Zion, Monument Valley, Dineta, Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, Vegas

I went on a fantastical voyage of discovery, with wonder - and danger. Read on if you dare!

I wore an N95 in the plane, airport, rental car shuttle, and most of the time to stores and in the casino. Hardly anyone else was. Most people have resumed normal life, whether or not they decided that explicitly. I still feel guilty when I get on a plane or go to a restaurant, as if I'm taking an unnecessary risk for mere entertainment. The risk is still not zero and I really don't want long COVID.

Here's where we went:



You will notice it's a static image, because Google continues to fuck up and make their service less useful by not allowing the waypoints in the embedded map.


VALLEY OF FIRE

Years ago I used to travel frequently to St. George UT for work, always flying into Vegas and driving. Somehow I never stopped to check out Valley of Fire State Park, which has the Fire Wave, which is much better than the stupid old regular Wave in northern AZ. The sudden transitions in the rock between white and red had to do with whether it was being laid down in a reducing or oxidizing environment (swamp vs not at the time.) These are Jurassic but there are also Cretaceous red rock layers in the Southwest.








Above: a fellow hiker chased down and cornered Salacious Crumb in a rock formation.




Above: you can see how clean and rapid the transition is between red and white rock, reflecting a change in local water conditions at the time, possibly because of a change in a river flowing over the sand at the time. Sneaker for scale, and as you can see the effect of the rock is powerful, immediately turning shoes a featureless gray.


Above: sunset in the Valley of Fire. Below: very mellow bighorns. (Very little zoom used here, they were just hanging out and very cooperative when people wanted to stop for pictures.)






SOUTH UTAH AND ZION NATIONAL PARK

On the way to Zion you get off the 15 in St. George, and boy has St. George grown in the last 20 years, doubling in population! (I recommend Frostop Burgers, whose imitation fry sauce is indistinguishable from Arctic Circle's at least for this gentile.) The home prices in Springdale at the entrance to Zion in terms of price per unit area are comparable to some decent places in Sonoma County, a finding that I repeated at several other trendy growing outdoorsy towns on this trip. Zion was beautiful as always. We did Emerald Pools which was surprisingly crowded but people were nice. At this point in the trip we were still thrilled by the novelty of snow (visible in patches on the upper reaches of the canyon walls.) Flagstaff would cure us of this.










Above: I heard another hiker theorize that these smooth piles of snow near the misty bottoms of the several falls around Zion were the result of "natural snow maker" effects of the falls at sub zero temperatures. I think this is right because most high falls had one of these.






















Compare above and below. The east end of Zion Canyon was used as the entrance to the hideout in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.







Also pictured, Riverside Trail to the Narrows. Unsurprisingly this winter, the Virgin River was roaring, so no hiking up the Narrows (though honestly I've never done it and don't understand the appeal of hiking in water or rock hopping for ten miles.) Very proud of my daughter who kicked butt on both of these hikes. Although she was unsure of hiking to a place called the Temple of Sinawava became she said it sounded like a bad guy. In Springdale outside Zion, for dinner I highly recommend the Bit and Spur. Try the local gin (Madame Pattirini, named after Brigham Young's drag performer son - yes really, and yes he really performed for LDS elders with their full knowledge.)


When we left Zion we passed through the windowed tunnels, then went into the Belly of the Dragon cave (pictured below, credit visitsouthernutah.com



Sadly Moqui Cave was closed. Our original plan was to hike Buckskin Gulch but there were at least two deaths in the previous week and the people who didn't die, didn't have fun. We made it down the fairly washed out 7-mile BLM road but, as I consider among my strengths as a father and husband that I don't kill my family, I decided we wouldn't risk hiking into it. And it worked out - because if we hiked Buckskin, we probably wouldn't have stopped at the understated trailhead for Toadstools SP, which I had never been to before.




























Above: inside an amphitheater. Three pictures down you can see it from a distance.














This was one of the big surprises of the trip (and if you're not surprised by something new at some point on a trip - why did you go?) In the parking area we also had our first encounter with a native person, who sold us some jewelry (nice lady; we later saw her in Safeway at Page.)

Afterward we crossed the Glen Canyon Dam (holding back Lake Powell - Hoover Dam's younger brother.) I know someone who did their honeymoon on a houseboat exploring the side canyons of Lake Powell which sounds like a blast. Page is smaller than I thought; also more native, although I'm not sure why this surprised me given the proximity to Dineta (Navajo Nation.) The street of little motels in Page would be a fun place to stay for a little bit, but I'm not sure I'd want to live in hastily built cinder block proto-Googie architecture indefinitely (as some people do because some have been converted into homes). Navajo Mountain stuck out as always but I learned it's off-limits as a sacred mountain to Navajos (clearly doesn't stop people though.) Navajo Peak is an igneous intrusion in the Colorado Plateau (itself a block of crust pushed up during the Laramide orogeny.) We skipped Goosenecks because it was out of the way and Antelope Canyon because you have to schedule a guide and it's expensive.


THE NAVAJO NATION

From Page it was a long haul across the Dineta (not sure people realize it's big - bigger than West Virginia, more than 200 miles by 100 miles.) There were signs offering compensation for radiation exposure - there was uranium mining in the Dineta, which you can learn about in this brief video. One person working at the Monument Valley visitor center (which has its own exhibit on the history) told me she'd just watched it herself and this was a known problem during her grandparents' generation. (See also, the uranium mine at Joachimstahl in the Czech Republic in this post, where political prisoners in Warsaw Pact countries were sent during the Cold War.)



Why is this list posted in the Burger King in Kayenta, AZ? It's part of a WWII museum, which also includes captured Japanese guns and flagsThe Navajo Nation is justifiably proud of their role as code talkers. (Note, the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano, who is famous for his role as Genghis Khan in Mongol among others, is actually a quarter Navajo - has grandfather was a code talker who spent time in the Japanese home islands.) We stayed in Goulding, which had just as great a view of Monument Valley and unbelievably cheap dinners (great steak! Super cheap!) I noticed that the room TV was tuned to the Sirius XM metal channel when we got in, and later noticed one of the house staff wearing a Behemoth T-shirt. (She admitted yes, she listens to metal while cleaning.) Keep on spreading the metal gospel sister! I have more/better pictures of Monument Valley and the materials at the Kayenta BK here (although the code talker display is updated now.)









Next day, it was back across the Dineta to Moenkopi (Tuba City) to see some dinosaur tracks and buy some turquoise. Yes, they're real tracks, made during the early Jurassic. While we were there the wind blew harder and harder, until finally we could see a red cloud rolling toward us from the flat land to the south, and a sandstorm blew in (no these photos were not taken on Mars.) The woman we bought from told us March is usually bad and she advises against trying to drive in that area (one benefit, now I didn't feel so bad about taking my family the long way to Flagstaff instead of over Olympus Mons.) To get the sand out of our eyes and mouths we went into Basha's, an AZ grocery store chain which has a specialized chain in the Dineta. The main difference in products available inside the rez was that they had a LOT of lamb.


Yes those are all real tracks. I don't know how the Perseverance rover is missing all of this.




I'm going to submit this to the "cozy places" subreddit.









As noted before, the Dineta is big. In fact it's so big that it has other nations inside of it - namely, the Hopi, who live on the effectively named First, Second, and Third Mesas. The simplified history of the Southwest is that around AD 1000-1100, it was drying out and resources were getting scarcer because the population had grown (in some areas on the Colorado Plateau like SW Colorado, the population today is still substantially lower than it was at this time.) That's when the common ancestor of the Navajo and Apache arrived from the north where their relatives still live in pockets up the West Coast, and on much larger territories in western Canada and Alaska. This couldn't have helped things, and the appearance of easily-defended cliff-dwellings at that time suggest things weren't going great (and the fact that the people living in these abandoned dwellings are referred to today by the Navajo as Anasazi, meaning ancient enemies.) This is also consistent with the typical pattern in history, where more aggressive newcomers push the previous residents up into the highlands - it happened with Basques in the Pyrenees, the Polynesian-speakers in Madagascar when Bantu-speakers arrived, the Marquesan-descended menehune of Hawaii when the new Tahitian settlers arrived - and of course, to Native Americans as a whole when Europeans arrived. (See also: the region of Zomia in James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed.)

The Hopi were part of one of the few even partly-successful native revolts against the Spanish, and in the early twentieth century after American influence was penetrating the area in a way the Spanish never had, part of the Hopi chose to withdraw completely, Amish-style, and remain so today (in the village of Oraibi.) I had no desire to force myself into the village, but even in the theoretically modern towns nearby like Kykotsmovi, it's anything but clear that outsiders are welcome (hand-written signs warn against photography.) At one point I got off the main road and drove into Kykotsmovi proper, which was clearly much poorer than the towns was saw in the Dineta. For unclear reasons, they were also much more committed to wearing facemasks than the Dine. We went to the Hopi Cultural Center and got Hopi tacos with sliced beef; we would have gone to the Burping Coyote store just because of the name but sadly it was closed, possibly due to GI problems. I have to say the stretch from Second Mesa to Winslow seemed like the most desolate.

Below: yes, I'm standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. This is not a growing town but they capitalize on what they have, and it's interesting to see that for the first time they have a native mayor. Below that is the entrance to a typical Route 66 trading post. One of the take-homes from this trip: kachinas have gotten popular and expensive. I mean, good for them, but they're cool and I want one, just not at the $500 level. Maybe time to make a Sonoma County style kachina.







OK, real mature, guys.






Above: from Chimayo Trading.



Just west of Winslow is Meteor Crater National Landmark. Incredibly windy that day (continuing the theme that I'm the only idiot who takes his family to Arizona to be cold.) The site is updated since I was last there 15 or so years ago, with information about the Chelyabinsk meteor from 2013. Image credit Planetary Society and Barringer Crater Landmark.






FLAGSTAFF

It was sleeting that night, and then the next morning I was awakened by the unbounded enthusiasm that can only be shown by a child waking up to snow. This was the last time any of us would be charmed by snow. Even the child. I should add: I grew up in the Northeast where it snows, every winter, at sea level. I have traveled quite a bit in the mountains of the Western US, including the Sierras and Cascades. Of the three scariest snow driving experiences in my life, two were in Flagstaff, one of which was during this trip. It snowed literally every day while we were there, regardless what the forecast said. One day we kind of escaped by driving east into the rain shadow of Mt. Humphreys (on which much of Flagstaff's inclement weather can be blamed). Possibly due to the weather, Flagstaff and Northern Arizona University reminded me quite a bit of State College, PA during this visit. It wasn't all bad - we had a couple days in which we were forced to relax (something many Americans are no longer good at, even on vacation) - bumming around the Airbnb as a family, playing board games, walking to dinner (in short, it was awesome). Two experiences that stuck with me: when grocery shopping I dropped something on the massive stack I was balancing to take to my car, and someone rushed to help me (wouldn't happen everywhere); and as I went for a walk, a Native guy was running around the street in the snow trying to be helpful and show people where to step to avoid getting soaked. He was pretty clearly intoxicated and noticing me doing my best to diplomatically refuse his attention, he turned and shuffled off, saying "We're not all bad people you know." I do know, but man that was a bummer.

The first two below: like the rest of the American west, Flagstaff has had a bad winter - with difficulty delivering mail and goods, and it showed on the produce shelves the night we arrived.






Above: see, I told you it was like State College. Below: a clever system at NiMarco's pizzeria, which I consider the analog business to the now-defunct Gumby's.






Flagstaff looks like it has some cool urban trails and the system connects to the Arizona Trail. The problem was, the trail was either under several inches of snow, or several feet of water. You can see the creeks which are dry for much of the year could barely handle the weather.





Then we headed off to Wupatki to see volcanic craters and ruins. Built by the Sinagua people (an exonym for the likely ancestors of the Hopi who abandoned the area around Flagstaff and went to the mesas shortly after the arrival of the Dene speaking Navajo). I always forget how volcanic the area north of Flagstaff is and I don't quite understand why there would be so much activity there but not as much in Nevada which has some of the thinnest crust on the planet. We got to the ruins but the family had clearly lost their patience with windy ancient things.