Day 4: June 16, 2011

10:30 am

Driving out of Monument Valley

74 degrees f

Writing on June 17

Teddy’s post:

Utah is an awesome state. As soon as we exited Nevada we drove through Virgin Canyon and into Saint George. St George was decent, we only got to see the strip malls, but everything leading to and surrounding it is big open country with beautiful cliffs and mesas. The speed limit is 75, and the drivers happily exceed it. The weather is dry and mild. The Sand Cove Park not only allowed camp fires, they sold firewood in the visitor center.

All of the regions we drove through, which included most of the southern side of the state, exuded the wild west cowboy country feeling from all the movies. I felt free and comfortable the whole time, with a few exceptions...

First, gas. They sell regular, but it is only 85 octane rated. The altitude is so high that they can get away with this without causing engine knock, but it still felt wrong to me that they were selling what we normal people consider regular, 87 octane, at a higher price. I instantly thought about renting a tanker and shipping gas from low to high, but then I remembered that this is a totally stupid idea.

Next, Mormons. The fact that my concussions precludes me from drinking for another 4 weeks probably makes the Mormons bug me less than they would under normal circumstances. By all means, they seem to be wonderful people, but as Erica mentions below, the names in Zion got pretty annoying.

My problems with them are minor at the most, but I thought these pet peeves were kinda funny. So, all in all, Utah rules, but I will need to bring a very big flask next time I visit.

Erica’s post:

Yesterday was an extremely eventful day, but I’ll start with the basics. We left Zion and headed to Bryce—just a two-hour drive north. We thought we could take a quick jaunt there and go back down to the Grand Canyon for our Day 4 campsite per our itinerary. Turns out, going to Bryce can really be an all day event and we really didn’t plan for it.

We drove up to a place called “Sunset Point” and were totally mesmerized by what they call “Hoodoos”. THIS really must be the place where they got inspiration for Big Thunder Mountain. These enormous stone pillar things shoot out of the ground. See pictures. This place could not be more different from Zion in terms of landscape and rock formations, but it was equally astonishing. We took a hike down below the Hoodoos into a relatively narrow squeeze called “Wall Street”. There is no sunlight here and the pillars are stacked together like skyscrapers. It actually did remind me of those narrow streets in the Financial District. The only difference was…no jerk finance guys!

Coming out of “Wall Street”, we had about a half-mile to go with some more beautiful scenery. We met some lovely little chipmunks who…again…followed us around and were captivated by my strange chirping noises. Yeah, I sound like an idiot, but hey—we got some really great pictures out of the deal. So presh. Not so presh was the massive rattlesnake who was coiled up sleeping by a tree. Oh, who am I kidding…he was cute, too.

10:45 am
78 degrees
Driving through Navajo Reservation

The hike back up was really tough and we soon realized that the exhaustion from the previous day’s hike combined with this one kind of killed the day for any more activity. It was only 2 pm and we needed to relax and stop pushing ourselves so hard to get everything in.

We checked some maps and realized it would actually be a gory 6-hour drive to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Did we really want to go? We had both seen it before when we were kids. There were tons of things we wanted to do in the Canyon, but we figured we would move on to other adventures.

So, we left Utah and drove on a series of “the only road for miles around” highways to get to the famous Monument Valley on the Navajo Reservation. First, we needed to stop, because we were both so tired and worried about driving. I had read about this place on roadsideamerica.com and couldn’t believe we spotted it on our drive. It’s in Mount Camel Junction and it’s called the “Thunderbird Café: Home of the Ho-Made Pie”. We needed some Ho-Made Pie! We ordered the Thunderberry Pie—the pie of the week. It was raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, and strawberry—or something. 4 different types of berries and it was actually so damn good. Shout out to Dada—“PIE!”


9:50
Driving by Kayenta
Navajo Reservation

At first, we were totally excited about driving through the Navajo Nation—we knew the landscape would be beautiful and it would be interesting to see how another culture lives. Indeed, there was a lot of cool stuff to see—including the most unbelievable sunset on the mesas and some tumbleweeds (Tumbleweed count: 3). But, it was actually sad. The people live in rundown homesteads with just a few markets but mostly fast food restaurants. As I’m writing this, we just passed two different hitchhikers. There were bunch of really sad stray dogs running around.

We finally got to Monument Valley where we planned to camp. We were under the assumption that Monument Valley was a National Park—a National Park of the United States. We really learned a lot last night. The Navajo have their own way of running things like their own police departmenr, their own “National Parks”—and their own park services (or lack thereof). It was pitch black by the time we got up to The View Hotel to ask where to camp. I waited in the car and Teddy came back with a map and some pretty weak directions. We were to go back down the hill, then take some road on the right. We found what we thought was the road—but the sand looked even deeper and scarier than at Sand Hollow. There was no one around, but a tour guide happened to pass and told us to follow the sandy road to the primitive campground. We honestly have to stop asking for “the primitive campground” and I think you’ll see why.

Driving side to side around the road on the well-beaten paths of trucks and RVs we avoided the pits of sand. We arrived at what we thought was a familiar camping permit drop box…but was just kind of a “rules of the campsite” sign. Only about 5 RVs and 3 cars parked at the top of the campsite and we saw no tents. I’ll talk about the only good part of the next few hours—what we thought was a bright, red headlight of an approaching car, was the most beautiful moonrise I had ever seen. Unfortunately, none of our cameras could capture how enormous, bright and clear the moon was. It was a deep orange-red and cast off a rusty glow. The “monuments”—these gigantic freestanding mesas—were brilliant shadows.

We got out of the car to take a closer look and instantly felt what we had feared—a 30 mile an hour wind blowing dust in our eyes and rattling the car doors. It was windy down in Kayenta—the town below the monuments—but nothing like this. In the spirit of ruggedness, we went for it and tried to set up our tent. Teddy parked our car against the wind and we tried to nail down our tarp. This is where it gets pretty comical in retrospect. We had to scream at each other over the roaring wind and find each other in complete darkness. Sitting firmly on the tarp, we nailed down four stakes at the top. We turned to grab more stakes and the tarp was ripped from the earth by the gale-force winds—it almost flew away, stakes and all, but we caught it and tried again. I don’t know what we were thinking.

Teddy parked the car on top of a hill to try to minimize wind from under the car. When that didn’t wor,k we moved the car again to get shelter from the port-a-potties…I was not having that idea. Finally we moved it to a sand dune. The same ridiculous display of spitting red dust and hammering wildly into rock solid earth continued. And we were only on the TARP—we hadn’t made it even close to the “tent phase”.

It was 10:30 pm and from the looks of it, we were really screwed. We had nowhere else to go. I did not want to sleep in the car—it’s so tightly packed, we would have to sleep upright in our seats. At last, we looked at each other in resignation.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Let’s get the f*ck out of here,” Teddy said.

But, oh does the story get worse. Bumping along the sand, a weird light bobbed up and down towards us: a sad stray dog with an injured leg. Something inside me knew that there was a reason we had failed on our multiple attempts to stake a tent. How scary would it be to wake up in the middle of the night with a wild dog sniffing at the zipper? Yet, there was another unexpected, even scarier reason to have flown the primitive campground.

Headlights brighten before us and flag us down. We assume it’s a ranger and we slow the car. As the it approaches, we realize that it’s a kind of broken down, low-riding green sedan—not an official vehicle at all. Remember, it’s a black night on a desert road in the middle of an Indian Reservation. The textbook creepy driver rolls down his window and says “You guys trying to set up a tent?” I’m nudging Teddy frantically to get the hell out of there. Teddy says, “Well, we were…” and the creeper says, “You wanna try to set up another one?” I’m not quite sure about Teddy, but I grew up in Los Angeles and I know when I’m about to get robbed. I didn’t want to scream so I grit my teeth and calmly told Teddy to STEP ON THE F*CKING GAS!

Thank God there was an opening at The View Hotel at the top of the road. We probably needed showers anyway. Needless to say we have promised each other only to camp in KOA’s or National Parks in The United States of America.