The Utah State Capitol

Posted on June 7, 2022 by admin

Back in August 2011, I wrote: “Among the National Statuary Hall Collection — each state gets to place two, except Virginia, which gets an extra one for Washington — I spied Ronald Reagan, Jack Swigert, Caesar Rodney, Kamehameha I, Dwight Eisenhower, Ephraim McDowell, Huey Long, Hannibal Hamlin, Samuel Adams, Gerald Ford, William Jennings Bryan, Po’pay, John Burke (of North Dakota), James Garfield, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Washington and Jefferson. I looked in vain for Philo T. Farnsworth, since who wouldn’t want to see him?”

Yet when I saw the lanky statue of boob-tube inventor Philo T. Farnsworth in the Utah State Capitol last month, I was sure I’d seen him at the U.S. Capitol more than 10 years earlier. Memory’s that kind of trickster.

Philo’s among a number of Utahans honored in the capitol, both as statues and in paintings. Curiously, I don’t remember seeing Brigham Young there, who is (unsurprisingly) the other statue in the U.S. Capitol from Utah. Must have missed him.

Utah being a late-blooming state (1896), its capitol is an early 20th-century edifice, designed by Richard K. A. Kletting, a local architect who did a lot of Utah projects.

The capitol has an expansive lawn. When we were there, we watched a man throw frisbees and two dogs catch them in mid-air, again and again.

Speaking of tricky memories, before visiting the capitol this time, I wasn’t sure whether I’d seen it in 1980. I got a good look this time.

Detail inside the dome. Note the seagulls in the sky.

Lots of nice detail in the building. Some allegories.

Some display cases on the first floor depicting Utah history, including one calling the state “America’s Film Set.”

One exhibiting beehive items.

Beehives are worked into the architectural detail, too.

Now I’m sure I didn’t see this place 40-odd years ago, because even after that long I’d remember such a magnificent capitol.

Temple Square

Posted on June 6, 2022 by admin

The wide balconies of the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City look over at the rest of Temple Square and its centerpiece, the Salt Lake Temple, which happens to be behind scaffolding right now. Not the first noteworthy place I’ve seen in that condition.

On the morning of May 21, we caught the temple at a moment of reconstruction, or rather a few years of it: a restoration and seismic refitting that will continue into the mid-years of this decade at least. Standing there for about 130 years now, the church must have decided it was time, despite earlier renovations. The building next door is the handsome Joseph Smith Memorial Building, built as the Hotel Utah in 1911, now an event venue.

We started our walk around Temple Square that morning on the other side of the Temple. This schematic by the church was posted on site to let you know that much of the area is closed for the reconstruction.

The other side of the Temple.

There was more to Temple Square than I remembered. There was more to Salt Lake City, for that matter. Considering that the last time I visited was 1980, that isn’t much of a surprise. After that much time, you might as well be visiting for the first time.

Yet I remember parts of the first time fairly well: an overnight excursion from Logan, Utah, not far to the north, in the company of Tom Jones. He attended Utah State University in Logan in those days, and that June I took a bus from San Antonio and back to visit him and — of course — see that part of the country for the first time. Two years later, I visited again as part of a much longer trip, also by bus, but didn’t go to SLC that time.

Salt Lake Temple stands out in my memory of 1980, as it stands out in the heart of the city for reasons other than mere height. I’m sure it loomed even larger 40-plus years ago than now, when downtown wasn’t as populated by as many tall buildings as it is now.

I checked — you have to love Wiki, this is the kind of thing it excels at — and fully 21 of the 39 tallest structures in SLC were developed after 1980, and another two were completed that year. The Salt Lake Temple wasn’t the tallest structure in the city then either, a distinction it held only for about a year in the 19th century.

The Temple might be closed, but it’s closed all the time to non-Mormons anyway. In 1980, we visited the North Visitors Center, a multistory building full of murals depicting the church’s novel theology, culminating in 11-foot replica of Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Christus statue in front of a celestial background.

That building lasted from 1963 to last year, when it was torn down as part of the work at Temple Square. The statue will be located elsewhere in the square, though for now a smaller-sized model is on view at the Conference Center.

The first place we saw at the square was the Salt Lake Assembly Hall.

Not a church building per se — or maybe it is — but in any case various LDS functions have been held there down the years since the early 1880s. A Gothic design by an early Mormon convert, one Obed Taylor. That’s a good old Biblical name that needs to be brought back, millennials. It’s not to late to name a kid or two of yours Obed (or Boaz, for that matter).

Impressive, but the Salt Lake Tabernacle is even more so, though its exterior reminds me of nothing more than a silver pill bug.

“Brigham Young, who was the Church President at the time of construction, proposed the original design idea of a large dome building with no columns to interfere with the line of sight to the podium,” the LDS web site says. “Bridge builder Henry Grow used a lattice truss design so the Tabernacle roof was able to span its 150-foot width without center supports.”

The building used to be used for mass general meetings of the church, but they were moved to the Conference Center in 2000. The Tabernacle Choir — known to the world as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — still performs in the silver pill bug. While we were visiting, an organist noodled bits of a few tunes on 11,623-pipe organ, such as (naturally) Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. An epic sound.

“The current instrument – the fourth organ to sit inside the organ case – was built in 1948 by the Æolian-Skinner Organ Co. of Boston,” notes the Tabernacle web site FAQ. “One hundred and twenty-two pipes from the original Joseph Ridges organ and another dozen from the 1885 Niels Johnson additions to the organ remain in use today. The 10 largest façade pipes, which date back to the original Ridges organ, do play.”

The last place we visited at Temple Square was the impressively large Conference Center, which as far as I can tell is simply The Conference Center. At 1.4 million square feet, it’s a whopper, including its 21,200-seat main auditorium, where the church holds its biannual general conference and other major gatherings. Design by ZGF Architects of Portland, Oregon.

Though not the size of the Tabernacle organ, the auditorium organ is no slouch at 7,708 pipes. I have no way to judge whether the following Wiki statement is true, but I’m passing it along anyway because it sure sounds impressive: “This organ is internationally significant… in that it is the only organ in the world that has 2 registers of pipes extending down into the 64′ series, the 64′ Contra Trombone and 64′ Contra Gamba, which both extend 4 pipes down to GGGGG#, 13 semitones below the lowest note on a standard piano.”

The Christus statue formerly at the visitor center may be in storage, but a smaller replica is on view on one of the Conference Center floors, along with busts of LDS luminaries and murals of Jesus in the New World.

Did I forget to mention the presence of Mormon missionaries in all of these buildings? Not skinny young men in white shirts and black ties, but pleasantly dressed young women, in pairs like the men, and from different parts of the world, according to their badges.

We were greeted by them in each building, and in the case of the Conference Center, each floor of the building. I chatted a few minutes with the first of these, in the Assembly Hall. I knew perfectly well they were missionaries, out to assess my interest in things LDS and put a fresh young face on this most successful sect of the 19th-century American effusion of creative religious enthusiasm. I’m no expert on Mormonism, but they probably found that I knew more about it — including the Golden Tablets, the early church goings-on in Nauvoo, the migration west — than most non-Mormons wandering in.

Before long, though, I was telling the first pair about how I like to visit religious sites anywhere I go, and recommended a few obvious ones to them, such as St. Peter’s in Rome, St. Paul’s in London, the Daibutsu in Nara and Borobudur on Java, but also not to ignore the smaller sites you happen across. Maybe not something they hear all the time from visitors, either. Yuriko had much less patience with the missionaries, and whenever I happened to speak with a pair, she usually was on her way.

The Road to Salt Lake City

Posted on June 5, 2022 by admin

On the afternoon of May 20, we drove from Canyonlands NP to Salt Lake City by way of U.S. 191 (including a short stretch of I-70), U.S. 6 and I-15. The reds and oranges of southern Utah were soon left behind for a more monochromatic sort of desert.

We stopped briefly in Green River, Utah (pop. a little less than 1,000), to find a bathroom and change drivers. I also spotted something unexpected in the small but green O.K. Anderson City Park.

An Athena missile casing, a relic of the nearby Green River Test Site, where the Air Force shot off 141 such missiles from 1964 to 1973, all aimed at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico (though one hit Mexico once. Oops).

“The program was developed to study missiles’ re-entry behavior and test anti-ballistic missile defenses through the simulation of the full flight dynamics of an ICBM within the confines of the U.S.,” notes the sign near Green River’s missile. Later (until 1975), the Air Force tested 61 Pershing missiles from Green River and trained U.S. and West German troops on their use at the site. Bet that was a plumb posting for the Germans.

Also in the park: a memorial to Bert Loper, whom I’d never heard of. A pioneer in whitewater river-running. Died at 79 on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon doing exactly that.

Further north, we made a spontaneous stop in Helper, Utah. Originally a railroad junction, and supposedly named after helper engines kept there by the railroad, Helper thrived on coal mining for many years — it is, after all, in the aptly named Carbon County.

Main Street in Helper.

Mining still goes on in the county, but these days Helper seems to be evolving into an arts and tourist town, presumably having been discovered by hipsters from Salt Lake City, only 100-plus miles away. Mormon hipsters? Why not? With the way SLC is growing these days, it’s probably producing more hipsters than it needs locally, and so can export them to Utah towns with colorful histories.

But Helper isn’t going to forget mining. Not if Big John has anything to say about it.

The fiberglass miner has been standing in Helper since the 1960s. He’s in front of the Streamline Moderne municipal building, built by the WPA.

Main Street Helper has examples of both buildings renovated for our time —

— and those with that potential.

At one end of Main Street is a handsomely restored Conoco filling station.

A sign on the door says the place is listed on Airbnb, so you can stay there.

Helper is also home to the Western Mining and Railroad Museum, which was closed when we passed through town. But some of its exhibits are outdoors, on a small lot nearby: mining equipment.

Further north from Helper, at a rest stop on U.S. 6 — Tie Fork Rest Area — is one of the more elaborate historical displays I’ve ever seen at such a place.

Go for the bathroom, stay to look at the locomotive and the other displays about railroading in Spanish Fork Canyon, which unsurprising involved hauling a lot of coal.

We made it to greater SLC in time for dinner at a place specializing in Korean-style fried chicken. We had a number of inexpensive options for dinner, because we were in a college town.

Provo, that is. We took a drive around the BYU campus, a sprawling presence at the base of the Wasatch Mountains: 560 acres with more than 300 buildings. Got the barest glimpse. At that moment, finding and feasting on Korean fried chicken was the priority instead. Travel is like that sometimes.

Canyonlands National Park

Posted on June 3, 2022 by admin

In 2021, Arches NP had more than 1.8 million visitors, making it the 16th-most popular U.S. national park among the 63, while Canyonlands National Park had about half as many, 911,000, or the 28th-most popular park. It’s an interesting example of the beaten-path phenomenon.

That’s because it’s a five-minute drive to Arches from Moab, the sizable town where people stay to visit the park, and indeed where we stayed. The closest entrance to Canyonlands, on the other hand, is about 40 minutes away from Moab. Not a long drive, but not nearly as close as Arches, so that’s where people go.

So many, in fact, that this year the NPS is trying out a timed-entry system to Arches, to avoid huge lines at the park’s single vehicle entrance early in the morning. To space visitors out, that is. I reserved a time months ago, 9 a.m., so it was no problem getting in, and the park didn’t seem too crowded as the day went on, though certainly a fair number of people were around. Maybe the system is working.

In any case, I wasn’t about to miss Canyonlands, at least part of it. Two weeks ago, we left Moab for Salt Lake City, spending the morning of May 20 at Canyonlands. Or rather, at the Island in the Sky District of the park, a poetic naming choice that sums up the region nicely.

The day was overcast, and about 20 degrees cooler — the 60s F. rather than the 80s — than the day before in Arches. A front had blown through the night before.

Unlike Arches NP, Canyonlands is fairly large (more than 337,000 acres), and like Gaul, divided into three parts. Island in the Sky, but also The Maze and The Needles, separated mostly by the courses of the mighty Colorado and its almost as mighty tributary, the Green River.

Soon after entering Island in the Sky, you’re at the Shafer Canyon overlook.

Way down in the canyon is the unpaved Shafer Trail Road, which leads to the equally unpaved White Rim Road, a wide loop around Island in the Sky. We’d see that road later, from a different vantage. We’d also see, looking rice-grain small, a handful of vehicles on White Rim, including motorcycles kicking up pinpricks of colored dust and no doubt fulfilling a desert riding dream or two of their riders.

Further down the paved road is the short trail to Mesa Arch.

Eventually, the arch is easy to spot.

Quite a view under the arch.

It was here that the awesomeness of Canyonlands began to dawn on me. I was looking into a canyon — marked by its own, deeper complex of canyons.

Awesomeness was really hammered home when we got to a spot called Grand View Point Overlook. With a name like that, it’d better be good.

The territory near the Grand View. Nice, and a bit more reddish here, but little hint of things to come.

The overlook itself. We walked a quarter-mile or more along the edge of the canyon — the wide canyon complex, reaching miles into the distance, created by the Colorado and the Green.

Wow. The atmosphere was a little hazy that day, but that hardly mattered. My images really don’t do the place justice, but that was a persistent theme on all of this trip.

Arches National Park

Posted on June 2, 2022 by admin

When you visit a place like southern Utah, you run through all the superlatives. In the moment, the wordless feeling as you stand in awe is enough. Later, you turn the bucket over, hoping that one extra-special word that fits what you’ve just seen will tumble out. But even the jewel cave that is English — to shift the metaphor — sometimes comes up short.

What would a Spanish speaker, whose linguistic predecessors have come here for centuries, say? Magnífico, espléndido, maravilloso? What do Germans, so many of whom seek out the desert Southwest in our time, use in such a situation? Großartig, herrlich, prachtig? What of the native tongues of the region? I’m mostly ignorant of those European languages, but vastly ignorant of those spoken on the Colorado Plateau for millennia, so I do not know.

All that is a long-winded intro to the vista we saw at Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park, where we spent most of the day on May 19.

“The Fiery Furnace is a natural labyrinth of narrow passages between towering sandstone walls called fins,” says a postcard I bought in the park. “The La Sal Mountains rise in the distance to nearly 13,000 feet…”

That isn’t a bad image, but it barely conveys the sweeping grandeur of the vista. Though different in most details — color, formation shape, vegetation — I instantly thought of Polychrome Pass in Alaska.

“The view toward the Alaska Range at Polychrome Pass is, I believe, the grandest vista I’ve ever seen,” I wrote last year.

At Fiery Furnace, I found its equal. Just like that. All the time, money and effort to reach this point seemed, all at once, entirely worth it, just to see what we saw. Of course, I had no doubt of that before, and not a vast amount of resources actually went into the trip, since travel is easy in our time, but still.

The marvels of Arches are many. By U.S. national park standards, it isn’t a large one, at about 76,600 acres (44th largest out of 63), but somehow more than 2,000 natural sandstone arches are packed into park. We saw a tiny but impressive fraction of these, and a lot else besides.

Perhaps the best known feature in the park is Delicate Arch, which is depicted on Utah license plates and a postage stamp commemorating the centennial of Utah statehood.

We didn’t get that close. We didn’t care to spend the energy to get there (increasingly with age, I’m learning to ration my energy). An easier trail takes you to a good if long-distance view of the arch, however.

I’ve centered the arch in this picture. If you look carefully, you’ll see people who did make the hike up to it.

Broken Arch, on the other hand, we were willing to make the mile or so round trip on foot to see. But first, we popped in for a look at Sand Dune Arch. It’s in a slot canyon just off the way to Broken Arch.

Which eventually tightens up considerably.

The arch itself is off in a wider place in the canyon.

Note the sand. The color of Mars, but the exact texture of warm beach sand on Earth. My shoes had to come off for a while.

But they were back on for the hike to Broken Arch, along this path.

Eventually, you arrive at the arch, which is cracked if not broken.

I looked at that view of the arch, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was going to say: A question. Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question. That only goes to show the absurd conditioning I’ve submitted myself to in the form of entertainment, but never mind.

Another view.

Under the arch. Erosion didn’t take its ultimate toll while we were there, fortunately.

Elsewhere in the park: long views of the La Sal Mountains and other vistas.

Except for lizards, wildlife was a little hard to spot, but not impossible.

Balanced Rock. Apt name, I’d say.

Mushroom cloud rock, I’d say about that view. The rock stayed balanced while we were there. One of these days, though — tomorrow, 100 years from now — down it will come. Our still images and even our eyes deceive us: the landscape is always in motion.

Natural Bridges National Monument

Posted on June 1, 2022 by admin

A question for very serious presidential history buffs: how many national monuments did President Theodore Roosevelt create? He was the first president with the authority to do so, since the passage of the Antiques Act of 1906, which was actually fairly late in TR’s time in office. Of course, he’d been instrumental in its passage.

Not a man for half measures, the president created 18, including the very first, Devils Tower in Wyoming, coming in at over 1,300 acres, as he took advantage of the fact that the law didn’t limit the size of the monuments. Some of TR’s national monument designations no longer apply, since they later became national parks, such as Petrified Forest, Lassen Peak, Mount Olympus and especially the Grand Canyon.

One by TR that retains its monument status is Natural Bridges National Monument in southern Utah. Created on April 16, 1908, it measures more than 7,600 acres, featuring some of the largest natural bridges in the Western Hemisphere. Natural Bridges also happens to be the first established of Utah’s many national parks and monuments, created about eight years before the National Park Service itself.

We arrived late in the afternoon of May 18.

As NPS entities go, Natural Bridges isn’t that large, and can be accessed via a ring road that passes within sight of three major natural bridges. At each, you have the choice of looking at the natural bridge from a viewpoint near the road, or following a trail closer to the feature. Each bridge also has a Hopi name.

Sipapu Bridge.

The NPS calls this a “mature” natural bridge, and it is the monument’s tallest and greatest in span. “It endures very little stream erosion because its abutments stand far from the stream,” the pamphlet says.

Kachina Bridge.

A little hard to see, but it’s the dark curve almost filled by a tree in my pic. It’s young, according to the park service, with canyon floodwaters still at work enlarging its span.

At the beginning of the trail to Owachomo Bridge.

We took a walk closer to Owachomo, about 20 minutes each way.

We encountered no snakes along the way to the bridge. I think we would have heard one before seeing it, anyway. Owachomo’s an “old” bridge, the NPS says: “The bridge may now have a fatal crack, or it may stand for centuries.”

Yep. We didn’t go quite all the way to its underside, since it was time to call it a day — an extraordinary day, as any day that includes Monument Valley and Natural Bridges and the Moki Dugway would be, but exhausting.

Utah 261 & The Moki Dugway

Posted on May 31, 2022 by admin

When planning our recent trip to scenic corners of the Southwest, I determined that we were going to make the move from Page, Arizona, to Moab, Utah, on May 18 by way of Monument Valley. I figured the mid- and late afternoon would be given over to the drive out from Monument Valley.

The most direct route to Moab from there is U.S. 163 through Mexican Hat, Utah, then on to U.S. 191 north through Blanding, Monticello and La Sal Junction, all Utah towns. Of course I examined some road maps as part of the process. (Doesn’t everybody? No? How is that possible?)

I spied an alternate route. Just after Mexican Hat, take Utah 261 north to Utah 95, then west a few miles to Natural Bridges National Monument as a possible stopover. I didn’t know anything about that national monument; there are so many. One hundred twenty-nine in fact, of which I’ve only visited a mere 20 or so, counting those on this trip.

A quick look at the park service map of the monument on line told me that is isn’t very large, and a single road loops through it with places to stop. Perfect for a short visit, I decided, before heading on to Moab. We might be a little more tired when we got to Moab, but it would be worth it. I was right.

I didn’t look into Utah 261 any further. On the Rand McNally road atlas, the small label Moki Dugway is next to the road, with a small arrow pointing from that name to about the mid-point of the road. I don’t remember noticing that. Later, I would. Michelin doesn’t mention the dugway at all.

So we set out from Monument Valley, stopping for a moment roughly where Forrest Gump stopped, but otherwise pushing on through. I expected more at Mexican Hat, which seemed to be a hotel or two overlooking the San Juan River plus a few other buildings. North of Mexican Hat, Utah 261 is an ordinary if remote two-lane highway through the desert. Dead ahead are the cliffs of a plateau, but it’s still off in the distance.

Before long, signs warn drivers that the road ahead will be unpaved for a few miles. No problem unless it’s raining, when reportedly unpaved desert roads gum up even four-wheel drives. It looks like it hasn’t rained here in a while.

The plateau grows closer, filling more of the windshield, and another warning sign about the unpaved segment whizzes by. I found myself thinking: does this road go around the plateau? It’s hard to see its course ahead. The road just seems to vanish into the steep cliffs of the plateau.

The next warning signs announce the road grade ahead: 10%. Also, they mention switchbacks on a narrow gravel road. By this time, you’re in the shadow of the cliffs, and realize the road goes up the side.

“Utah 261 is part of the Trail of Ancients, a National Scenic Byway that stretches across 480 miles through Colorado and Utah,” says Road Travel America. “The highway connects Utah Highway 95 with US Highway 163 by crossing Cedar Mesa and plunging down the dugway at an 10% grade, revealing sweeping views of Valley of the Gods, stripes of color in the rocks of the San Juan River Canyon known as the Navajo Tapestry, and distant Monument Valley.”

Up we went. The climb is about 1,200 feet. The road curves as much as you expect, enough to lose count of the switchbacks, all the while kicking up a little sand and gravel in your wake. There aren’t any rails, though usually there’s a rise in the ground at the edge of the cliff, so it would take more than a casual slip of the wheel to take a plunge. Or would it?

It wasn’t really a hard drive, and I didn’t think it was that dangerous, since I was going only fast enough to outpace the pull of gravity. Of course I had to hyper-focus: every instant on the road ahead, though peripherally I caught twisting and turning glimpses of the sky and the increasingly distant valley below.

I enjoyed the drive. It had a rare intensity. Yuriko was less enthusiastic, there in the passenger seat, where eyes can linger on the increasingly high drops.

Only twice did we encounter vehicles coming the other way, down, and while narrow, the road was wide enough to pass them without stopping. The state of Utah recommends that only vehicles less than 28 feet in length and 10,000 pounds in weight attempt to drive the dugway, which seems reasonable to me, and which I’m sure is routinely ignored.

“Moki is derived from the Spanish word, Moqui, a general term used by explorers in this region to describe Pueblo Indians they encountered as well as the vanished Anasazi culture,” Road Travel America explains. “Dugways are roads chiseled into steep slopes.”

Turns out that the Moki Dugway is a relic of the early atomic age, created in 1958 for trucks to haul uranium ore from the Happy Jack Mine on Cedar Mesa to the mill in Halchita, near Mexican Hat, which left a radioactive legacy of its own.

I’d learn about all that later. Of course we made it to the top. The road turned back into an ordinary two-lane blacktop. I paused to take a few pictures of the valley below. Note the lower paved level of Utah 261, snaking toward the cliffs.

Valley of the Gods, eh? Angry, unforgiving gods lording over a desolate realm, I’d say.

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Posted on May 27, 2022 by admin

Back to posting on the last day of May. Memorial Day and Decoration Day coincide this year, which won’t happen again until 2033.

“Throughout the 19th century, white settlers considered the Monument Valley region — like the desert terrain of the Southwest in general — to be hostile and ugly,” notes Smithsonian magazine. “The first U.S. soldiers to explore the area called ‘as desolate and repulsive looking a country as can be imagined,’ as Capt. John G. Walker put it in 1849, the year after the area was annexed from Mexico in the Mexican-American War. ‘As far as the eye can reach… is a mass of sand stone hills without any covering or vegetation except a scanty growth of cedar.’ ”

Tastes change. I imagine Capt. Walker’s reaction was entirely reasonable for his time, considering he and his men came by horse and mule, carrying everything they needed, living meagerly and fully aware that their surroundings could kill them all too easily, or at least make for days of uncomfortable misery, whatever season it was. Monument Valley was a vivid ordeal for them, not a notion fostered by cinematic entertainment.

We have it a good deal easier here in the 21st century, and am I glad. All it took for us to reach Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park on May 18 was a roughly two-hour drive from Page, Arizona, by Toyota horseless carriage along paved two-lane roads through the Navajo Nation.

My main concern that morning — and we got up fairly early — was that I didn’t know for sure we’d get in. The park’s policy for visitors is, first come, first served, and there’s a limit to the number of people who can enter each day. Even on a weekday, I imagined joining a long line of cars waiting, only to be turned away.

Nothing of the kind happened. We got to the entrance booth with no one ahead, paid $8 a head, and got in to the place known as Tse’Bii’Ndzisgaii in Navajo. First stop, a fully modern visitor center.

The wind whipped the four flags in full motion: Utah, the Navajo Nation, the United States and Arizona. I wasn’t familiar with the Navajo flag, but I am now.

Something I didn’t know until we entered the park and saw a number of private roads leading off to residences in the distance: people live in Monument Valley, unlike in a national park or monument. I expect ranching and running tours are their main occupations, along with selling the products of Navajo craftsmanship to visitors.

For $8 a head — an absolute bargain, if you asked me — you get to drive around a 17-mile unpaved loop road in the park, dusty and red as Mars, but only occasionally bumpy. The road doesn’t venture that deep into the park, which measures nearly 91,700 acres. Longer treks by foot or horse or jeep are possible, available only with Navajo guides, and no doubt offer rich rewards to those undertake them.

Even so, the drive is incredible, passing formations of astounding size and shape and contour and color. It’s easy to see what enamored John Ford about the place.
Speaking of the director, the park honors him with a spot called John Ford Point.

As well it should, since he put Monument Valley on the map, as far as the more receptive imagination of the 20th century was concerned, though naturally he wasn’t the first outsider of that period to visit — the likes of Zane Grey and (of course) Theodore Roosevelt came earlier. Harsh terrain, still, but the material progress of later years allowed later visitors the leisure to appreciate the place in a way that Capt. Walker could not.

Ford must have known he had a cinematic treasure in view when he had the cameras first deployed here for Stagecoach. The world clearly agreed.

Of Ford’s many forays into the valley, Smithsonian has this to say: “The shoots were usually festive, with hundreds of Navajo gathering in tents… singing, watching stuntmen perform tricks and playing cards late into the night. Ford, often called ‘One Eye’ because of his patch, was accepted by the Navajo, and he returned the favor: after heavy snows cut off many families in the valley in 1949, he arranged for food and supplies to be parachuted to them.”

Though it wasn’t the first place we visited on the drive — in fact, it was nearly the last — the instantly recognizable view from John Ford Point is going to go first here.

Because later movies and commercials returned to this particular view so often, the other marvels on the road aren’t as famed or recognizable. But they’re equally worth a good look. Just a sampling below; there was something remarkable just about everywhere you look.

Aside from the rock giants, the terrain itself fascinates, its colors so unusual to those of us from greener places.

Color that the road itself shares.

Without color, the contours emerge vividly; Ford must have appreciated that, too.

We left the park that afternoon, but even as you drive north from Monument Valley on U.S. 163, it has one more gift to give, if you’re paying attention. I almost wasn’t. As we drove along, we noticed people ahead, standing in the road, taking pictures. They got out of the way before we reached them, but I wondered, what are they doing there?

Then it hit me, and we stopped at the next pullout in the road, maybe a fifth of a mile away, and looked back. A view almost as famed as that at John Ford Point, and certainly as arresting.

That isn’t quite the “Forrest Gump Stopped Here” place, but I wasn’t about to go back where those yahoos had been standing in the road just for that (unlike Stagecoach, it isn’t a movie I like very much). In fact, I wouldn’t have remembered the view was made famous in that movie, either, but some other people had stopped where we were, and I overheard them talking in German about Forrest Gump.

U.S. 89A

Posted on May 26, 2022 by admin

Much excitement yesterday afternoon around here, when the village alarm sirens went off around 3:30. Moments before, my phone told me of a tornado warning, both in English and Spanish. I was advised to seek shelter.

Instead, I took a look out of both the front and back doors. We had rain at that moment, but very little wind, and the clouds weren’t particularly dark. The sirens quit, but started again a few minutes later. I listened and watched a while.

Another warning came and went, but the wind stayed low. It might have been a reckless impulse, but nothing I saw made me want to seek shelter, which in my case would be the lower level near the bathroom, but with the bathroom door closed, because there’s a window in there. Still, I watched the skies more closely for a while. I understand that while a funnel cloud had been spotted over the northwestern suburbs, for whatever reason it never came to the ground and stir things up.

Our most recent trip was a driving one, despite the cost of fuel. I have the receipts in front of me for buying gas five times. They helpfully list the price per gallon, regular each time.

St. George, Utah (May 15): $4.599. Page, Arizona (May 17): $4.789. Blanding, Utah (May 18): $4.659. Moab, Utah (May 20): $4.689. Salt Lake City (May 21): $4.569. According to AAA, the national average for gas a week ago (May 19) was $4.589, so we were paying slightly more than average (which today is $4.600), but less than at home. A year ago, the average was $3.035, for an increase of about 51% since then.

All together, we paid $147.63 for gas on this trip, which would have (roughly) been about $100 had we taken the same trip a year ago. So that’s about $50 that Mr. Putin owes me. I suspect he’s going to stiff me on that charge.

I didn’t like paying a premium for fuel, but it was completely worth it. Some of the drives were extraordinary.

Such as the one from Page to the Grand Canyon and back, especially back, because getting to the park was the main focus in the morning, and we didn’t stop. On our return, which was in the late afternoon of May 17, we took a more leisurely attitude, and took a look at things along the way.

U.S. 89 out of Page is a good drive through a red desert landscape, generally following the Colorado River, which is mostly invisible, far below in Marble Canyon. The drive south from Jacob Lake, Arizona, on Arizona 67 through the wonderfully alpine Kaibab National Forest to the park entrance, is also good.

But the best road that day by far was the two-lane U.S. 89A, which connects the other two, U.S. 89 and Arizona 67. As visible in the map, it skirts Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.

On our return, we headed east on 89A from Jacob Lake (where 89A meets Arizona 67), which is in the forest at that point: through a fine aspen, spruce-fir, ponderosa pine and pinyon-juniper woodland. Nice, but the road is even better is when you reach the edge of the Kaibab Plateau. There’s a place to stop and see the Vermilion Cliffs and the desert flatlands below.

The thin black line is 89A. From the viewpoint, the road heads down toward the flatlands, leaving the Kaibab Plateau. As far as I can tell from the maps, the highway is the border of the monument, or very close to it. In any case, you see the cliffs looming not far away. They follow you for miles down the road.

“Vermilion Cliffs National Monument is a geologic treasure,” says NPS signage along the road. “Its centerpiece is the majestic Paria Plateau, a grand terrace lying between two great geologic structures, the East Kaibab and the Echo Cliffs monoclines.

“The Vermilion Cliffs, which lie along the southern edge of the Paria Plateau, rise 1,500 feet in a spectacular array of multicolored layers of shale and sandstone… these dramatic cliffs were named by John Wesley Powell in 1869, as he embarked upon his expedition of the Grand Canyon down the Colorado River.”

Earlier explorers were here, too. In 1776, Fathers Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante came this way, though they had to turn back to Santa Fe eventually, so harsh was the terrain.

In our time, there are a handful of lodges on 89A in the shadow of the Vermilion Cliffs, but little else in the way of human artifacts, at least until you come to Navajo Bridge, which takes the road across the Colorado River at Marble Canyon.

Rather, two Navajo Bridges: in my picture, the original bridge on the left, and the modern bridge on the right, both steel spandrel arch bridges. The historic bridge was dedicated in 1929 and represented the only crossing of the Colorado for many miles, effectively joining the Arizona Strip with the rest of the state. The wider bridge opened in 1995, and the older one was repurposed as a pedestrian and equestrian bridge.

Naturally, we went across it.

The view of the Colorado from the pedestrian bridge.

The historic plaque.

I looked up the Kansas City Structural Steel Co. There’s a newish company of that name, founded in the 1990s, but the one referred to on the plaque seems to be this one, whose work was in the early 20th century.

There are warning signs as well.

I supposed it means a survivable sort of jump, as with a bungee cord, which no doubt lunatics do sometimes, or at least used to.

Grand Canyon National Park, North Rim

Posted on May 25, 2022 by admin

There is one way to drive on paved roads from Page, Arizona, to the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, at least without going way out of your way. Go south from Page on U.S. 89, then north on U.S. 89A, then south on Arizona 67. If that sounds a little roundabout, it is, but the drive is worth every minute you spend. It takes two to two-and-a-half hours if you don’t stop much.

Eventually, you end up at the park, famed the world over.

As the raven flies, and we saw a fair number of them soaring on the air currents around the canyon, it is about 10 miles from the North Rim to the South Rim. Driving from the North Rim to the South involves more than 200 roundabout miles.

The South Rim has fairly close access to a large metro area — Phoenix — and the sizable town of Flagstaff as a closer jumping off point. That’s what we did in 1997. It occurs to me that we visited the canyon this time two days short of exactly 25 years after the first time.

The nearest town to the North Rim is Page, reached as I’ve described. Not exactly remote, but certainly out of the way. In 2021, about 221,000 visitors came through the North Rim entrance when it was open May through mid-October, according to NPS stats. (The road is snowed in much of the year.) So for every one visitor to the north last year, there were 10 to the south, with about 2.2 million visitors coming to the South Rim during 2021.

When we got to the North Rim last Tuesday morning, the place was popular enough, but not overrun. Even mere feet away from the Grand Canyon Lodge North Rim parking lot, which is where the road into the park ends, the view doesn’t disappoint.

The lodge itself, just opened for the season two days earlier, is perched on the rim, and built from native stone and timber, especially Kaibab limestone from the nearby cliff at Bright Angel Point.

People were perched on the lodge viewpoints.

Through a subsidiary, the Union Pacific Railroad originally developed the lodge in the 1920s, though the first structure burned down after only a few years, and was rebuilt somewhat differently in the ’30s. Design by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, who specialized in lodges and railroad stations. He also designed 140 cabins surrounding the main lodge by 1928.

“Erected in 1927-28, this is the most intact rustic hotel development remaining in the National Parks from the era when railroads, in this case the Union Pacific, fostered construction of ‘destination resorts,’ ” says the National Historic Landmarks listing for the building.

“The main lodge building was rebuilt in 1936 following a devastating fire, but its most important interior spaces retained their scale, materials and flavor, and the deluxe cabins and standard cabins of log and stone construction also kept their fabric, layout and ambiance.”

From the lodge, Bright Angel Point is a 10-minute walk along a trail created by — no need to guess very hard — CCC workers. Those lads need to be honored with a bronze on the grounds somewhere, though I might have missed it.

Out at Bright Angel Point. Let’s just say there were impressive views. And an impressive wind whipping by.

We didn’t have the place to ourselves, but sometimes, almost.

We had lunch in the lodge restaurant, an enormous space with high ceilings, dark woods and towering windows to bring the view of the canyon into room. The food: decent. The view: magnificent.

A separate trail leads away from the lodge and heads toward the campgrounds, a few miles away. We walked part of that trail, which generally follows the rim.

Offering its own views.

A return trail cuts through a pine forest, with no notion of the yawning canyon a short distance away.

Sometimes, we had to go around the trees lying across the trail.

There’s a life metaphor in that somewhere, but on the other hand, a walk in the woods is sometimes just a good ramble.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Been There