Wendy & Skip's RV Adventures

First, the good news. Despite the challenges faced by the park, as described below, not a bit of that detracted from our experience here in the slightest. This place is wonderful.

Arches, as one might expect from the name, has thousands of arches. Over 2000 to be precise. More than anywhere on earth. The explanations for how these arches came to be was never completely clear, but I think it’s something like this. This whole area used to be an ocean that accumulated sand and sediment. Then it dried out. Then it was a lake. More buildup. Then it dried out. Then a swamp. Then dry again. Then a lake. Then dry. Then an ocean again. And so on for dozens of epochs, leaving dozens of layers of rock made up of varying kinds of stuff. Then the whole area got lifted up as part of the Colorado Plateau and started getting worn down by water. As rainfall would hit the rock, it would seep in and in some cases it would hit a layer that was less permeable, so the water would move sideways. As it did, it eroded the rock along the horizontal layer, leaving a layer of intact rock above it. Over time, it wore out the whole kabob, leaving a hole with rock above it. Presto change-o, an arch. This area just happens to have the right combination of layers with the right permeabilities to lead to arches everywhere. Other formations occurred in similar ways. Sometimes there’d be a little clump of really impermeable rock, and everything around it would get worn down. Zippity-doo-dah, a spire. Or sometimes a sliver of impermeable material and abracadabra, a fin. Or a big area, and you get a butte. (I’m pretty sure that if a ranger read this, he’d throw up in his Smokey-the-Bear hat, but too bad. That’s close enough for this story.)

So we spent several days just exploring this fascinating little area of bizarre geology.

You get the idea. But it’s not just arches. It seems that everywhere one turns, there’s another oddity caused by erosion in this area of particularly malleable layers of different kinds of rock.

And sometimes this place is just unspeakably beautiful.

And, because I’m me, I did do my thing of getting up at 3:00 a.m. one morning and running over to get a shot of one of the arches (the North Window in this case) at sunrise.

So we had a great time at this strange and beautiful place. We did several hikes, attended a really great ranger-guided walk, all had several picnics, all the usual things, just in a place that is anything but usual.

But now for the bad news. Arches National Park is seriously overloaded. I mean like clogged-up, choking-on-itself, loved-to-death overloaded.

The problem isn’t the number of visitors, at least not in an absolute sense. Last year, Arches had about 1.6 million visitors, which isn’t large compared to other western parks like Grand Canyon (6.0 million visitors), Yellowstone (4.3 million), Grand Tetons (3.3 million), or even Glacier (2.9 million). The problem, at least as it appears to me, is that there are darn few places for those 1.6 million people to go. The result is that they congregate at a few locations, overwhelming the parking lots, turning the trails into something like urban sidewalks, and destroying the wildness of the place that presumably most of the visitors came to experience.

And the effect is compounded here by three factors: First, Arches is rebuilding its entire road network, and the park was closed Sunday through Thursday from 7:00 pm to 7:00 am. The upper end of the park, including the area around the famous Landscape Arch, is closed entirely. Second, there is a surplus of rental Class-C motorhomes like we have never seen. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. And because the RV parking spaces are often filled with cars who couldn’t find anywhere else to park, the RVs park in the car areas, taking up 3 or 4 spaces, and the whole thing is a vicious circle. Finally, there seems to an unusual number of tour buses. At the Windows/Turret arches area, for example, there were FOUR (that’s right, count ’em, four) tour buses dumping people into a teeny, 100-yard path to the overlook. Plus, most of them were French, which made a bad situation even worse.

I understand that NPS is currently considering a management plan under which people, at least groups of people, will have to stake out a reservation slot to enter the park. That’s a terrible solution, but maybe better than the current situation.

As I said at the outset, the crowds weren’t really a problem for us and didn’t interfere with our enjoyment of the place. We usually get to where we going early in the day, and we head into the back country where there are fewer people. (Although here, perhaps due to a higher-than-normal proportion of fit, young people (dang them), even the trails had more people than we’re used to seeing. But, as you can see from my pictures, I was always able to capture the scene I wanted with no people in the frame, so things were never that bad.) So, it was a great stop for us despite the crowds. Combined with our excursions to Canyonlands (see the accompanying post), we’ll remember this place for a long time.

 

 

 

If you’ve ever seen an old Western, you’ve seen Monument Valley.

[On edit: In a remarkable coincidence, Volkswagen has a new commercial that not only features a few clips from Monument Valley, it expresses in a very heartrending way why road trips have always mattered so much to our family. It’s worth watching here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpq4NXtokNU.]

But what made Monument Valley a special stop for me was not its connection to the film industry, but its unbelievably photogenic quality. So, with a hall pass from Wendy, I set off at 3:00 a.m., drove several hundred miles to Monument Valley (getting lost twice in the process, but that’s another story), paid the $20 to enter the “Navajo Tribal Park,” and spent several hours just taking picture in this magical place. Below are some of my favorites.

A very special place indeed. Next stop: Utah.

We’ve always loved southwest Colorado, but the family’s first exposure to the area came sans moi back in 1988 when Wendy, her dad, and the three kids made a 6-week trip, zig-zagging cross-country to Grand Tetons where I met up with them. I’m catching up with their experience only now, nearly thirty years later, checking off Fort Davis, Carlsbad Caverns, and White Sands. And now it’s southwest Colorado.

Their base of operations for the area was a reservoir 18 miles from Durango, Vallecito Lake. At 7800 feet, it’s the highest such lake in Colorado, and is situated in an unbelievably picturesque valley. Our mission: find the camp site where the family stayed 29 years ago. Success:

There are many stories attending the stay at Lake Vallecito (Jennifer coming down with something, the boys converting a log in the freezing cold water into a makeshift raft, Cliff celebrating his 10th birthday, Robert getting his finger stuck in a Coke can) (although consensus seems to be emerging that the finger-in-a-can event actually happened at Fort Davis), but the story that gets the most play involves Cliff standing motionless in the field, like the human equivalent of a Great Blue Heron, with his arm cocked and spring loaded, until bam! he snatched a field mouse out of the grass. Funny how in a beautiful place like this, every time one mentions Lake Vallecito, someone immediately chimes in with, “Isn’t that where Cliff caught the field mouse?”

The next day, it was off to drive the San Juan Skyway, a 236-mile designated scenic drive that forms a loop around the San Juan mountains in southwestern Colorado. That range is the largest mountain range in Colorado and has 19 peaks above 13,000 feet. Even in mid-May, the upper portions of the drive were covered in snow.

But the highlight/lowlight of the route, without a doubt, is the famous/infamous “million dollar highway,” a terrifying stretch of “road” between Silverton and Ouray, famous not only because it is narrow (barely wide enough for two cars) and twisty, but because it has no shoulders and no guardrails, and has a rock face crowding one side and a thousand-foot sheer cliff along the other. If that description doesn’t scare the bejeezus out of you, perhaps you should consider that the road figures prominently on the list of the world’s most dangerous roads: Dangerous Roads.

Hard to believe, but it was a great day. After seven hours on the road, though, we were ready for a rest.

One other thing we did in the Four Corners area: We asked the clerk at the campground what was a fun thing to do locally and she suggested Hawkins Preserve. This seems to be a recurrent theme in our travels: small, locally funded nature preserves that are well done, completely enjoyable, and turn out to be surprising highlights of the trip. This preserve had a network of trails, maybe 4 or 5 miles total, with a wonderful picnic area in the middle.

Next stop: Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.

 

Wendy and I have both been to this national park several times, and it’s not one of our favorites. I’m not sure I know why Mesa Verde even is a national park, as opposed to, for example, a National Historic Site.

To be sure, it is interesting in its own right. Thousands of people once lived in over 600 cliff dwellings, most of them hidden under the overhangs of the canyons cut into the mesa. No one even knew this whole series of habitations was even here until it was discovered by some (probably drunk) cowboys in the 1800s! Everyone ought to see this place, or similar cliff dwellings, once. But once is enough.

And there are some interesting footnotes to the story. For example, these dwellings were abandoned around 1300, apparently because the Anasazi completely depleted the resources of the area (so much for the Noble Indian living in perfect, sustainable harmony with nature), perhaps in part because of a 24-year severe drought (so much for “climate change” being a new thing caused by nasty coal-burning power plants). But it’s basically just an area of ruins and decayed buildings of a culture that suffered an economic collapse and couldn’t adjust, sort of like making modern-day Detroit a national park.

And (good news for the family reputation), I did avoid getting in an argument with the ranger. When he commented that the Hopi Indians are having a hard time getting the young people to stay on the reservation, making baskets and doing chants to the spirits in the dirt pile, instead of moving to California, going to Stanford, getting a degree in computer science, working for Google, advancing human knowledge, and providing a good life for themselves and their families, how sad, I resisted the urge to offer the counterargument and instead smiled politely and concluded in my mind the ranger must be a total dipstick.

So, we canceled the trip to Blanding (which would have offered more of the same, plus side trips to see ancient Indian petroglyphs, which look a lot like a child’s stick figures, except not quite good enough to be taped to the refrigerator) and will explore southwest Colorado instead. Further posts to follow.

The stop in Tucson was supposed to be a layover to get some work done on ACE, see Wendy’s sister, Susan, and her husband, Terry, see a couple local sights, and basically gear up for the next phase of the trip. Ho-hum. No big deal. It turned out to be a wonderful and memorable stop, maybe even the best of the whole trip. Here’s why. (There’s so much to recount that this is going to take a while. Sorry.)

Things started off with Susan and Terry inviting us to attend their annual Cinco de Mayo party, held this year on Cuatro de Mayo, and attended by some sixty-odd friends and neighbors. (You can read “sixty-odd” with or without the hyphen and I think it works.) We had a great time, wonderful people, great food, and Margaritas made with some orange liqueur that, unfortunately, made them way too easy to drink.

In planning for the trip, we mentioned to Susan and Terry that, oh by the way, we really like Mexican food, so they arranged a series of dinners at Mexican restaurants, each one better than the one before. Mi Tierra, near Susan’s home, was very good; Guadalajara in Oro Valley was, in my view, even better; but what topped el pastel was Elvira’s (no, not named after either the Mistress of the Dark or the song by the Oak Ridge Boys) in downtown Tucson. That last stop was a gourmet restaurant, with a posh, modern décor, and with a menu featuring foods in Mexico City-style, including five different types of molé, with each of our dinners memorable for both their preparation and their presentation. What a treat.

Susan also arranged a trip to “Biosphere 2.” For those of you who don’t remember it, the  original “biosphere” experiment was an attempt back in 1991 to seal up eight people in a huge, self-contained structure where they would live for two years, producing their own food, using plants to produce oxygen, recycling waste to grow the plants, blah blah blah. It was sort of like the grown-up version of those terrariums you made as a kid with the plants, the puddle of water, and a little frog (that promptly died and got dried out and your mom told you to get that stinking jar out of the house). That Biosphere experiment didn’t work very well either (among other things, they ran out of oxygen) (oops), and the structure has since been converted to series of contained environments for large-scale earth science studies and environmental education. But the concept of a structure that permits self-sustaining human habitation is still there. Bingo. I loved the place. While the tour guide was blathering on about how the Biosphere facility can teach us about climate change and various other environmentalist boogie men, I kept looking at this place and wondering, “This is great! How can we build this thing on Mars?”

  

We also managed a day-long excursion to the Pima Air Museum, another world-class facility in (no offense to South Tucson) an unlikely location. The air museum is the third largest in the U.S. (behind the National Air & Space Museum and the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson) and not only has its own excellent collection of vintage aircraft, it also houses a separate museum for the 390th Bomb Group (complete with an intact B-17) and coordinates with the Davis-Monthan AFB “boneyard,” where aircraft are sealed up and stored pending either reactivation or dismantling.

And, Susan took us to another unlikely, but completely wonderful, spot, Sabino Canyon. This is something unlike anything Wendy and I have seen before. Sabino Canyon is a deep canyon in the desert outside of Tucson that contains a perennial stream. What made it unique is that the U.S. Forest Service operates a tram that takes visitors up the 3.8-mile canyon on a guided tour, pointing out the geological and biological features of this unlikely stream in the middle of the desert. Then, visitors have the option of taking the tram back down or, as we did, enjoying a leisurely two-hour hike back to the visitors center.

The highlight of the week, by far, though, was a trip to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. The “museum” is a combination of a botanical garden, wild animal park, zoo, and educational facility, all wrapped up in an authentic desert layout. One strolls about over several miles of trails and walkways, seeing the flora and fauna of the Sonora Desert as one might see it over years of backcountry hiking. Seriously. This is the second time we thought we were attending some little second-rate “local” museum (the first was our trip to Cody, Wyoming) only to be met a world-class facility that is as good as one can find anywhere.

In addition to a wonderful indoor exhibit of reptiles, insects, and an amazing assortment of little desert creatures that will sting, bite, or otherwise poison you, there’s wide array of animals native to the Sonora Desert were on display in man-made but natural-looking habitations:

And there was an extensive cactus garden, with many of the species in full springtime bloom. [Click on the thumbnail photos to enlarge]

  

We did make a quick stop to Saguaro National Park, but given how excellent were both the Sonora Desert Museum and the Sabino Canyon excursion, the national park was actually something of a let-down. Think about that. How often can a national park be a let-down?

So that ended our “layover” in Tucson. Six days of non-stop eating and touring, excellent in every respect, all made possible by Wendy’s wonderful sister.

Next stop: Mesa Verde National Park and southwest Colorado.

After arriving in Alamogordo and setting up at the campground, we went out and looked at sand. Lots of sand. Some of it was in piles. That’s it. Good bye.

Actually, contrary to what one might think, going to White Sands National Monument is not just about going to look at big piles of sand. First of all, it’s not “sand” as most people would think of it. Such sand is ground up rocks (mostly quartz). The White Sands stuff is granules of gypsum, like in wall board and plaster of paris and toothpaste, that started as big gypsum crystals created when gypsum washed out from the surrounding mountains and just recently (over the past 7000 to 10,000 years, which is a blink of an eye in geological time) got eroded into small particles by the action of the constant desert winds. So, there are heaps and heaps, over miles and miles, of gypsum granules forming an unbelievably picturesque landscape. In fact, there are 275 square miles of these dunes, the largest in the world. But the geological story doesn’t end there. Gypsum is (1) water soluble and (2) easily blown away, so on both counts it shouldn’t even be here. But, since I saw it, I’m pretty sure it is. How can that be? I don’t fully understand the geology (even after attending a ranger talk on the topic), but it turns out that there’s a perched aquifer just under the surface of the dunes that binds up the base of the gypsum fields so that, while the top few feet of the dunes get blown hither and yon by the wind, the mass of the gypsum remains fixed within the confines of this subterranean water, and then with each rain, gets formed into big crystals, eroded into sand, and the process repeats.

The other thing that makes White Sands NM unique is that unlike most venues under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, where a “look but don’t touch” rule is enforced, at White Sands the NPS wants everyone to go out and play in the dunes! Really. Not just hiking and picnicking and nature trails and ranger talks and all the usual stuff, all of which abound and are very well done, people are encouraged to drive along an unpaved road of hardened gypsum, climb the dunes, and walk out into the area and take in the breathtaking beauty of the white expanse of rolling dunes. NPS even sells flying saucer sleds in the visitor center! It’s almost as if NPS were saying, “Look, anything you do is going to get obliterated by the wind in a day or two anyway, so go out and have a blast!” And people do. We went on a short hike into the dunes, and part of the fun was trying to scramble up the dunes with your feet slipping backwards almost as fast as you can move forwards. It’s like playing in the snow, but in a way that’s warm and dry. If you used to be a kid, coming to White Sands is a ton of fun.

White Sands is one of the stops made by the family back in 1988, one that they always raved about. I never understood why until now. What a great place.

Next stop, Tucson.

When I was planning the Big Bend stay, one of my assumptions was that one day we’d drive up to the McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, see the telescopes, attend an evening “star party,” and then drive back. I made that assumption because, on my map of Texas, it’s only about a half-inch between Big Bend and Fort Davis. What a dipstick! It’s actually 150 miles twixt the two, 70 of which is through the park itself at 45 mph! Obviously, one doesn’t make a quick run to and from the observatory, so we cut the Big Bend stay short by one day and headed up to Fort Davis.

Doing an astronomy thing was on my list because lately I’ve become fascinated by the Milky Way and west Texas has the clearest and darkest skies in the United States, perfect for star-gazing. At the risk of sinking into a pit of interminable, mind-numbingly dull blather, a “galaxy” is a system of millions to billions of stars, along with cosmic dust and other stuff, all held together by gravitational forces. Current estimates are that there are about 100 billion galaxies, but that number may double as the Hubble telescope continues to scan the heavens. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a “spiral galaxy” that itself contains somewhere between 100 and 400 billion stars. (For those trying to picture this in their heads, a billion galaxies times a billion stars in each would be a “quintillion” stars, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars, of which our sun is one.)

What makes all of this fascinating is that on a clear night, one can see millions of our neighboring stars by looking “across” the galaxy! From earth, the “transect” across the galaxy looks like a milky band across the sky. In fact, during certain times of the year one can look right through the middle of our galaxy to the center “core”! In most urban areas, it’s too light and too polluted to see the Milky Way, but my heart was set on seeing it once we got to someplace better.

Fort Davis turned out to be a special treat in many way. First, the tour of the observatory was completely fascinating. We got to see their telescopes, watch real-time images of the sun boiling and blowing off huge spurts of flaming gases, and learn about all of those incomprehensibly bizarre aspects of the universe that astronomers and physicists deal with routinely every day. Just one example: McDonald Observatory is about to enter into a multi-national effort to study “dark energy,” a force that astronomers assume must exist because the universe is not only expanding (my brain is too small to understand what that even means), its rate of expansion is increasing because something, scientists don’t know what, is apparently pushing the galaxies apart. As they explain it, “we call it ‘dark energy,’ but we don’t actually know what it is, and it may not be ‘dark’ and it may not be ‘energy.’ Maybe our understanding of the universe is wrong, or maybe we don’t understand gravity. We’re not sure.” Excuse me? There are actually people to think about these things as part of their jobs? And besides that, this is a fine time to tell me that maybe gravity isn’t what we think it is.

Secondly, I was hoping to attend a “star party” at the observatory, using one of their telescopes to peer into the night sky. Unfortunately, though, the star parties are only offered on certain nights, and not the night we were there. Disappointed, I returned to the campground and, in one of those “coincidences” that proves there is a benevolent force ruling creation, an amateur astronomer had set up in the campground with a super-duper telescope (a 15.6″ reflector, for those who know what that means) and was hosting his own star party! He gave me a personal tour of the night sky, and I got to see Jupiter and its moons, the double-star of Castor (of Castor and Pollux, the two main stars in the Gemini constellation), an incredible close-up of the moon, and I forget what else. What a treat!

Finally, after a disappointing few days of overcast skies in Big Bend, the night turned crystal clear, I got up at 4:00 a.m., and there was the Milky Way in stunning glory. My little baby camera isn’t very good for astrophotography, but I was able to capture this shot.

(It’s hard for a computer-appropriate image to capture enough detail to reveal how truly impressive the Milky Way really is. A larger file, available here, is better.)

Next stop: Carlsbad Caverns.

 

[Ed. note: Sorry for the delay in posting updates. For the past 5 days we’ve been in areas of the country where people have no internet and no cell phone coverage, and they seem to be OK with that.]

Big Bend is a different kind of national park for us. Lying along the Rio Grande River in the very southern tip of Texas, one might think it would be nothing more that mile after mile of empty wasteland, of little interest to anyone except illegal immigrants passing through on their way to enrolling in Medicare.

There’s much more to it than that, though. Big Bend consists of three separate components: the Chihuahuan desert, the Rio Grande River valley, and the Chisos Mountains, and each area we found to be worth seeing.

The Chihuahuan desert, for example, is one of four deserts in the United States: the Great Basin desert, which occurs mostly in Nevada; the Mojave Desert, which occurs in California and Arizona; the Sonoran desert, which also occurs in California and Arizona, and dips down into northern Mexico; and the Chihuahuan desert, which occurs mostly in northern Mexico, with smaller areas in New Mexico, Arizona, and West Texas, and which is the largest of North American deserts at over 140,000 square miles. What was most interesting to us, though, is that people were actually able to live in this incredibly hostile environment.

The Rio Grande river section of the park was mostly just a flat expanse, well suited to swimming across undetected at midnight, but what made it worth seeing were the spectacular canyons.

What we enjoyed the most, though, were the Chisos mountains. The peaks rise to over 7800 feet and, incredibly, the environment is wooded and cool, completely different than the desert just a few miles away. Bear and mountain lions populate the area, and temperatures are usually about 20 degrees cooler than down on the desert floor (meaning, for example, that the day we went hiking, temperatures were in the 70s!).

As interesting as we found Big Bend to be, though, we both sense that it falls into a different category of national park experiences. There are parks, like Yellowstone and Grand Tetons and Glacier, that one can go to countless times and never grow tired of the experience. Then there are parks, and we put Big Bend in that category, that are definitely worth seeing, but which are more in the category of “immunization” parks. That is, having been there, we’ve had the experience and having had it, we’re now immune and, as much as we really enjoyed this visit, we don’t have to have it again.

So, check it off the list. Next stop, Davis Mountains State Park and the McDonald Observatory.

We’ve started the 2017 western trip, having blazed through Livingston, Louisiana (nice RV park), survived the pavement hell of Louisiana and Eastern Texas, stayed overnight at Columbus, Texas (OK, but not up to our standards), and finally arriving in San Antonio. At first, we weren’t sure we’d even make this stop, seeing as how we were trying to orchestrate our stops to spend the smallest amount of time meandering along through places with little to commend them. But neither of us had ever been to San Antonio, so what the heck? It’s on the way, sort of, so a couple days layover made sense.

And we are really glad we did. Tops on my list was going to the Alamo.

The legend of that battle has been imprinted on my mind since elementary school, but what we learned on our visit is that reality is even more dramatic than the childhood stories we all grew up with. It’s hard to imagine: 150 volunteers, plus or minus, against a determined army of maybe 10 times that number; Santa Ana’s raising of the red “no quarter” flag; and the last-minute realization that help would never arrive. In these circumstances, William Travis called the men together and said, in essence, “Look, here’s the deal. Reinforcements are not coming. We cannot defeat an army of this size, and if we stay and fight, the result is certain death for all of us. But we fight for principles that matter and we only have two other choices: surrender or flee, either way announcing to our countrymen that freedom and liberty are not worth dying for. It’s not for me to tell you what to do,” and then, drawing his sabre and carving a line in the sand, he continued, “but I intend to stay and fight and die right here, because I believe liberty, and patriotism, and everything that is dear the American character are worth dying for. And I ask any man who’s willing to stand with me to cross this line.” At that moment, every one of the volunteers (save only one!) crossed the line. And they stayed and fought, dying either in the ensuing battle or, if wounded and captured (including, perhaps, Davey Crockett), when lined up against a wall and shot.

The rest, as they say, is history. As has happened so many times over our history, the enemy’s “victory” inspired a sense of American outrage, which led to an overwhelming response, which led to a crushing defeat of Santa Ana and his army, which forced Santa Ana to save his hide by signing a treaty relinquishing the territory, and the Republic of Texas was born. As often as this pattern of events seems to repeat itself, Wendy and I sometimes wonder whether our national motto should be changed from E Pluribus Unum to Non Ursa Poke.

Our second objective was San Antonio’s famous River Walk. In 1921, a disastrous flood hit San Antonio, and the city planners did what such people always do in such cases … they decided to channelize the portion of the river that ran through downtown, and then pave over it. As it turns out, though, they encountered the dreaded little-old-ladies-in-garden-clubs contingent. Under the impetus of that formidable force, the idea of channelizing the river remained, but it’s flow was regulated by an upstream dam and a plan created to develop the corridor. Later on, through the efforts of the WPA, some 17,000 feet of walkways, bridges, and landscaping were added along the channel. Over the years, the number of restaurants, bars, and shops increased, the size and layout of the River Walk changed and grew, and it now stands are one of the most successful urban projects of its type, serving as a model for countless other developments, including the Little Sugar Creek Greenway in Charlotte, NC. And it is completely charming.

Oh, and one more thing. In one of those improbable coincidences that proves something, Son #1 had a business to San Antonio while we were there and we met up for dinner!

Next stop: Big Bend National Park.