Meador Manor

TRIP DATES: June 13-15, 2018 | Slideshow | Photo Album

After completing our tour of Antelope Canyon and having lunch in Page, Arizona, we had a five-hour drive to reach our trip’s penultimate hotel in Moab, Utah. Although Moab is only 155 miles northeast of Page, and they both lie along the Colorado River, the highway route is 270 miles. One has to travel east for hours across the arid landscape of the Navajo Reservation before turning north. We turned off at Kaibito for a restroom break, but I allowed our TomTom GPS to guide us along a bumpy dirt road to return to the highway, something Wendy did not appreciate. She declared a moratorium on unpaved back roads for the remainder of the trip.

We passed sandstone buttes that reminded us we were passing within a dozen miles of Monument Valley, made famous in the westerns of John Ford. I’d originally planned to divert to see it, but couldn’t make that work out given the availability and timing of our slot canyon tour. So we only admired small buttes in passing as we journeyed to Moab.

We were both weary and hungry by the time we reached Wilson Arch, 24 miles south of Moab. It spans 91 feet and rises 46 feet above the desert floor and was the largest arch we saw on the trip, having decided to forgo Arches National Park just north of Moab to concentrate on other less popular attractions. Soon we were driving northwest up Spanish Valley towards Moab’s downtown at its far end.

Arriving late, we pulled into a Wendy’s for dinner. While driving back through town to the Best Western Plus Canyonlands Inn, we passed a truck that someone had converted into a hiking boot. In addition to hiking and mountain biking, the area also offers kayaking and boating along the Colorado River and four-wheeling across the desert mesas.

The small town’s catering to tourists comes after a uranium mining boom that began in the 1950s and lasted until the 1980s. The Christian Bible tells of Moab, lands located east of the Dead Sea. However, early residents of the Utah town were uncomfortable with the name, as the Bible claims the Moabites descended from a titular ancestor conceived when Lot’s eldest daughter, sheltering with him and her sister in a cave after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, got him drunk and they incestuously conceived a son. Much earlier in its history, there were petitions to change Moab’s name, but those failed.

The next day we enjoyed lunch at Sweet Cravings Bakery & Bistro, and would return for lunch the following day as well. Their paninis were fresh and delicious. I had them put turkey and swiss with mayo and lettuce on sourdough, while Wendy ordered their Adventure Inn panini, substituting cranberry sauce for the mayo and adding jalapeño jelly and cream cheese.

After lunch we headed north past the Colorado River and turned west on Highway 313 towards Dead Horse Point. I’d read online that the free state park offered spectacular views of the Colorado and surrounding canyons and was a closer and free alternative to Canyonlands National Park.

The name was a bit offputting, arising from a legend that the point of the mesa high above the Colorado was once used as a corral for wild mustangs. Cowboys rounded them up, herded them across a narrow neck of land, and then fenced that off with branches and brush. Horses were selected from the herd corralled by the steep cliffs falling off on each side. The sad part of the legend is that the remaining horses were left to die of thirst, trapped on the point 2,000 feet above the Colorado.

Along the way, we paused to take in the panoramic view of Big Mesa to the north. Two smaller mesas were visible to the northeast.

The views from the Rim Trail as we approached the visitor center were impressive, with rugged eroded canyons in the foreground and background mountains.

Bright blue colors visible on the distant floor in the panoramic shot were not the Colorado River, which is quite green, but instead potash evaporation ponds lined with vinyl and partially filled with tinted water. Potash is potassium chloride and used in plant fertilizer. A mine pumps water down into the Paradox Formation to dissolve the potassium chloride salt. The water is then pumped up into the ponds to evaporate, leaving behind the salt to be harvested by twenty-ton scrapers.

At the park’s visitor center, we took in the sweeping view to the east. The Colorado River meandered by 2,000 feet below. We enjoyed shopping at the gift shop, which was well stocked with interesting items. It was a short drive south from there to the point itself, where we passed through an example corral fence at the neck.

There was an overlook of a gooseneck bend in the Colorado at the point, with a large structure offering welcome shade. We had come prepared for the harsh ultraviolet assault and posed for a selfie in our wide-brimmed hats. Then we took in the view of the basin to the west. Thousands of feet below we could spot rafts cruising on the Colorado.

That evening we drove to the south end of Moab and circled back along its east side, climbing the valley wall toward the sand flats for panoramic views to the south towards the red cliffs of the valley’s opposite wall and the peaks of the La Sal mountains 20 miles to the southeast.

The terrain was rough and varied as we climbed towards the sand flats. Enthused by the views in the golden hour of the evening, we decided to drive north to the Colorado River and drive east along Highway 128 along its south bank.

Sheer vertical cliffs, stained with desert varnish, rose to 900 feet above river as we meandered 15 miles upstream to the northeast.  It was another stunningly beautiful scenic drive in Utah and a wonderful end to the day.

The next day we packed up for the return to Salt Lake City. We stopped in at Sweet Cravings again for lunch, and Wendy enjoyed shopping at Lin Ottinger’s Rock Shop. Then we drove northwest for 4.5 hours to the airport in Salt Lake. We saw rain falling across the landscape and odd yellow gaps in the storm clouds.

Eventually we were headed north on I-15, managing to hit rush hour traffic as we drove north along the Wasatch Range. Trixie the TomTom GPS app guided us along, warning us about impending traffic jams and how long it would take us to clear them. It steered us onto the I-215 beltway to finally arrive, road and traffic weary, at a Courtyard by Marriott. We checked in and walked over to Roberts Restaurant for a delicious dinner. Wendy enjoyed some salmon, while I feasted on an excellent steak.

The next morning we checked our Ford Fusion in at the airport and flew back to Tulsa. After so many days in the arid high desert, we both were struck by how green the landscape appeared as we descended. We were back in Green Country and glad to be home.

I suspect that we will aim for a cooler area of the country for our June 2019 getaway. But we enjoyed some truly spectacular scenery looping across the high deserts of Utah and far northern Arizona on our arid adventure.

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< Arid Adventure, Part 4: Antelope Slot Canyon

TRIP DATES: June 11-12, 2018 | Slideshow | Photo Album

The highlight of our trip would come at the lowest point in our looping journey: a walk through the Antelope Slot Canyon near Page, Arizona. So we needed to make our way south out of Utah down to the Glen Canyon Dam which impounds Lake Powell. The terrain meant we would have to drive a long arc west, south, and then back east.

Scenic Highway 12 continued to impress as we traveled west toward Bryce Canyon. A few small towns dot the arid Bryce valley. After we found that Foster’s Family Restaurant in Bryce was now the UpTop Steakhouse and only open in the evenings, we backtracked to Tropic for lunch at Rustler’s Restaurant.

Tropic was named by pioneers seeking to promote it as a more temperate location than its competitors. In the late 1880s, the Mormon farmers in the area diverted water from the East Fork of the Sevier River into the often-dry Paria River drainage to irrigate their fields. They dug, mostly by hand, a 15-mile ditch which still runs today. We saw the Sevier River’s water flowing through the Tropic Ditch near the Mossy Cave Trail at the north end of Bryce Canyon.

The surrounding hillsides had the characteristic look of the famous eroded amphitheaters of Bryce Canyon National Park a few miles to the southwest, which nature carved out of the pink Claron limestone of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. Unlike the Grand Canyon, Bryce was not carved by flowing water, but instead by frost-wedging and chemical weathering.

For 200 days a year the temperature cycles above and below freezing in that area of Utah. During the day, melt water seeps into fractures only to freeze at night, expanding by 9%. The ice exerts a tremendous pressure of 2,000-20,000 pounds per square inch. Over time this “frost-wedging” shatters and pries rock apart. In addition, rain water, which is naturally acidic, slowly dissolves the limestone, rounding off edges and washing away debris. This creates fins of rock jutting out from the cliffsides, which then erode into free-standing hoodoos.

We shopped for trinkets in Bryce and then continued our journey west. A dozen miles across the northern end of Bryce Canyon, Highway 12 runs through Red Canyon, the western edge of the valley, with its own erosion of the Claron limestone. The road passes through two manmade arches in the rock, which were fun to drive through.

Too soon we left Highway 12, and the rest of the drive to Page was uneventful. We followed highway 89 down the Grand Staircase, a term Clarence Dutton coined for the steady descent, layer by layer, through the sedimentary rock formations from Bryce Canyon south to the Grand Canyon. The pink cliffs of Bryce give way to grey, then white, and eventually the Vermilion Cliffs we had driven by the previous summer, ending in the chocolate cliffs that form the top layer of the Grand Canyon.

The high desert we drove through heading back east in far southern Utah towards Lake Powell was quite inhospitable. It became even more desolate as we dipped south into Arizona. It would never occur to one to stop and stay in Page, Arizona were it not for the formidable Glen Canyon Dam and associated natural and man-made wonders.

The 710-foot high dam was built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation from 1956 to 1966 and has always been controversial. Edward Abbey wanted to wreck it in The Monkey Wrench Gang, and Marc Reisner delineated its downsides in his superb history Cadillac Desert. The level of Lake Powell fluctuates considerably, but it has never recovered from a drought in the first years of the 21st century. While its full capacity ranks it as the second-largest man-made reservoir in our country, global warming and the increasing demands on the Colorado River mean it could eventually become a “dead pool” that can no longer generate hydroelectric power.

We were glad to arrive at the Days Inn in Page, where we had a nice dinner at the Gone West restaurant. The next morning we drove to the Wahweap Marina for an Antelope Canyon boat cruise. Wahweap is a Paiute word meaning “bitter water” and dates back to when the mineral-laden trickles of water in the area were unattractive. Now all that and much of Glen Canyon is subsumed under the cool clear waters of the lake.

There was quite a crowd in the marina waiting to board the boat, hiding from the brutal sunlight outside. We sat on the upper deck by a retired couple from New Jersey. They were fun to visit with and in the middle of their own adventure out west with some other retirees. I wore my Tilley hat, of course, but made the mistake of wearing shorts and forgetting to protect my legs with sunscreen. The heat and sunlight were intense, leaving me with an itchy sunburn by the end of the 90-minute cruise.

Our boat took us past the dam and Castle Rock. All around us were the red cliffs of the uppermost layers of Glen Canyon and the “bathtub ring” of mineral deposits from back when the lake was actually full decades ago.

We zoomed by the cliffs and eventually headed up Antelope Canyon. Our massive vessel cruised up the winding canyon, following a much smaller boat. I was surprised at how far we could make it up the winding and narrowing canyon formed by Antelope Creek.

Desert varnish stained the walls of the canyon, reminding me of the stains at Echo Amphitheater near Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. This natural patina is primarily clay particles with iron and manganese oxides.

The weathering in some places exposed the layers of sedimentary rock, created hoodoos, and in spots yielded bright orange sand. There were quite a few houseboats on the lake, although for me the intense heat and sunlight, with little vegetation, left me with little desire to linger.

We returned to the marina and struggled to cool off inside the resort before heading back to Page. That afternoon we laundered clothes, and I bought some aloe vera gel for my sunburned legs. The next day we would revisit Antelope Canyon via a guided walking tour through its upper slot canyon.

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Arid Adventure, Part 4: Antelope Slot Canyon >

< Arid Adventure, Part 2: Escalante