Utah, part I

So. It's official. Nick and I are Daytonians.

We arrived Sunday evening at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and checked into our pre-reserved temporary lodging that will be our pit stop until we find an apartment/house. And there's progress on that front, but I hesitate to write anything about it as I don't want to jinx anything. But it's looking good so far.

I have to say, I was a *bit* concerned as the receptionist at the Inn directed us not to a hotel room but to another building ... and as we drove through the temporary housing area, a collection of one- and two-story duplexes, there was a HUGE bulldozer and a half-torn-down building that happened to look very similar to the rest of the units we were passing. That is to say, Nick and I both silently sat in the car, thinking "AREYOUFUCKINGKIDDINGME? We're being sent to condemned freakin' housing. Only they haven't gotten to ripping OUR shithole down yet." And we had no idea how long we'd be staying here ... so our throats both started to sort of close up in anticipation (dread?) of what we'd find. Neither one of us wanting to be the first to say anything, we gingerly opened the front door (like we thought it was going to come crashing off its hinges or something) and shot each other somewhat confused looks when ... lo and behold ... this place was NICE. As in, full kitchen with nice appliances and dining room furniture, big living room with a flat screen TV, and two well-appointed bedrooms. Clean carpet, nice floors - in fact, it looked to have been relatively recently remodeled. So I guess the Air Force DOES know how to take care of their people after all. Huh.

It's hard for me to believe it's only been one full day here: what a day it's been! We went over to the medical center to square away the transfer of my health care and records, Nick went over and checked out the AFIT campus on base and met up with his sponsor, a former S-3B guy who's here working on his PhD, we went grocery shopping at the commissary on base, and then we went and looked at some apartments in the downtown area and one other neighborhood that had piqued my interest. Like I said ... progress.

I had a little time in the car on the way through Kansas to sort through and do some very (very) rough editing of my shots from our first day in Utah, and in my procrastination to get anything up on the blog in the last few days, I managed to get through the second day as well.

So let's see, where did I leave off? Ah yes, St. George. Lovely desert hamlet. Friendly people. We departed as early as we could muster the next morning for a 40-minute drive into Zion Nat'l Park. Almost immediately, the landscape became more rugged and riddled with red peaks jutting up from the middle of incredibly flat stretches of desert scrub.





(this following image is one of my faves from the day, though sadly it ended up a bit oversaturated during my in-car rudimentary postprocessing. This is one I'll work on once my picture monster desktop is up and running again in our new place.)



Oh, and one more note about the post-processing: after I started looking through the images, I noticed that HOLY HELL I have a lot of dust on my sensor. Maybe from switching lenses five or six (or more) times a day in Alaska? Or even more frequently here on the road trip? (that's rhetorical) The dust gets progressively worse through the first day and you'll notice some really bad dots on shots from the second day. I will be editing these spots out of the "keepers" but I need dear old Photoshop to do that well, so for now you can curse the evil dust along with me.

Because Zion is an incredibly popular park, there is almost no parking inside the park, and there is basically one main road that takes you to all of the sights, the National Parks people decided to limit the number of cars on the road in the park. Now, the main drag is accessible only by shuttle bus, and as we just didn't have the time to hop on, hop off, etc (and it was already upwards of 90 degrees at 9:30 am), we chose to drive on through the park and leave Zion unchecked on our bucket lists. But we certainly got an appreciation for the architectural peaks and mesas (buttes?), and we were there early enough in the morning to still have the moon hanging in the unbelievably blue sky:



And the drive, of course, was beautiful. We climbed up on a series of switchbacks that overlooked the main canyon of the park and then passed through two long tunnels carved into the side of the mountain. Here's a shot as we entered one of the tunnels, looking back through the side-view mirror at the stunning peaks behind us:



As we continued our drive through the park, we started to notice the fascinating patterns that the wind and weather had worn into the sandstone. Some of it, like this, was more of a horizontal slashing, while other patterns closer to the tops of peaks were more vertical:



And then we got to Checkerboard Mesa, so named for the horizontal and vertical slashing that creates a sort of grid on the side of this windswept mesa.



I could type out the explanation for this amazing geological phenomenon, but seeing as I took a picture of the sign at the viewpoint, I'll let you read it as I did:



I should have realized this was the Easternmost stop in the park when a busload of weary-looking European tourists unloaded and excitedly paced from one end of the viewpoint to the other, snapping pictures. Hey, when your first sight of Zion is Checkerboard Mesa ... well, I couldn't really blame them (too much) for hogging every good self-timed portrait shot. Sure enough, we soon exited the park and were on toward Bryce. We had one of those great road trip moments as we were driving along (well, NICK was driving along. I was staring, stupefied, out the window). We rounded a curve and it looked like we were going to be passing over a small river or a mini gorge or something: the land was pretty flat and there were no super duper special geological features on the near horizon. Then, out of nowhere, we drove over a little bridge and HOLY CRAP! The view off to the right was like a miniature Grand Canyon!! The picture didn't really work (I was kind of shooting into the sun and there was enough respiration from all of the trees out there that there was a bit of a haze), but maybe it'll give you a sense of something:


We had a pretty peaceful drive through the Utah backcountry as we approached Bryce Canyon National Park. Just outside of Bryce, we went through a portion of the Dixie National Forest known as Red Canyon, which was probably the most intense color I had seen in a long time.



There was a nice little pulloff and we stopped to take a few pictures, but we were also happy to feel that the temperature had dropped a few degrees (we had gained significant elevation). As we continued toward the Bryce entrance, we started seeing more and more reddish orange rock interspersed with the normal gray granite:



And then, voila! We were at Bryce. Thankfully, unlike Zion, you can drive the main road and its little offshoots, and we pulled into the first of many parking areas to explore the main "ampitheater." You can actually walk the whole rim of the ampitheater (so named because it's a crescent-shaped rim that envelopes a deep gorge filled with these AMAZING formations called Hoodoos) but we sadly didn't have time!

The Hoodoos are incredible, spiny, veiny spindles that are formed through erosion by water and ice and are distinct to this one small area of Utah. The presence of multiple kinds of sandstone layered on top of one another is what allows for the kind of weathering that produces these bizarre and fascinating formations. I realized, after looking through my pictures, that it's a) impossible to convey the magnitude of the expansive ampitheater, b) unlikely that pictures could give a sense of scale of the individual Hoodoos, and c) still awesome to see in pictures.













Nick and I wandered around Sunset Point and hiked a short trail up to Inspiration Point, all the while walking in a sort of dazed and amazed stupor. The beauty of this country leaves me speechless; that it CAN leave me (ME!) speechless is stupefying. It's easy to see why Native Americans worshiped gods of nature and natural forces: if we didn't have knowledge of geology, time, and science, wouldn't we also assume that supreme beings put those mountains, those hoodoos, those arches, in exactly the place they wanted? To be worshiped as pillars of strength and beauty, monuments so many thousands of times more beautiful and delicate, intricate and colossal than humans could ever dream of creating? As we drove around, Nick and I wondered when in the evolution of man did he begin to appreciate natural beauty? We know that early homo sapiens were drawn to water sources for food and survival and natural caves for shelter ... but when did we as a species begin to look at the world around us and have our breath taken away by the grandeur and grace? Does it date back to the same time we started making practical objects from an aesthetic point of view? Did nature inspire us to do that? It's enough to make the heads of a couple of agnostic thinky people like us spin (see them spinning?).



A little farther down the main drive in Bryce, we came across a pullout for a view of one lonely arch (Bryce doesn't have many):



And we saw so much more, but for the sake of brevity (I know, I know - TOO LATE!), I will just say that Bryce was someplace we really look forward to returning to for an extended stay and hiking. There are some great trails that are easily accessible to the average day hiker that take you down below the rim so you can hike with the hoodoos! And because Bryce is at 8000-9000+ feet elevation, even in the summer is it far more temperate than the other Utah parks. And once you acclimate to the incredibly wee amount of oxygen in the air at that height, I think a Bryce hiking/camping trip would be an excellent adventure indeed.

We had toyed with the idea of staying North of Bryce, just outside of Capitol Reef National Park, in the tiny hamlet of Torrey. The town has just 141 residents but somehow supports several restaurants and no fewer than six hotels ... go figure. Nick had read in our trust AAA Utah guide book about a locally famous restaurant called Cafe Diablo which, as we found out from our waitress, is listed in 1000 Places to See Before You Die. The food was divine, although the portions were absolutely mind-bogglingly huge. We each had an app (Nick had rattlesnake cakes, I had a duck salad with jicama slaw) and were so stuffed from those we were really glad we'd decided to split an entree (pumpkin seed-crusted local trout). The setting was totally idyllic and the food left us rested and relaxed. We decided to continue on through Capitol Reef and stay in Green River (it may have had something to do with nostalgia for the name ...). The drive through Capitol Reef lasted through the magic hour before dusk, and it could not have been more appropriately named!

We stumbled upon this one-room building along the road in the park, and although it was just being shaded by the adjacent peak, there was still enough light to capture the scene. This building was nearby and similar in appearance to the historic Fruita school, a one-room schoolhouse founded by the Mormons shortly after they settled the area, though there was no plaque at this building indicating its purpose or history.



We stopped to get one last panorama during the moments just before the sun set:





And thus ended our marathon day of National Park-ing. It couldn't have been better! We pulled into Green River late and exhausted but oddly energized. But it still hadn't really hit us that we were MOVING across the country instead of just VISITING some parks on vacation. The first revelations started to come the following day ...

Which I will blog about once my fingers have recovered from this post. =)