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.