Saturday, July 14

Saturday, August 14:  Gallup to Painted Desert, Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon

It’s all true: the landscape of the Southwest is gorgeous, and the natural wonders beyond belief! Whether looking at those wonders or just the amazing weather, your eyes tend to pop  out of our head as you round a turn in the road or, emphatically, as you get your first sight of the Grand Canyon.

We checked into a rather sumptuous room at the Yavapai Lodge in Grand Canyon National Park a few minutes ago, and we can handle the luxury. 

But to begin at the beginning of the day: we had a good breakfast at the funky El Rancho hotel (though another guest who was examining the dozens of autographed movie star photos on the balcony insisted “You shoulda gone to Earl’s”) and checked out about 9:30, heading west on I 40/ US 66. (Route 66!) About 70 miles west of Gallup, we pulled into the Petrified Forest National Park, which includes the Painted Desert in its northern portion. The Painted Desert is particularly spectacular as you come upon it suddenly, after driving through a more monochromatic countryside. The petrified wood was amazing to look at, and there were even more and better petroglyphs than we’d seen yesterday, but we didn’t need to stop for every sight of another ancient petrified log. Amazing, though, to see the pieces scattered around the landscape like so many logs of freshly sawn wood, even though they were millennia old.

The one downer of the day was navigating through Flagstaff on the way to the Grand Canyon. Traffic was slow and dense, and our frustration was complicated by technology. I wanted to follow the straighter route prescribed by Google Maps; Carmen wanted us to bypass Flagstaff and take a longer route. She was right, of course, but it took her a long time to recognize what I was trying to do. “Recalculating, recalculating” was her constant refrain as I kept ignoring her frantic cries for us to turn back to Route 40. At last she gave up. I could have turned her off, of course, but was sure that at the next turn she would see the error of her ways.

We arrived at the Park at about 4:00 pm (PDT), gleefully swooping through the “prepaid” line to flash our Senior Park pass, which has saved us hundreds of dollars of entrance fees so far, and will continue to do so. We followed the signs to Mather Point overlook, found a parking space in an appallingly large sea of cars, and followed a trail through thick shrubbery, turned a corner, and MY GOD THERE IT WAS! Bursting out before us, almost too huge to grasp at first. The colors! The distances! The great depths right below our eyes!  The spiky towers and minarets of stone rising out of the canyon floor! We could see a hawk circling half a mile below us, a tiny patch of white water where the Colorado River was visible, and the North Rim, ten miles away, where perhaps an equal number of tourists were staring back at us.

The Grand Canyon in All its Glory

And there were indeed lots of tourists, speaking Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, and even English. The click of camera shutters was a thousand crickets chirping. We had read in the AAA Tourguide that if you visit in summer, you’ll be griping about the crush of tourists for years to come. On the contrary – we felt exhilarated by the fact that so many people had come from so many places to stand in awe at what is unquestionably the most spectacular and spiritually moving sight in the US and perhaps the entire world.  

On the way back to the car we passed an intense group of earnest Creationists, possibly a family, sitting at a couple of card tables under an awning, trying to pass out religious literature, explaining how Noah’s flood had done the whole thing (personally, I tend to subscribe to the theory that it was Paul Bunyan with his axe, or maybe a furrow plowed by Babe, the Blue Ox. I bet the Navajo, whose land abuts the canyon, have a more inspiring legend). The throngs passing by tended to give them a wide berth. A little boy in the group was looking confused and agitated, possibly dismayed by the rejection or indifference shown by so many passers-by to the indisputable facts his parents had taught him.

We checked in at the Yavapai Lodge, and found our room, a rather elegantly outfitted but more or less standard motel room in a two-story cabin a few hundred yards away.  Publicity photos on the website had shown elk grazing outside the window, but it seemed unlikely, given the armada of cars and buses parked all around, that many elk would really want to take the trouble. A so-so dinner at the nearby Canyon Café, where I returned with laptop after dinner in hopes of sending out the last two days’ blog posts (it was the only place with wi-fi)  while Joy stayed at the room. Couldn’t get a strong enough signal, or more likely the computer was trying to do too much at once (trying to stream gorgeous photos of cliffs and canyons from the iPhone to the iCloud to the MacBook at the same time as it was attempting to upload my purple prose.  So back to the cabin and a book, and soon to sleep.