Bryce Amphitheater: