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Route 66, Four Corners, Mesa Verde

We left Flagstaff at 5am. Every morning on this trips was an early morning, packed with things to see. We purposely picked this route so we could see Winslow, Arizona and the famous location of the song, Take It Easy. We got there before the sun rose and there was no one around. 

It was so worth the trip of the highway to see. We played Take it Easy as we arrived. We studied the background of why Jackson Browne wrote about this location. Here’s what I found out:

As legend has it, Jackson Browne was driving to Sedona on Route 66 when his car broke down in the middle of Winslow. Winslow had some acclaim in the 50s with a celebrated hotel, the historic La Posada hotel. Then , in the 60s the town almost disappeared after I-40 was built and by-passed the town.

We took some photos and then it was on to the Petrified Forest National Park. We got there too early, it wasn’t opened yet. So we took a photo. I didn’t want to wait because I really wanted to spend as much time at Mesa Verde. I had been reading so much about the park and the cliff dwellings, I didn’t want to waste any time. [Note, we ended up spending a lot of time in Petrified Forest the next day, on the way to Tucson.]

We continued on toward the Four Corners Monument, Navajo Tribal Park. Monument on Route 40.

We drove past Gallup and Shiprock, and admired the Painted Desert. It was so beautiful watching the sunrise in the middle of the desert. 

We turned off the highway, for the Four Corners Monument not knowing what to expect. In the middle of nowhere was this park and buildings. We paid our admission and entered. There were vendors all around the middle of the park selling native american art and jewelry. I wanted to remember this place since it was magical with the flag and the history and wind, so I bought a ring from a native american woman. We took a bunch of photos and then headed to the hike. 

We hiked down the trail stepping in all four states: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. It is a rugged landscape and today the blue sky was accented with puffy, white clouds. October is the best time to go here. Very few people were here so there weren’t any lines, and it was cold-ish. 

Now it was onward to Cortez, where we would stay the night, and Mesa Verde. The drive was spectacular and clouds threatened the entire afternoon. We could see oncoming dark clouds most of the time and got rained on a bit. But there were not many people in the park which made it very nice. There was a fire here, too, in 2002. You can still see fire scars driving to the mesa.

Mesa Verde was magical. It was everything I expected and more. It has a vibe, something in the air that made me feel the history, the people who lived here. As we started the drive up to the mesa I was just awaiting after every turn something beautiful but the coolest part was when I got out of the car, walked the trail, and just around the first curve, I saw it – the cliff dwellings under the overhanging cliffs. Cliff Palace.

There is nothing like it in the world. I just stared and couldn’t take my eyes off it. I walked closer for a different perspective. It was spectacular, I felt the sacredness of this place. We stopped at Spruce Tree House, Cliff Palace and Balcony House. 

Guided tours of the cliff dwellings ended a few days before we arrived so we could only look from afar. Next time, and there will be another trip here, I will do a tour and get close. 

I wanted to come here and just be in the park, experience being there. I wanted to take in the landscape and watch the sky. This is exactly what I did. We brought our lunch and sat on a bench and just watched. On the drive back down we stopped at the Fire Lookout and took in the amazing views.

I cannot wait to come back here.

We stayed the night in Cortez and at first light, headed south to Tucson and Saguaro National Park.

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Grand Canyon and Flagstaff in October

My original plan was to run the Javelina 100K. I signed up six months prior to the start date. 

Training didn’t go as planned. Blah blah blah. 

In September I decided that I would instead take a tour of National Parks and visit the legendary 4 Corners. 

My travel partner was Mark, who initially offered to crew my 100K race, then decided that touring the National Parks was a good vacation idea, too. 

I planned to see my friend Mary on Friday night to wish her well on the 100K but my plane was late and the lines for the car rental didn’t get me out of the airport until 11pm. [Note: Mary loved the race and wants to do it again, so I have a second chance to do it at some point.]

Saturday morning Mark and I left for the Grand Canyon at 5am. We drove past Sedona and Flagstaff wanting to spend as much time at Grand Canyon and Bright Angel trail as possible. Our only stop was for a late breakfast in Tusayan. I had the most amazing Huevos Ranchos. 

We got to the park and headed straight to Bright Angel. I wanted to go down at least 3 miles. I loved seeing the trail in the distance; I just wanted to hike to the river. We occasionally caught glimpses of the Colorado River.

The trail was steep in places but also leveled out for a nice break. It was nice to just take a leisurely hike into the canyon.

Usually my hiking plans take on a life of their own and I go go go. But this time it was a slow pace, checking to make sure Mark was good. He’s more of a road runner and doesn’t really hike – but is in great shape. He did well. 

We ended up hiking 2.5 miles with 722 feet of elevation gain. 

After visiting the shops on the South Rim we took the shuttle west and walked along the Rim Trail. We were able to see the Colorado River and stopped at the Powell Monument honoring Major John Wesley Powell who was among the  first to ‘run’ the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. 

I’ve read Stegner’s book about Powell, and have read so many historical stories about Powell. He was the person who warned the government about the west’s aridity that wouldn’t be able to sustain agriculture. He was also a scientist. He also advocated for removal of Indigenous, which no longer makes him a hero, in my view. 

It was a cold day in October to visit the park – so much better than sweating, which was the case the last time I visited the Grand Canyon in 2015. 

Mark and I drove back to Flagstaff past Humphreys Peak in the Coconino National Forest where we saw the devastation from the fires in 2022. In the picture below you can see the blackened tree trunks.

We had dinner in town and stayed the night in a hotel. It was a long day seeing northern Arizona. I can’t wait to go back. Mark and I have a plan to come back this coming October for a Rim to Rim hike.

Next up Route 66, 4 Corners and Mesa Verde.

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Reading books, obsession, poets and the star

I’m currently in book reading mode. This happens to me every 5 or 9 years. I suddenly want to read everything, go back to school and watch every movie or documentary on the subject I’m suddenly obsessed with. It’s pretty fun to spend every free moment reading and thinking about reading, and listening to books in the car and on my phone. I’m obsessed.

This time it is Western American Literature and Western American History.

I should say, this time and last time I got obsessed with every writer writing in the late 19th and early 20th Century. I read master theises, I read research and subscribed to journals. I go down associated subjects’ rabbit holes. It’s so fun.

Warning: this is not really related to the outdoors but I do have a triathlon analogy coming up. Read on, please.

I’m reading and buying books from DeVoto, american history scholars, railroads, authors writing about this time period and text books about these subjects. What is interesting to me as I follow link to link, reading about writers and historians and the transcontinental railroad, I see a book about a man writing about the Sonoran Desert. And I remember his name. I read his book when I was living in Tucson and the Sonoran Desert. I remember on my blogspot blog I wrote about the book, and about him.

The irony in the story below is about obsessions and getting so into a subject that it generates a book, a story or a movie – or changes your life.

I dream of being a scholar, professional athlete, world traveler. The closest I can come to realizing a dream is to: read everything, do the work, talk to people. The key to success in any enterprise.

But I digress. Here is the story I wrote January 2014 about a book I loved.

The Fallen Sky and Obsessions

I am reading The Fallen Sky An Intimate History of Shooting Stars. And while, I am no scientist and I know nothing about meteors and meteorites, it is a really interesting book. What hooks me is how the author personalizes a story about the people who are obsessed with meteorites. The author, Christopher Cokinos, is searching for those who are searching for meteors; he is hunting the obsessive types.

I know that type well.

For I am obsessed with triathlon.

I am endlessly fascinated by fellow-obsessed triathletes. I want to know what drives them, what makes them get up in the morning and train, then go to work, and train again. But I’m also obsessed with the west and western writers and people who chose to live in the west.

Maybe my next book needs to be about obsessed nature writers who are triathletes and live in the west.

I am reading five books right now and The Fallen Sky is my number one. I can’t seem to put it down. This is my favorite passage so far. As you read it think of what you are searching for, the journeys you have been on and what you found, and the people you met:

“Whether someone wishes to possess a meteorite to sell it or to crack one open in a laboratory for discovery, the meteorite must first be found or hunted. Which often means you have to be willing to go where the meteorites are ….such journeys have impressed on me that wonder-whether from discovering a geological rarity or tracking down a hidden history or finding a lover – is not as pristine a feeling as some would think. I found that mine was a journey into wonder and its costs. Along the way, I bore changes in my life and realized that I was hunting the lives of the meteorite hunters – not just the stones themselves-and I began to understand these strangers’ lives better when I accepted my own. Quests, after all, can come at a very high price….As to the meteorite clan, they’re a complicated, colorful lot.” (4)

Yes, quests come at a cost and triathletes sure are a colorful bunch.

It’s like the osprey folks. They are obsessed about finding osprey. The obsessed are everywhere.

I’m going to keep reading The Fallen Sky and learn about shooting stars and crazy people who are endlessly fascinated by them, to understand my own obsessions.

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Go see the world

“National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”  —Wallace Stegner, 1983

I’ve just finished re-watching America’s Best Idea, the PBS special from 2009. In 1988 I wanted to go see the western National Park and signed up for a trip. Now, I just want to go see all the National Parks; I just want to go see the world. As much as I can. Ken Burns inspired travel.

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Following Isabella and My Colorado Adventure, Book Review

Robert Root writes the story of how he followed Isabella Bird’s three-month (Sep-Dec) journey at age 42 through the Front Range of Colorado in 1873. While Bird seeks to understand this place, Root seeks to see what Colorado will mean to him after living most of his life in Michigan. 

He writes about that first view of the Rocky Mountains while driving from the plains; it is impossible to forget. It is a spellbinding moment of beauty and awe – that first glimpse of snow white peaks in the distance. He enters Colorado from the east similar to all migratory Americans, and me too. (17)

I know that view he describes from driving west from Maine in 2004. Like early adventures and explorers Root is lured west by the promise of new beginnings. 

As an outsider, Bird entered each new world with an openness to experience and an intention to record what she encountered. (19) I think this is a similar sentiment for me. I feel like every new trail or new state I move to there is an intention to record it and understand it. 

Bird was labeled high strung along with being an adventurer. In 1873 there were few women adventurers exploring the frontier.  Root writes her health improved while traveling. When home, she “wilted”. Her life was traveling and exploring but she preferred the less traveled parts of the world. She was always looking for the path less traveled, less populated areas. Also, novelty and freedom kept her healthy, Root writes. And this 1873 Colorado  challenged her resourcefulness and curiosity. A place unfettered by duties to her family and society is the world she created for herself. The plains and the makeshift settlements unsettled her but once she reached the canyons and mountains she remarked: 

“the canyon became utterly inaccessible…this was exciting; here was an inner world.” (47)

When she entered Estes Park, she came alive.

 “Mountain fever seized me”, she writes in her journal.

Root writes that she didn’t have much interest in the science of the place; she was interested in the mood it created in her or the circumstances it created for her. (63) I am captivated by her journal writing about the hike to Longs Peak. I just so happen to be reading this section of the book on the plane as I fly from Knoxville to Denver knowing I will see the peak in the distance. I never thought of climbing Longs, even after 10 years of living in Colorado but for some reason, I want to now. Maybe it is the emotion she writes about the trail to the top. I want to experience it the way she does. 

Root writes that Bird worried about writing about beautiful places because you don’t want the masses to find it. Similar to other nature writers, particularly Edward Abbey, she wanted to keep it to herself and unspoiled. 

Root reflects on Bird’s writing and his, and defines memoir and compares it to autobiography “Autobiography is a chronological art, an act of recordkeeping with commentary, not, like memoir, an attempt to revivify a period of the past, make it possible for another person to live the moment too through reading. Autobiography eschews the intimate, the commonplace detail,  the unexceptional private life; memoir embraces them.” (113)

Are you a sticker or a transient? Root answers: “If you stay too long in one place you can no longer  call yourself a transient or a traveler. You’ve become an inhabitant and you spend your time learning how to dwell there, day by day. For most of us, perhaps, this inevitable change is not only expected but anticipated. For Isabella Bird, it was frustrating and unacceptable.” (271)

I’m not a sticker but I’m not transient either – I think, maybe.

Bird came to Colorado on a recommendation of a friend, writes Root. She found more than she expected and didn’t expect to stay longer than she did. She traveled to remote places, places on the edge of the frontier, and avoided settled places. She preferred the wild and less cultivated areas. She went on to other places and wrote books about the other places and never mentioned Colorado again; and she never came back. She wanted to be in motion and test her limits. She retreated from a regulated life of responsibility and obligation and social constraints. 

Root is a nonfiction writer of place who wrote this book after moving to Colorado. He falls in love with the place as he follows Isabella’s travels in the Front Range. 

Like Root, I love to explore new places and find its “distinctive qualities” and learn its natural and cultural histories. “I’ve merely wanted to know where I am…I like who I am when I’m here,” he writes. I can say the same thing about the mountains towns I’ve lived in. I consider my current place, Sevierville a mountain town. 

Root ends his book with a pithy statement about Colorado that rings true to me and my discovery, while living in different places: “I can imagine moving on. I can’t imagine letting go.”

“The mountains are hard to ignore, hard to be complacent about, and yet the sight of them so often startles me, stuns me, as if I’m repeatedly discovering them anew.” (265)