California Dreamin'

Debbie's freewheeling "plans" for this trip included meeting her brother, Ken.  It turns out we're to meet him twice, since our itinerary was so flexible. We spent five days in an RV Park near his house --visitng, touring, maintaining--  then we'll pick him up in San Fransisco in a few weeks, and travel with him for a week or so.

So here are Ken and Debbie at Joshua Tree National Park. 

Not only Debbie, but the Ranger at the
Park gate also wore cold weather gear,

As usual, it seems we brought the cold weather with us. Don't you believe the song that claims "it never rains in Southern California", either!

Ken kept remarking his surprise at all the greenery here.  Of course, he'd visited this area many times in the past and says it usually is not so bountifully green.We know it doesn't look that way to you, but we're believing.

Joshua Tree NP has two main attractions, aside from desert.  The obvious one, of course, is the proliferation of Joshua Trees here.  It is said the Mormons named this species because it reminded them of praises with arms uplifted.   Okay, says John, who can sort of see that, but why Moses's successor as opposed to some other praising Biblical figure?  That remains, as yet for him, unanswered.

The second attraction here are the many, many "small" mounds of rocks.   These have nothing to do with the stuff we'd seen in Utah.  Instead, geologists say each of these piles began life far underground as a molten magma bubble rising through the deposited sandstone layers as two tectonic layers collided.  Go ahead and google which one subducted never to be seen again, in the process taking whatever fossil clues with it.

When the magma bubbles breached the surface and solidified, the sandstone washed away, while cracks in the igneous rock enabled freeze/thaw vertical splitting that ended up fracturing each lump. The result is a unique collection of piles of Nature's rubble. There are hundreds of these largeish pimples.  All we need now is some sort of giant Clearasil to eradicate this geologic acne.

John was bored rather quickly and even Ken admitted to being "rocked out" after a time of trying to "reverse fit" the big tumbled blocks on the lower ground to the spaces from which they may have been cleaved.

There were several people who took advantage of these not-quite mountains to practice their climbing skills.  (See him left on the left?)








Ken's photographic eye is always looking for a good contrast and is rather proud of this one  ==>







The Brys are too claustrophobic to walk in here, and after taking this shot from the other side, Ken admitted that he also walked around.

Yes, we know it's silly; these rocks have been here longer than we've been alive so why would they decide to crush us in the next second?  Yes... but--



Ken toured us through the Palm Springs area, as well.  We ate movie-star-priced hamburgers at "Tyler's", downtown on the Plaza for one lunch.  The next day found us at "John's Place" in Yucca Mesa for a really, really tasty (and big!) bowl of more-realistically-priced chili amid a collection of black'n'white celebrity photos on walls.  Some of them, we even recognized, like Duncan Renaldo and a young Barbara Stanwyk. Maybe you're impressed with the old movie star names we're dropping. 
Or maybe you're just too young to have watched the old Zenith, or even to have reminisced decades later when War sang, "Cisco Kid was a friend of mine".

Our welcome to California was less than desired.  Not Ken's fault.  First off, Mom Nature heralded our departure from Arizona with a Haboob, a wicked windstorm that threatened literally to blow our RV off the road.  Fighting the wheel for two hours was about as much as either Debbie or John could handle at a time.  In some flat open desert areas, the wind blew rivers of sand across the interstate (like a Michigan winter storm with dry snow; we know you've seen that) and raised obscuring dust clouds. We're calling that a tan-out.

Then, approaching the state line, we saw the speed limit drop from 70 to 55 -to 45 -to 35 -to 25... Then, "All Vehicles Must Stop for Inspection".  All.  Not just the commercial carriers.  All: cars, motorcycles, vacationing RVs.  "This is still America, right?" asked John of no one in particular. "We don't have to show our papers just to travel between states, yes?" 

"California is its own little reality," rejoined Debbie.   Remember, this is the state with the most reversed federal appeals court in the nation.**   Approaching the "inspection booth" at a slow crawl, John sees the uniformed official inspector waving him to come forward.  When we stopped, the inspector wordlessly kept waving us to move on, obviously irritated that we had obeyed the signs.  What did he "inspect" anyway?  What was accomplished aside from angering visitors?

Next, we are greeted with a full dollar price hike per gallon of diesel fuel above Arizona's.  John's brother, whom we hope to meet in another six weeks, writes that "The gov signed a 60 cent gas tax hike then stood up a committee to study why gas prices are so high." 

PS:  The speed limit for all trucks and any vehicle towing a trailer now is 55 mph on I-10.  So we'll not arrive when planned, either.

Past the Salton Sea, approaching Palm Springs we find countless (John tried, but couldn't) wind turbines crowded together in the Coachella Valley. 

Just one cluster of dozens in this relatively small area!  Perhaps 400 or more across the valley.
{John's trying real hard not to say something acerbic about the terrible public cost:benefit ratio.}

Another day, we took a tram to the top of an 8,500-foot peak in the Palm Springs area.  Aside from the cold air and snow on the ground, John noticed people wearing foam pads --maybe 4 by 4 feet-- as if they were backpacks; some carried two or three.  Ken said that he'd learned they were cushions for folks who are bouldering, or what John had heard of as free climbing. Somewhat loudly scoffing, he told Ken that John's Mama didn't raise no fool and you can't convince him that a couple mattresses are going to save your life when falling from a cliff face.

OK, Ken, John hereby apologizes. These are what they are advertised to be, but it took a few YouTube vids to convince. Here's one: https://youtu.be/pKSQ5f3I7fo. Obviously, we're not talking cliff cliffs, but folks who are practicing do need to pad the inevitable fall.  John, eating crow, has relearned that one is never too old to learn:  a wasted day is a day without education. Add your favorite aphorism here: ____________.

There's more California ahead including the reason Debbie's bicycle has traveled across the country in our coach's 'basement'.

    ––  

**A federal prosecutor in Grand Rapids mentioned this to John more than a decade before President Trump attracted the Hateful Left's lightning for daring to Tweet the same thing. Let's trust the attorney on this one.

Page to a new state

The town of Page, Arizona, is tucked into one corner of the huge Lake Powell.  This lake is not a natural feature with softened, rounded corners.  It was formed, as was Lake of the Ozarks and many others you could name, artificially.
Once the Glen Canyon dam was finished in 1963, the lake grew and grew as the Colorado River flowed up against the restraint, the waters deepening and backing upstream and into the tributaries until 1980.

 It's been decades since the Colorado River ran into the sea; every drop is sucked up and used by the people who demand to live in deserts. {Why? is the real question.}

Those of us who live in the warm embrace of the Great Lakes don't care how extravagantly we use our water because we send every drop back to be recycled again and again as it has for tens of thousands of years.  For Debbie and John to stand here and see the dry desert, the huge expanse of water, this immense dam and grasp that it took international cooperation among Mexicans, Indians and several States full of Americans is sort of overwhelming.

But then, that's how the West has affected us.  Everything is just so--  so huge!

That's not green eyeliner along the riverbanks. There are trees down there.






Everything  is so different, and excitingly beautiful with stark contrasts.

Driving south out of Page, toward our campground, we ran across one popular, iconic feature.  It's called Horseshoe Bend, and is (depending on the region of your speech) an oxbow or perhaps a gooseneck, but very certainly is a bend.

In time, of course, the river will wear away the stream's walls behind that huge central spire and  resume a more direct course; the remnant moat will dry up and it will be just another interesting chunk of rock amid many others.  But you will never see it, nor your kids, and probably not even their kids' kids.  

That is just a huge precursor island, by the way.  Those white streaks at "8 o'clock" and "9 o'clock" are sizable power boats leaving a decent sized wake, each. The river is probably 2,000 feet down.

After you pay $10 to park your car, you get the opportunity to walk a mile and half (round trip) to stand on the overlook and take that picture.  Then you get to walk back up the 189 feet you just walked down.

Oh, the immensity!...

And then you get to continue driving south to get to our "camp" at Lee's Ferry, right along the same river.  Debbie's casual glance at the map showed that we needed to go south a bit, across the Colorado River, and then up to our campsite on BLM land at Lee's Ferry, and that seemed so close on the map.  The proverbial crow may have had a 5 mile flight, but our drive was 40 miles to get down the mountain pass, over the Colorado River, and back north to the campground.    US-89 climbs before dropping precipitously --and curvaceously!-- down to 89A, which basically is the other leg of the switchback headed north again.  

It wasn't until after John downloaded our actual track from his ever-faithful, decades old, hand-held, Garmin eTrex and overlaid it on a topographical map that the picture became very clear.
The dense cluster of elevation contours tells it all.  You have to drive all that way around because doing anything else would require an elevator  --or wings.  Lee's Ferry is just 3,100 feet elevation, nearly a half mile lower.

But once we got there...!  The US BLM had paved this camping area and made mostly level, easy pull-through sites for the big coaches like ours.  Smaller trailers and tent campers have sturdy sun shelters at their sites. Clean pit toilets.  Trails through camp.  Small trees provide some campsite seclusion.   After driving next to them for 20 miles, we now face the 2,000' high Vermilion Cliffs across the Colorado River and there's even a small rapids here, less than ten raft-minutes from the put-in about a mile from our camp.

The BLM has a dump station, too!  What more can you ask for a $20/day (half that for us oldsters)?  We stayed three days and the fantastically awesome scenery encourages us not to mind the 2-hour round trip commute to Page and Lake Powell.

It also encouraged us to post a "Take With" checklist at the RV's exit door so we could stop arguing about who's turn it was to forget the camera.

We've been on the road for better than three weeks and have found some minor shortcomings in the coach that need attention  --nothing more than any homeowner has to do to keep the place in repair.  And we need to order a few things, which means a need for Civilization and access to an Amazon Locker, Home Depot, Walmart, and like that.  So we headed south to the Phoenix area.  A former WCUZ employer lives in the area, a man John greatly respects and appreciates.  He bought us brunch and we caught up with each other after the WOOD years had intervened.  Then we hit the Locker and stores, resupplied our provisions, and broke out the pliers and screwdrivers at the nicely laid-out Cave Creek Regional RV park, not far from Carefree, Arizona.

The less-than-faithful coach navigator calls it Kay-yerfree.  Debbie's almost used to that.  What floored her was the sharply defined Flora Line about 40 miles north of our destination.
The nearly vacant desert we'd gotten used to suddenly became filled with many species of cactus, especially the heretofore unencountered Saguaro --in large numbers!  Cave Creek features powered/watered/paved campsites, each separate from its neighbors by close to an acre of land covered with cacti and unfamiliar grasses while birds make unaccustomed calls.  The cries of many coyotes were loud.  We stayed three nights.  It was A Good Thing.

It is, indeed, an alien land to us.

We'll leave this southwest corner of Arizona to finally meet up with Debbie's brother, Ken, in Palm Springs, California as the retirement adventure continues.

Zion -another canyon of Biblical proportion

Of Utah's five National Parks, two are studies of erosion, with the third, as previously explained, the result of a local geologic upthrust that eroded.  The fourth, actually, resulted from more of the same local kind of disturbance.  All of them were coupled with wind and weather, but at Bryce Canyon, the localized effect on the sandstone layers --producing the myriad hoodoo formations-- was uniquely formidable.

Now, at number five, we find upthrust mountains brought local rivers to bear harshly on the "soft" sandstone rock over the eons, causing even the Virgin River to penetrate thousands of feet of terrain like a pro.  We suppose you could research the average rate of descent as we forget the number, but suffice it to say: What the Colorado River did to the Grand Canyon over a longer distance and time, the Virgin River more than did to Zion Canyon in shorter distances and times.  "Like a knife through hot butter!", John's Dad would say often [although, never one to believe mere words, a much younger John tried both and found a hot knife through butter was at least as effective  --although harsher on the hands;  Dad was no dummy.]

Zion also has distinct rock formations, such as the The Three Patriarchs.  Maybe you don't see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as clearly as you see the Presidents at Rushmore, but the Methodist minister and two other unidentified (we guess Mormon) clerics [according to tour bus patter]  felt compelled to honor these Old Testament icons so. 

Somewhere back in Bryce, John blew out the arch support on his left foot and the insert we found at a pharmacy was of little comfort.  It would be Arizona before we could get a better prosthetic from Amazon, so John limped

along trying to keep up with Debbie, who wanted to go on long hikes with big elevation changes.  After years of keeping up with Boy Scouts, John hates elevation changes.

Unfortunately, Zion is not a windshield event.  It was, by far, the most popular/visited in Utah and, to deal with the massive crowding, the NPS has set up a free bus service frequently shuttling a circuit from the entranceway Visitors Center to the highest elevation at Sinawava Temple.
  {John looked at the map with its sinuous curves in that area and asked a Ranger if the name were conceived as a pun.  The Ranger didn't get it  (doesn't anybody take trig in high school anymore?), then seriously explained it was a local Native American name.  The vowels are all short...SINN-ah-wah-vah.  John thought he might have been giving the government too much credit anyway.....}

 Each shuttle stop features at least one "walk", some of which the infirm among us might regard as "hikes", and there are several back-country actual hiking (backpacking!) opportunities for those gifted with fewer caloric years bulging their belts.  Also a horse-riding event.  Halfway up is the Canyon Lodge if you want to sleep with the ambiance right outside your window.  You may drive your own car that far.

 It's all so ruggedly beautiful!  You may deduce from the greenery that it also is lower in altitude than the last few National Parks we visited.  That is, indeed, true at the lowest levels, around 3,000' feet.  But the peaks, even there, are at 7,000  and the highest in the Park is 9,000.  Yes, you can get up there --there even are rock climbing opportunities.

Because the Zion Canyon is so deeply cut, we saw many layers of the underlying rock in all their variegated glory.  Debbie says that, for us Easterners, the story that is told of Frederick Dellenbaugh's paintings helps explain the awe we feel here.   When his paintings of this area were displayed at the 1906 World's Fair, the Rangers here tell of those viewers congratulating Dellenbaugh for his vivid imagination as their experience did not allow them to believe such a thing could exist in nature.   His own words were read to us by Ranger Gretchen: "To the eye prejudiced by the soft blues and grays of a familiar Eastern United States or European district, this immense prodigality of color is startling, perhaps painful; it seems to the inflexible mind unwarranted, immodest, as if Nature had stripped and posed nude, unblushing before humanity."

Fauna posed for us, too.  Debbie found and sho-- err, photo'd this No Fear Deer browsing near a populated path.


Not many feet away, amidst some
serious forest growth reminiscent of our Michigan home, John snapped these cactus sharing grassy space.








Here's a  "hanging garden" caused by meltwater collecting inside a porous sandstone layer, then directed to seep sideways by a more impermeable layer.







And...Debbie explores.


ps:  Back at Capitol Reef, you may recall we were very impressed with Lori, the interpretive Ranger who intelligently explained rock layers and the unique monocline so that anyone could understand.  She also declared herself thrilled to be standing on the red-brown Moenkopi (MO-enn-koh-pee) layer of sandstone which is underfoot there.   Here in Zion, we saw some Moenkopi, but we saw other colors of layers, as well.  If you have a chance to attend a program session with interpretive Ranger Gretchen at Zion (who was mentioned above), don't miss it!  She's an excellent communicator and seems to know her stuff.  High marks.

ps:  back in our "Salt Lake City -2" chapter, John wondered aloud "D'you suppose that people who grow up looking out their kitchen window at this ever go on vacation to somewhere like Michigan and say, disdainfully, 'Why'd I bother?!'"  Well, Capitol Reef's Lori turned that on its ear.  She'd recently visited Michigan's UP  --"I love Lake Superior!"-- and was greatly impressed with Pictured Rocks, which drew Debbie and John to her warmly, as we'd backpacked that lakeshore trail several times and even had flown our airplane over it two summers back.   Sometimes it takes a stranger to show you the value of that which you have.

We're sort of shut of Utah at this point, but we have some days to kill yet before needing to meet Debbie's brother Ken in Palm Springs.  So, its time to backtrack to Page, Arizona, visiting Lake Powell and finding those red-rock Vermilion Cliffs with the developed BLM camping opportunity we'd learned-of earlier.   We also had another important lesson about the size of America's Southwest and its three-dimensionality.

Coming up....

Adventures with The Bitch (Governor's version - not suitable for children)

No, John and Debbie are still married.  The Bitch is our GPS navigator by Garmin.  She allows us to specify the size of our coach, so as to take those measurements into account when considering low bridges along the route, and such like. An admirable quality, you would think (and it is), but Debbie has given her this name --along with occasional colorful expletive adjectives-- because...

We have a definite love-hate relationship with The Bitch.   Usually her directions are clear and quite timely.
     In one mile, turn right on State Route 98.
  In half a mile, turn right on State Route 98.
  In one quarter mile, turn right on State Route 98 to Parkerville.
  Turn right at the next traffic light to take State Route 98 to Parkerville.

First off, Debbie does not like unnecessary diphthongs.  "Why does The Bitch always make mile two syllables?!" she exclaims loudly enough to be heard over the road noise of open windows, almost daily. "You stupid Bitch, it's NOT mi-yull!!"

John frequently has a problem with her pronunciations, too. While traveling through Missouri, which alphabetizes its state roads, The Bitch would try to pronounce things:
          In one miyull, exit to the right on Missourian.
            John (driving): "What?"
            Debbie, calmly: "Take the next exit."
            John, pressured: "But we're not going to Missourian. I don't know where that is!"
            Debbie, less calmly:  Just take the next exit."
            John, pressured and irritated: "What if it's tiny and we can't turn this monster around?!"
            Debbie, far less than calm:  "Just exit the--
           In one quarter miyull, exit right on Missourian and bear left.
           John, angrily: "Where the hell is she taking us?!"
             Debbie, exasperated; "How the hell should I know?!"
             John, losing it:  "I sure as #%^# don't!  Look at the damn map!"
             Debbie, screaming:  "WHAT MA--"
           Exit right on Missourian, then bear left for Main Street.
           John, jerking wheel back and forth:  "WHAT DO I DO, DAMMIT?!"
             Debbie, already having lost it:  "DRIVE THE DAMN BUS!!!!"

Seriously, would you tolerate somebody trying to screw up your 46 year long marriage like that?

And then there's programming her, which supposedly you can do orally without becoming distracted while driving.  
     John:  "Voice Command.  Find Place."
     The Bitch:  {no response}
     John:  "VOICE COMMAND!  FIND PLACE!"
     The Bitch: {continues ignoring him} 
     Debbie, in copilot's calm quiet tones:  "Voice Command."
     The Bitch:  Say a command.
     Debbie, smirking:  "Find Place."
     The Bitch:  Speak a place.
     Debbie, confident of her superiority: "Aldi." 
     The Bitch:  Did you say "Kohls?"
     Debbie, PO'd:  "NO! --  BACK!"
     The Bitch, calmly, as if nothing had happened: Speak a place.
     Debbie, strained:  "ALDI."
     The Bitch:  Did you say "Ace Hardware Store?"
     John:  "HAH!  Fifty years as a Radio announcer....."

This is a Google Map
providing a superior
overall image. No link
between Garmin and
Google is implied.    

Communication skills aside, we seriously began to doubt her intelligence
on our "test trip" to the UP last fall when, upon leaving Traverse City, she told us a state park in the UP would be 742 miles away.  Finally, after several frustrating attempts to tell her our destination is not far across the Mackinac Bridge over the Strait, we deduced that we had set one of her options to Avoid Tolls, so The Bitch kept routing us south through Chicago and back up again, just to avoid paying $4 to cross Da Bridge.  OK, then, our fault.  BUT even the laziest program coder should have built some common sense logic into her, so that she should have asked: Four bucks or an extra 700 miles? Are you sure?  Y/N.

C'mon, Garmin!  John's relied on your hand-held eTrex in the backwoods for decades and it's been reliable and sensible.

It was later that same day that we discovered her ignorance and confusion about local country roads when she tried to take us off our Michigan paved road to send us down a sandy unpaved track in the middle of Nowhere Forest.  We did not turn into that for fear of bogging down all six wheels plus the four on our Toad.  Good thing.  We discovered the deep sand rejoined our paved state road just a few miles ahead.   The #^%|#@ stupid Bitch!!

The latest straw occurred on this trip, after we left Capitol Reef National Park, headed for Bryce Canyon NP.  Our destination was a KOA between St. George and Hurricane, Utah.  Debbie had left The Bitch thinking we were driving a car, as we also use her in our Honda Toad for side trips while encamped.  About ten miles before the final exit from I-15,  Debbie realized we probably should tell The Bitch she is navigating the RV this time.  John made the adjustments (manually; he knows how to push her buttons) and we were gratified to see her direct us an extra nine miles to one exit farther.  "There must be a low bridge or a tight obstruction," we said to one another. "Trust The Bitch!"

So we made the indicated turn to SR9 in the middle of busy construction, a plethora of orange barrels, and narrow travel lanes.  Whatever.  We are fewer than three miles from the comfort of full hookups at KOA prices (Debbie will spend money for a shower between BLM boondocks).  As instructed we made the first left, north, on Old Highway 91, drove about one mile and were greeted by this sign on the side of the road.

It's not a joke.  In fact, so many of their customers had been screwed by their own GPS navigators, that KOA felt it necessary detail a much better way to reach its full service parking pads. It seems somebody had decided to drive a heavy tank-treaded machine on the hot asphalt road which was old to begin with.  As Debbie was behind the RV's wheel, John disconnected the toad for a recce and found the last 1.3 miles to our destination was a jouncy asphalt washboard, broken out sections of pavement, and ....  well! It looked just like a Michigan highway after six decades of Governors (Democratic and Republican) imposing new taxes, drivers registration fees, and other pocket filchings to Fix The Roads.  {Now that John's no longer a professional objective reporter, expect a highly emotional political diatribe below.***}

So --back on track-- the Brys offer high thanks to the distastefully spelled "Kampgrounds of America" and will even forgive the ungrammatical warning.
[To be fair, John knows professional writers who google "further versus farther" each time they come to it.]

KOA's heart is in the right place, which usually results in better business, too.

First thing John said to the owner of this local KOA was, "Thanks for spending the big bucks on that durable, colorful, attention-grabbing, metal sign!"   That woman blamed all GPSs.  John and Debbie know better.

It's The Bitch's fault.




_______

***
Our latest Guv, of course is the Democrat Whitmer who ran with the slogan Fix The Damn Roads.  Months of that coarse and crude campaigning on the family televisions got her elected and we find that her only solution is to make Michigan's gas tax the highest in the nation, while intending only 60% of that extra money for actual roads, and not diverting any dollars from the other waste.  It doesn't seem to bother her a bit.  In a recent speech, she threatened the Legislature that her only alternative is to shut down the Government!   So, do it, Gretch!!  Fire yourself in the process.  We the People can FTDR without paying public teat suckers....or setting up another decade of the Nation's Worst State Economy under another profligate politician who's only future is to spend the rest of her life teaching unthinking Californian youth to do likewise.

Utah's not done with us yet

John may have gotten "rocked out" temporarily, but Debbie was insistent that we visit all five of the National Parks in this state.  So from Capitol Reef, we pushed on to Bryce Canyon and John has to admit that the third park --Capitol Reef-- invigorated his attitude. 

As opposed to Canyonlands and Arches, which were studies in erosion, the third park was formed by a "local" (hundred{?} mile long) disturbance that thrust a line of rock up in a "small" area.  The result was that long, narrow valley between impossibly high cliffs of near vertical stone that we saw in the last chapter.

Bryce Canyon is entirely different.  We drove past simply huge acreage of greened land, turned to climb another canyon road (through these tunnels),
across some more miles of what could only be considered prairie (in fact, they are home to prairie dogs!), and then found areas where settlers put down roots with a vast wonder at their back doors.

Again, we apologize that a camera --even a relatively sophisticated dedicated type (not our phones!)-- is just too, too small a device to render such a hugely grand scene.

In fact, many times Debbie and John both lowered the camera, realizing any attempt at capturing what we could see would be dismayingly, disrespectfully pointless. {see about the hoodoos below}

The canyon climbs to more than 9,000 feet above
sea level.








That is snow in mid-May.

   

One of the pictures above showed a veritable garden of hoodoos.  These are peculiar rock spires caused by weathering.  The spires are pancaked layers of different types

Hoodoo

of sandstone that erode at different rates, often causing fatter tops to be perched on top of skinnier shafts.  Occasional hoodoos show up all over the Western red rock deserts, but in this area, hoodoo spires are so numerous because of vertical fracturing and the weather, which cycles through a less-than-24-hour freeze/thaw 180 days a year.  (And yet, Ms. Whitmer there are NO potholes in these roads, which continue to be maintained with a lower gasoline tax than--   ach!  nevermind; you're not reading this anyway.)



Let's get a better perspective on the sheer size of these things:

We've been more than a week above a mile high now, but these three days spent here are the highest yet.  John noticed some very mild evidence of altitude sickness, but at least that coughing virus has nearly disappeared.  Things is, though, tea is never hot-hot!  (Water boils at a lower temperature, the evaporative technology refrigerator has difficulty, the generator puts out less power, vehicles get less mileage, etc.  Millibars!  My kingdom for more millibars of oxygen!)

Speaking of the weather, we arrived on a mostly sunny day with Debbie intent on reprising our BLM (read: Free!) experience.  After getting an overview from a helpful Visitors Center volunteer, we ended up turning off Utah SR12 north on Tom Best Road, to find it sort of like Michigan: sandy loam under nicely graded and defined camping areas carved out of the high-altitude fir forest (we hesitate to name tree species in our ignorance).  Late in the afternoon, we found a great place with a rock fire pit, parked the coach, went around to scavenge wood from a couple vacant sites (we'd need a permit to cut anything), and laid out our patio carpet and table, expecting to have a relaxing evening tomorrow in our chairs by the fire with, perhaps, a Michigan microbrew in our fists.  Then we woke up to find that not even the NWS saw this coming ...and not even after it had been in progress a few hours!

   

It finally stopped snowing about three inches later at noon.  By evening, it was gone.  High temps were comfortably (for John) around 50.  Debbie's blood has forsaken its Norse cold weather heritage.

On our third day of roaming the canyon, John talked with a tourist who noticed the towing prongs on the front of our Honda.  It turned out he was another Fulltimer, whose only house was the one on wheels.  We're not sure we want to take that step.  Anyway, he'd just come north to Bryce Canyon from south of Lake Powell, Arizona, an area known as Marble Canyon featuring the Vermilion Cliffs.  We decided to add that to the itinerary seeing as how we have some extra time, having cut snowy Colorado out of earlier travel.  The man was a fount of information about camping that area and told us of a developed BLM  opportunity at Lee's Ferry: paved roads, vault toilets, a coach sanitation station with potable water, picnic tables and even camp shade shelter for those without a mobile house.  It's not free, but ten bucks a night (for us oldsters, and thank you young taxpayers for picking up the other half of that fee) fit Debbie's specs, as well.

John's wanted twin .50 cals
on his front bumper forever,
but this is the closest he's come so far.

We'll get to those Vermilion cliffs, but we have one more National Park in Utah, yet, and this one is really unique, too.  Stay Tuned.

Canyonlands, Arches, & Capitol Reef National Parks

We're putting these together because –big mindstretching picture-- they are all part of the  Colorado Plateau, which is a chunk of North America bigger than Texas that somehow pushed up several thousand feet in one nearly level plane.   And then Nature's magic happened.

The Grand Canyon digs down through that Plateau. Canyonlands and Arches (literally next to each other) show other parts of its underbelly, while Capitol Reef shows more, Bryce Canyon (at which we just arrived) even more, and Zion National Park even more yet.  Each of these has rocks. but each has unique scenery composed of rocks.  We're not going to get real professorial here, just show you pictures.

It's just all so big!
This is right outside the Canyonlands visitors center:

Once  upon a time, less than 300 million years ago, there were oceans covering much of this area.  In the intervening times, the landscape changed to larger and smaller bodies of water, some of it fresh (as in Lake Bonneville that became the Great Salt Lake), and all of it supporting a bunch of plants and critters (if you don't mind calling T.Rex a 'critter').  The big story is the sand deposited on the sea/lake beds –thousands of feet of it.  Then whatever happened to cause the uplifting, made cracks/fissures; then existing rivers were augmented/changed by rain/snow; and there was wind, too, so–   Erosion happened.

And we get to see all the different layers of the cake.


It takes a car (luckily we brought one) to get around to all the different areas in the individual parks.  And then we get out and walk to observation points.  And we take pictures that cannot begin to describe the awesome magnificence of this gi-huge-ic landscape! Debbie says each picture we take needs a thousand words just to augment its meaning.

The Colorado & Green rivers
are confluent in this area.

The Green River is one of the shapers of the land.

We consumed one day at Canyonlands alone, went back to our coach on the BLM land where we were surrounded by more of the same (just not in an official National Park) and John literally was overwhelmed.  "Rocked out", he said, "No more.  No canyons, no arches, no boulders, cliffs..."
So after dinner he went to bed.   Still coughing.  That virus thing was wicked.

But Arches was right there, and the next day brought more sun, more sweat and sun-reddened skin with more summer like temperatures, and a bit less phlegm, so Debbie pried John from the coach to see what is said to be The World's Largest Collection of Naturally Occurring Arches.

   

There were other features, as well, things that we'd not seen at Canyonlands.  Like this really magnificent spire collection:

 And even the iconic Balanced Rock which may or may not have survived when our children can make this trip.

But they are still Just Rocks, so John picked up The Hobbit for about the 4th time in his life to finish re-re-re-reading it and criticize Peter Jackson's dragging this story out to three long feature length movies with his invented stuff that Tolkien never wrote including that unlikely love sto[this is a run-on sentence!] while Debbie drove on to Capitol Reef.





Luckily, he picked his nose out the book just in time to see the absolutely stunning scenery along Utah-24 for the last 25 miles or so.  And you drive right between these things!  And they are so variegated!  And we learn that Capitol Reef is a small National Park, but the change in scenery was invigorating!

Among them were sheer cliffs that obviously had been cleaved, leaving hundred-foot tall perfectly smooth sheets of rock.  In the first half of this "era" (A.D.), a native people scribbled their primitive art on the all-too-inviting blank rock. ["People in every time like to commit graffiti!" –unknown tourist female's wry reaction to these:]

Minimum 700 year old scribbled scratch art. 
{false color image so you can see these better}

Having a more reverent take on it, the NPS describes these scratched markings as "stories [that] present detailed information regarding geography, demography, economy and religion."  It then admonishes us that "Our collective goal must be to  preserve these expressions....for future generations."  Many Park visitors help with their cameras.

More closely associated with our own time, settler families occupied the narrow valley that runs more than a dozen-miles through the National Park (it is the only way to get around/through the "Reef", the sharply upthrust walls of rock).  The valley is, at many points, barely 100 yards wide, with the smallish river abundantly greening a flat, grassy area that became farming homesteads for a dozen families in our era.  It all feels so close and protected and secluded from the outside world.  The one-room school house that served the small population is smaller than our 2-car garage and was not shut down until 1941, the decade our births.  There are imagination-stirring opportunities to explore their fields and orchards available.  Debbie and I walked a way up The Grand Wash, a "dry" (for this day) deeply cut flash flood river bed. Here she is exploring a 'cave' that floods cut into the rock wall.  John divided his time between being awed by the high clifftops overhead, and studying every possible egress to higher ground –just in case  [as if this fat old man had any chance of outrunning a debris-bearing, fast-moving killer flood  ;-}} ].

Later that afternoon, we drove into what was described as a dirt road used by early motorcars (1915ish?).  There was also warning of a wash's tendency to produce fatal flash floods engendered by storms in the area.  We had scattered showers, but the violent summer storms are 6-to-8 weeks off yet ...we think.   So we ventured a couple miles down the road, Debbie quite verbally annoyed with each rock and shallow dip our tires encountered.  John kept pointing out that they were no worse than the condition of our neighborhood streets in February before Georgetown Township's plow trucks could scrape past the ice.  We think we're still friends.

Those cliff walls are high and many were adorned
with precariously balanced Honda-size boulders!

And we're still not done with our amazement over this park!  A very engaging, vibrant and educational "geology interpretive ranger" named Lori (we hope we remembered properly) made the colored layers in the rock walls come alive for us.  And clearly explained why Capitol Reef was so significantly unique.  We'll leave it up to the interested reader to google for "monocline".

She also helped, to Debbie's fascination, with an understanding of the seeming "dentition" of rock walls in a particularly noticeable reddish-brownish layer of rock that kept showing up all over this area, inside the park and out.  We would find more information shortly about the vertical

fracturing and weathering that might eventually turn some of these things into "hoodoos".  But, let us leave that for a future chapter in this evolving blog, if you're not too disappointed.








Debbie surprised herself by agreeing to a pork BBQ dinner at our RV Park just outside Torrey, UT, (whimsically named "Thousand Lakes" in this desert environ).   It was good!  (Maybe a little underserved for the $20/person price; we had to serve our own plates, fill and serve our own drinks, then bus the table and put the dishes "away" for someone else to wash {so John ignored the Tip jar}, but we walked the 150 feet back to our coach happily enough.)  And because we were in an actual RV Park with actual running water, 50 amps of actual electricity and an actual sewer hookup, we managed to get the red rock dust of the past week out of our hair and coach crevices.  Now all we need is a bountiful rain storm to wash down the past 2,200 miles of exterior road grime.

See you when we see you.