I'm not much in a writing mood, which is anathema for a blogger. I put it down to nicotine withdrawal and my umpteenth attempt to kick the habit. I find myself with shortness of breath walking uphill at 7,000 feet. It's time to quit.
The drift down the Colorado starts in Page, at the Glen Canyon Dam, and ends about 30 miles downriver at Lee's ferry. After Lee's Ferry it's another 220 miles downriver, though the Grand Canyon to Lake Mead.
This part of the country is mostly Navajo Sandstone. It's old Jurassic sand dunes, solidified with minerals. It's full of fossils, dinosaurs and other strange creatures.
The walls of the river here average between 1,000 and 1,500 feet of elevation, mostly straight up.
View from the Navajo bridge near Lee's Ferry.
More Lake Powell pictures.
Sunday morning! Time to get the show on the road and depart for parts unknown.
Maybe it would be a good day for the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument? The Vermillion Cliffs National Monument? Zion National Park? It's hard to find wine up in Utah, but they have pretty geology. I remember a tennis court outside Zion.
From a few miles away, the Colorado looks like a little crack in the desert.
I try to understand why we keep running into the Colorado River wherever we go in the West. It flows though Texas to the sea and also though the Grand Canyon and out to the Sea of Cortez by California. The deal is that there are two Colorado Rivers in the U.S. One is confined to Texas and the other famous one has formed geologic wonders and huge man-made lake recreation areas. Here they call the Texas Colorado River, "Lake Austin".
As we enter East Texas, we see by the mile markers that it’s 1,000 miles to the western border and El Paso. We’ve covered about 300 of that.
We stop just outside Austin at the Griffin Falls State Park. We’re out of bayou country and into gentle rolling farmland, lakes and lots of oak trees mixed with just a few prickly pear cactus and roadrunner birds.
My first act in Austin is to go for a swim in the pool formed by the upper falls. As I float, I see swallows swooping low over my head to catch insects. They’re a lot like bats with no sonar.
The swimming area is empty except for some turtles. An unfamiliar species of cypress trees line the banks. The falls are formed by a limestone outcropping.
We decide to go to the Alamo Ritz Drafthouse in the evening to see the new Star Trek. It’s a good movie and I see by the previews that a new Terminator movie is coming out this summer, presumably with no Arnold. We order white wine and potato skins to go with the movie.
As we walk, we pass a lot of live music venues. Austin claims to be the live music capital of the world. I have my eye on Antone’s for tonight. They’re doing a Blues group at seven. I'm approached by a person who mumbles something that sounds like it ends with "apple juice". "Apple Juice?", I repeat, somewhat mystified. Yes, she says, she's from Chicago, she's dehydrated and needs money for apple juice. "That's better for you than Crystal Meth", I think to myself and give her a dollar.
Moab had a brief boom in the early 1950s due to desert uranium mining and prospecting. It currently has been expanding rapidly because of the millions of tourists who come to enjoy the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks.
The town has a lot of jeep, ATV and dirt bike rentals as well as raft trips, sky diving and bicycle tours. Mrs. Phred googled 14 beauty parlors, but the lone barber keeps leaving notes saying he's at a convention. There's a chairlift and a waterpark that seem to be out of business as well as numerous restaurants, coffee shops, auto parts stores and bookstores. Moab is still too small for a Wal-Mart. That might be one necessary criteria for our next home.
We took a ride yesterday along a road on the Colorado river and up to the snowline in the mountains and saw dozens of really nice camping/recreation areas built along the river by the U.S. Forest Service.
This morning, after three sets of tennis in Moab, we had a panic situation. We had to change RV parks and the slide-outs stopped working again. The rear slide was stuck in the extended position which makes the RV undrivable. There is no one in this small town (other than Phred) capable of solving the problem.
Touching the loose purple wire to a hot lead had no effect this time. Finally, after all other hypotheses failed, I removed and reseated the four square relays in the basement battery compartment. That worked. Apparently, some of the relay contacts had a little corrosion.
We've picked up our Jeep for our excursion into the Canyonlands National Park tomorrow. The four-wheel trails lead up switchbacks to the rims of the canyon. The red jeep has satellite radio, air-conditioning, power windows and a big V-8 engine. It feels a little tippy driving because of the extremely short turning radius and big tires.
On Wednesday, we have a ranger-guided hike scheduled into the "fiery furnace" area of Arches National Park. It's a sandstone maze about eight square miles in area. People got lost and died in there all the time so you have to go with a park ranger. The fact that I'm a trained navigator carried no weight with the Park Service.
We gave the Moab library three shopping bags full of books for their book sale section. Two of the books were new Tony Hillermans. Belatedly, we realized that our oldest grandson would have enjoyed them.
On Sunday, we'll be parking the RV here and heading over to the Wendover, Nevada, casinos to visit my brother, Spike, then we drive back across the Great Salt Lake to Salt Lake City for a flight back east to see the six grandchildren.
When we return, we need to decide a direction. I have two trip routes planned. One leads southwest to Death Valley, up the west coast and to New England. The other goes northeast to the Rockies, up to Canada and to New England. There is a 4,000 mile difference in the two plans.
...Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on ...
(But...I could have sworn, the song said, "there's still time to change both yours")
We're parked about 100 feet from the Utah border. This seems to be the houseboat world capital. The big lake winds though 100 miles of sandstone canyons which used to be the Colorado River. The water flowing out from the dam is now clear and a constant 47 degrees. The 173 million tons of red sediment that used to flow downstream is now deposited in the upper reaches of Lake Powell. The fish downstream are probably confused by all this.
We're taking a modest raft trip from the base of the dam to Lee's Ferry about 20 miles down the Colorado. That's probably the last place to get out before Bright Angel in the Grand Canyon National Park.
We'll be heading up to the Capitol Reef National Park and then Moab from here. We've made a reservation to park the RV when we fly out to visit the grandchildren.
I found a hike to a slot canyon for today. To see it you need a rope so you can rappel down 40 feet into the canyon. Mrs. Phred has expressed doubts about my rappeling ability.
Lee's Ferry is where the big 6 and 10 day raft trips though the Grand Canyon begin. The picture below is a supply raft, which will accompany a group of rafters that are due in by helicopter from Las Vegas in the afternoon. At the end of the trip they will be airlifted out.
