I spend the night after Meteor Crater in Homo Lovi (don't) State Park, a site with millennia old shards of Native pottery littering the high desert. The following days' drive takes me into the heart of nearby reservations - first the Hopi tribe, and then the Navajo. There are Hopi settlements high atop the rugged Mesa's that shape the landscape, as the road winds up and down the hills.
The following morning I start out in a small canyon, the mouth of which opens onto Monument Valley: it is just dreamy. My campsite was part of a small settlement called Goulding's Trading Post - they show John Wayne films (which feature the valley) each night. The view out my window in the morning alone makes me think the next week or so is going to rival Yellowstone and the Canadian Rockies.
I drive out through the valley, beneath and between the monoliths. This is quiet season, it seems, with only a small fraction of the roadside stalls set-up for business. The scenery is totally spectacular - it makes so much sense that Hollywood chose to locate in this region. The approach to the small town of Mexican Hat is perhaps the most impressive - twenty or so houses squeezed along a cliff edge above the river gorge that flows through the town.
As I think I mentioned, this next week is to be given to visiting the National Parks of southern Utah. First up is a couple of nights in Arches. I hike into the canyons there, along great fins of rock. Coincidence of timing sees me accompanied by a gang of fellow tourists, from Japan. They are rather loud fellow tourists. All eight of them. Being loud. In a massive echoey canyon. I daydream they are all ducks, and this is a different arch - Brunel's Sounding Arch in my hometown of Maidenhead. Ducks cannot quack under the sounding arch. An absurdity of acoustics. Alas, my daydreaming is to no avail.
Lunchtime, and I am treated to an arguing couple, their voices resounding around the landscape. It wasn't so much an argument, to be fair. More a bitter man, chastening his wife because their water was too cold. It is a fraction above freezing in the sunshine. He is, clearly, a twit.
I'll do my best to avoid the reportage of a fireworks display - all oohs and aahs. Suffice to say, the scenery - Partition Arch, a rock window on a cliff edge with views onto the canyon below, in particular - more than made up for the less peaceful visitors to the park.
These Americans don't mess around when it comes to naming stuff. Arches National Park is, well, loads of big (and not-so-big) rock arches, formed by the passage of water and the forming and melting of ice in cracks, and the action of the winds and the pull of gravity and of time. Canyonlands, as if you couldn't guess, is a devastatingly spectacular array of gorges and valleys and, er, canyons, where the Colorado and the Green rivers converge. Don't tell anyone but, in my opinion, it puts the Grand one to shame.
I could easily spend weeks working my way through these parks and wandering their trails. Unfortunately I have just the one remaining before my travel visa is up and I have to move on. Next up on my Grand Circle tour is Goblin Valley State Park.
I had to wonder whether 'goblin' is a euphemism on this side of the pond. This particular state park is probably not the place to go if you are in any way a sufferer of Freud's phallic fixation. 'Envy' doesn't quite do it, here. Goblin Valley is a veritable sea of bulbous rock columns (don't say that too quick) with pointed mushroom caps. It is as if the state punishes the textbook graffiti of its teenage boys by forcing them to recreate their illicit art in this desert, in clay. It is an amazing sight. Be prepared to find yourself agape.
Capitol Reef National Park comes next. It is so named because early explorers found the feature - where rock seams millions of years old have been pushed up and through the Earth's crust - virtually impassable, much like trying to sail through an oceanic reef. There are massive sandstone cliffs there, weathered into bizarre curves and monoliths. With a lot of nipples. Despite these, it is not in the same league as Canyonlands and Arches so, after a short but necessary walk up Miners (sic) Mountain, I move on.
Upon exiting I am confronted by cliffs with scores of strange buttresses - like the Assyrian Kings of old, seated side-by-side upon their sandstone thrones, surveying their lands before them. My route the rest of today takes me down Utah Route 12 and is a contender for drive of the year. The road peaks out at 9600ft and affords an extraordinary vista - land mass melting into the horizons in a gray haze, the foreground puckered by cliffs and canyons. Back down into a valley before rearing up again, the road leads along the proverbial knife-edge, with hundreds of feet between leaving the road and meeting the planet again, should one veer off the tarmac to either side.
Having experienced a drive like no other, and wound up alongside a frozen reservoir, virtually skipping for joy as the sun bestowed its' setting magnificence upon the ice and the trees and the world, I awoke the next day thoroughly in a mood; a quite marked swing in emotion. I don't think I have ever experienced mood swings this wild in my life. As I move through these epic landscapes I am regularly hit with almost overwhelming euphoria, only to find myself totting up the number of nights left in the US each evening. The solitude is taking its' toll - I've a really strong yearning to be back in the UK. I can't stress enough how important friendships and human interaction are to ones sanity.
And, so, Bryce Canyon, which I visited next, felt like just another pile of weathered rocks, just another ridiculously gobsmacking panorama. I'm now in Zion, which is equally incredible, and intend to stay here for two nights so I can take it all in. Perhaps the rest will do me good. I do feel rather fatigued. A day without a long drive to set me up for my last three nights on the road.
I conquer three different hikes in one afternoon in Zion - I think I must be getting used to the altitude or something, because the suggested hike times in the trail guide were wildly conservative. And so to my last stop on the desert canyons tour: Valley of Fire in Nevada. There are so many furry scuttley things running about - jackrabbits and cute little desert rats - it's like I've found the real-life inspiration for Sylvanian Families. The scene reminds me of the pristine dreamworld of Tubbyland, except it is parched and arid and has killer bees and poisonous scorpions thrown in. The desert rats are so plentiful I'm convinced they must have taken some bedroom pointers from the jackrabbits. They are everywhere I look.
Not content with the menagerie of cutesy death upon my doorstep, I decide to hike into the Nevada desert for the afternoon. I fill both my internal and my external bladders with a couple of litres of water and head out into the scorched wilderness. Death Valley notwithstanding, I am undecided whether my choice for 'first ever desert to hike across' - Valley of Fire - is wise or not. My intended destination is the park visitor centre, 3 or 4 miles away. I get there without incident, drinking another 2 litres of water en route. Inside I discover there are tarantulas native to these parts, just to compliment the poisonous snakes and scorpions. Also, daytime temperatures can reach as high as 82C out there - spectacularly high. Fortunately for me, it is the first week of January or something, so the worst I can expect is about 25C. Still, that doesn't mean the tarantulas won't be about foraging come sundown. I'd best get a move-on back to the campground if I am to avoid them. It's funny how I only notice the many strands of spider-web hanging between the desert plants on the return leg.
That night, out of the blue, I had a quite vivid dream. It was set in a future-place: a community tourism project of sorts, the likes of which I will be visiting in February. But the cast of characters were people from my past: university housemates; the ones I haven't kept in contact with. The dream compelled me to do some 'mystalking', or whatever the facebook equivalent is called.
I may have known this anyway, but I learnt that people's lives move forward at different rates. And I feel there is no right or wrong speed for this progression. Yet the very fact that these differences are possible triggers thoughts of 'what ifs'. Thoughts on the fringes of regret. Which must be down to jealousy on some level. Envy. And perhaps the fact these feelings exist points the way forward, the direction to next take.
I didn't step on a rattlesnake, by the way. The National Parks here are usually quite good at telling you when not to step on things, so I figured I should pass on the advice. It seems sound enough to me. If you do ever step on a rattlesnake, make sure you possess the reflexes of a better rattlesnake than the one you choose to step on.
Just a few nights left in the US...
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