Canyon Country
As the new day dawned on September 8th, we began making trips from the house to the RV loaded with clothes, bedding, and foodstuffs. Kurt and my Dad were able to help a little, but mostly they just stayed out of our way. To everyone’s surprise, we were on the road by 8:30 heading south. An accomplishment for this group. Of course to get this close to our targeted time, my Mom had stayed up until about 3 a.m. getting ready. After the conversation died down, we started the big audio book we had chosen for our two week trip, World Without End by Ken Follett. Within a half hour, we were all into the story and happily traveling down the road gazing at the scenery, but mentally in another world. We made a stop for lunch at a Subway in Jerome. It gave us all a chance to stretch our legs and get in a game of dominos. We finished the day at Utah Lake State Park near Provo. It was an inexpensive stop at $20 with 50 amp power and clean bathrooms which is not reliably the case at public campgrounds.
On Wednesday, we again drove all day entertained by the book. I had chosen a small private RV park called Bauers in Glendale, Utah as our home base for exploring the canyons. Glendale is located conveniently between the two parks and the on-line reviews were raves. Conversely, the reviews for the parks right outside the entrances to Zion and Bryce were just the opposite. When we arrived, we found that our reservation had been lost. Randie and I, having been in the business for years of taking reservations, have a certain amount of sympathy for this situation if the owners handle the situation well. These folks did. They apologized that our requested site was occupied, gave us another one only a little farther from the bathrooms, and then made an adjustment to our bill as compensation. I enjoyed talking with the owners about campground ownership a bit. Seems they had never been RVers themselves when the decided to turn part of their apple farm business into an RV park. They talked to a lot of RVers before setting up the park and made some good decisions, but they also learned some things the hard way. Tammy, the owner, told me that the advice she was given was to make the bathrooms nice, especially the womens shower area. If the wives are happy, you’ll get returning guests. We all took the opportunity to check out the showers that evening and agreed they’d done a good job.
Being out in the middle of nowhere, there was no television reception or cell phone service. We all decided this was a perfect time to open up the old home movies that I had picked up from Costco recently. For my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, we had taken all the old super 8 movies from 1958 through 1989 and converted them to two DVD discs. We watched the first disc that night beginning with scenes from the months before my parents’ wedding, through the toddler and childhood years through to 1974. There were some portions that I had never seen before and, of course, much of it was new to Randie. He claimed not to be bored as we all hollered out comments like, “Look at Mom’s hairstyle!” and “There’s Kurt pretending to be Batman”. Randie commented on how attractive my parents were in their youth. My Mom looked like a pin-up gal and my Dad was movie star handsome complete with a pipe.
Since it had rained much of Wednesday evening, Randie consulted his favorite weather satellite websites on Thursday morning. The colorful pictures helped us decide, based on the movement of the front, to attack Zion first. We all loaded into the toad and drove to the park entrance where Dad produced his Golden Access Pass, gaining us all a free entry. We all thanked him for being old. Entering the park from the East, our first experience with the park was the tunnels, the longest being a mile long. Quite an engineering feat in the 1920s, it was not built with modern vehicles in mind. It is possible to travel through these tunnels with an RV, but you must drive down the middle of the two lanes, forcing a closure of the tunnel for oncoming traffic. The park accommodates this with an extra fee and some inconvenience to other park visitors. The builders were thoughtful enough to blast out several openings along the mile long stretch providing fleeting previews of the amazing scenery that awaits once you emerge from the darkness. In an effort to reduce traffic in the park, a shuttle system was introduced in 2000 to ferry visitors to all of the major viewpoints and trailheads in the park. After watching the introductory movie at the visitor center, we left the toad behind and rode the shuttle to all the stops. At the furthest point, we left Kurt and Dad behind on a bench and with my Mom started down the riverside trail which leads to the Zion Narrows. Not being up to the full challenge nor wanting to keep the guys waiting for too long, we walked only about a half mile along the river. We saw several places where the water was seeping out of the rock, making its way to the river and had a close encounter with a chipmunk. They seem to be as unafraid of humans here as the ones we saw at Crater Lake.
For those of you who have never been to Zion National Park, the scenery is ….massive. The rock formations are gigantic and beautiful. I felt like I did back at the Redwoods: small. The scale of the environment just seems a little out of whack. We lunched at the lodge and removed our sweatshirts and jackets while commenting on the improving weather. By midafternoon, I was zipping off the bottom half of my pant legs and we were refreshing ourselves with an ice cream cone. By the end of the afternoon, Dad was exhausted and the rest of us were not far behind that feeling. It was a very quiet drive back to the campground which was evidence of just how tired we all were.
We finished off the home movies that night and went to bed early.
On Friday, we turned out of the RV park driveway in the opposite direction from the day before, heading to Bryce National Park. Once again, Dad’s park pass saved us the $25 entry fee and we thanked him for being old.. Although the two parks are within two hours of each other, the terrain is quite different. For those of you who haven’t been to Bryce, just picture Big Thunder Railroad at Disneyland. It is obvious from the first few minutes in the park that this is where the imagineers got their inspiration. Aside from the large variety of colors found in the rocks, from pink to deep orange to vermillion, the most notable feature in Bruce are the hoodoos. Hoodoos are pinnacles of rock left standing as a result of nature. In some cases there will be one large hoodoo and in other cases, there are hundreds standing together like an army. Also worth noting are the windows and arches formed throughout the park as softer layers of sediment erode below stronger strata of rock. As the previous day, we started our explorations at the movie location for an overview and then made our way out to the end of the 18 miles canyon rim road before turning around and stopping at all the viewpoints on the way back. The plateau we traveled along was dotted with ponderosa pine and aspen trees, but the canyon floor 2000 feet below was barren except for glimpses of a green ribbon that was the Bryce creek. When we could manage to force our gaze away from the beautiful and colorful formations, we found we could see well over 100 miles into the clear distance beyond the opposing canyon rim. In addition to all the natural geologic wonders, we got to see a lot of wildlife as well. We dodged deer in the road more than once, commented on the large size of the ravens patrolling the parking areas, saw chipmunks, an antelope, and a herd of bison. Randie was lucky enough to spot one of the park’s black squirrels, easily identified by it’s white tail. This species of squirrel is found only Zion and Bryce Canyons. It was a beautiful day in the park, although it had rained much the day before while we had cleverly avoided the squall in Zion.
When we got back to Bauers, we showered in anticipation of an early departure the next morning and Randie hooked up the toad for a quick get away. Mom came back from the showers with a dozen or more small apples and thoughts of baking a pie. Although the Bauers had converted the use of the land to an RV park, there were still numerous apple trees around and they were happy to give away apples to their guests. There were always a few 5 gallon buckets near the shower building full of apples looking for a good home.
On Saturday, we got an early start, but let it slip away from us at a spontaneous stop at McDonalds for coffee, dominoes, and breakfast. Fortunately, we got a nice surprise when we crossed the border into Arizona and found that we gained an hour of our day back. We left the coach around 11 o’clock at Kaibab National Forest campground, the best option we were able to come up with on-line or from the Trailer Life book. We got a nice long pull-thru spot with no hookups by the bathroom for $8.50 (thank you Dad). By a little after noon we had made it through the gate for the Grand Canyon North Rim and were having lunch at the lodge. When I was a child, my parents took my brother and I to the Grand Canyon’s South Rim and I can still remember thinking then that it looked unreal, like an oil painting. Although we could easily see the 10 miles across the canyon to the more visited South Rim, to drive there is more than 200 miles of road. We made the drive out to Imperial Point and then took the road to the end of the other leg of the park to Cape Royal. The views were beautiful and I have to believe that the Grand Canyon offers one of America’s most memorable landscapes.
Sunday morning we made the drive to Sedona. In route we stopped at a tourist rest stop in the middle of nowhere with a parking lot built for and filled with large tourist buses. The beautiful large store was stocked with Indian jewelry and artwork along with the customary cheap souvenirs and trinkets. We used the restrooms and stretched our legs while laughing at our memories of experiencing these type of places on our African and European bus trips. When we walked back out to our coach, we found foreign tourists from the buses parked near us bent over our front license plate CNIC RD taking pictures of the plate. I’m not sure if was the lettering or the fact that it was a Hawaii plate that attracted them, but several people snapped a close up. One French woman was even brave enough to approach our door and ask to take a peek inside, which we endulged. Our route to Sedona took us through a steep canyon comprised of numerous switchbacks. The hairpin turns were fittingly hair raising and the narrow road kept drivers very aware of the yellow line. Randie turned off the book as we started our descent for maximum concentration and we all tensed while somehow enjoying the view. When we checked into Rancho Sedona RV park we once again found that our reservation had been lost. These folks were not as accommodating though. And even though the mens room was out of order, the staff had a take it or leave it attitude about the ridiculous rate of $75. Admittedly, the park is beautiful and has a great location right downtown, but still… Once parked, we piled into the toad and went exploring to make the most of our one day. My folks had been here on more than one occasion, but it was the first time for Randie and I. My mom pointed out some of the notable formations of rock surrounding the town. Coffee Pot was the easiest to find, and it really does look like an old fashioned coffee pot. We drove all the way out to the old mining town of Jerome where the building seem to cling to the cliff walls by their toenails. We all left the Haunted Hamburger restaurant there fully satisfied from our early dinner and made our way back to Sedona in the dark. I would assess the town as artsy fartsy with the benefit of tons of natural beauty all around. We would have liked to have spent more time and hope to be back one day.
From here we head to Mesa to begin looking at potential snowbird roosts. I think we’re all looking forward to staying in one spot for a few nights and a nice hot shower.