Last day at the Grand Canyon. We arose and drove back into the park to the Yavapai Geology Museum. It sits on the rim at a point designated by some committee way back in the day as being the most phenomenal view on the South Rim.

I suppose one could argue the point.

I highly recommend the Museum, but only after your brain is overloaded with all the views, and here’s why: you will find yourself, as you gawk helplessly at the grandeur, wondering why and how and Sweet Cthulhu what??

How do you read all those layers of rock?  What happened here?  Why is this the only one of its kind—why aren’t there grandish sorts of canyons littering the continents?  They’re all big enough, and it might be pleasant to have some in more temperate climates, with trees and flowers and such.

The museum answers all those questions in a very beautiful, organized way.  It’s the only place in the Park where you find yourself not looking at the Canyon.  Pro tip:  in the geological timeline, on the little round hemisphere maps of the gadabout continents, those faint, barely visible gray lines are the United States.  It took me halfway through the timeline to realize that.  Doh.

The inability to know what I was seeing grew stronger and stronger every moment the past few days: on the river, how do you read all the little ripples and backwashes and eddies?  How do you read the rocks’ layers and joints and crumblings? How do you understand how all the plants and animals are joined together?

How do you make sense of all the hundreds of millions of years of accidents and erosions and ebbs and flows and drifts and uplifts?

The short answer is that you can’t, ever.  No one can.  All you can do is try to be there, present, and part of it—and take some of that wonder with you back to your own back yard and realize that the profound ignorance you faced in the Canyon is just as present in the Labyrinth if you will only sit and be there, present, and part of it.

We hit the road to Sedona, the last phase of our trip.

On the way, we stopped off in Flagstaff for lunch, and for me to buy a windchime that I had admired last Saturday. Also, a scientifically correct sculpture of a zebra-tailed lizard.  Photos will have to wait till we return to Newnan, because its little toes and tail are incredibly fragile and I’m not unwrapping it.  Should have gotten a picture of it when I bought it, I guess.

Sedona, for those of you who have only a vague awareness of it, is the New Age Hippie Woo capital of the world.  Its main attraction are the Vortexes, super-spiritual earth energy centers.  I will try to explain more about those after our sunset tour this evening with Rahelio.

Sedona was actually the main goal of our trip when we started planning it; the LFW helped expand the thing into this glorious trek.  Some of our party were eager to sample the energies and woo, and I am one of them.  Yes, it’s woo, but it’s first class, grade-A woo, and I want some of it.

The drive down was not what we expected.  First the pine forests started, and then suddenly we were in a mountain, and then an extremely steep, twisty decline into the Oak Creek Canyon, where signs and AM radio stations warned us to listen for flash flood warnings.  Oh my.

You see how the stone is white limestone, and you will also notice that we are now in a region where it rains enough to support plant life.

The closer you get to Sedona, though, the more the rocks become the red limestone for which the city is most famous.

We are staying at the Sky Ranch Lodge, which is up on the mesa next to the airport (and one of the vortexes).  Here’s the view from our porch, the courtyard:

Little collective cabins with porches; swimming pool; event site for weddings, although there aren’t any this weekend.

Sure, who wouldn’t want to get married here?  After seeing the view, we asked if any rooms were available with porches facing the cliffs, and there were.  We moved our stuff posthaste.  This is now our view:

And now it’s time to go to downtown Sedona and shop for crystals and incense, maybe get our chakras balanced, and in general just wallow in the woo.

So, yesterday we went on a multi-part adventure. My Lovely First Wife booked an All The Things tour^[1,] via Grand Canyon Scenic Airlines, and as usual the rest of us were slightly aghast to find that it a) was twelve hours long; b) involved an ATV ride, hiking, and river rafting; c) ended with a three-hour van ride back to the airport; and d) worst of all, required us to be at the airport at 5:45 a.m.

And as usual, the entire thing was glorious.

First of all, if you have never been to the Grand Canyon at all, go. You have no choice in the matter. Just go.

Secondly, save up enough pennies to book a flight over the Canyon, preferably after you think you’ve seen it all from every viewpoint. You haven’t, and flying over it will re-boggle your mind. (I would recommend a helicopter ride rather than a plane ride.)

We arrived at the Grand Canyon Airport on time and were sent out onto the tarmac to get into a smallish plane:

I am still squeamish about heights and especially heights in smallish aircraft. But we all loaded in, our party plus a nice couple from Yorkshire plus a pleasantly talkative man originally from Savannah, and up we went.

I will not bore you with all the photos I took.

We flew up the river to Page, AZ, where the Glen Canyon Dam creates Lake Powell:

We deplaned and climbed onto one of those tour jeep-like things where you sit on a bench with perfect strangers, in this case three Chinese women who had spent the weekend in a reunion of thirteen of their girlfriends from elementary/high school in China—all of whom now live and work all over the U.S. and Canada. It was quite startling to hear them conversing in Mandarin and suddenly one says, “Whatever…” in perfect valley girl inflection.

There was elkage:

Our destination was the Upper Antelope Canyon. I knew that from the booking but had no idea that where we were heading was THAT canyon—you know, the one on all the posters.

This is our guide, Dee, shepherding us into the canyon. It’s actually a deep cleft in the rock, scoured by wind, sand, and flash floods. As Dee explained, small flash floods deposit sand while big ones flush it out. In the 15 years she has been a guide, twelve feet of sand have been deposited in the canyon.

Again, I could go for pages posting photos: the whole place is one huge photographer’s orgasm. I’ll post a few with the warning that you won’t see any dramatic shafts of light like on the posters—it’s too late in the year for that. In another couple of weeks, Dee said, light won’t penetrate the canyon at all.

Even though the place was relatively packed—there was a tour right ahead of us, one was treading on our heels, and we walked back through all the tours on their way in—it was peaceful in that stunning way that sculptural architecture is. Like the Grand Canyon, your eye cannot take it in and comprehend it, even though it’s so much smaller.^[2]

We hopped back on the tour jeep and were taken to the river tour place, where we got on a luxurious bus and drove for a longish while, crossing the Colorado via the Navajo Bridge, the only bridge for hundreds of miles, over an already deep gorge.

Our destination was Lee’s Crossing, the only place where the cliffs take a break and give people and animals a shot at crossing the river. Until the Navajo Bridge was built, it was the only way to get across the Colorado at all.

We got onto a nice, large, stable inflatable raft with our box lunches and proceeded to munch while Kim, our pilot, guided us away from the dock and upstream towards Lake Mead. The tour usually puts in up near the dam, but there has been some alarm and concern over a particularly large piece of rock (Kim said it was 30×40 feet, 8 feet thick deep) that was threatening to collapse. Apparently the standard procedure is to go ahead and dynamite the thing and get it over with, but since it’s next to the dam…

So we put in at Lee’s Crossing and went upstream.

The cliffs in this section of the river are Navajo sandstone. (The Grand Canyon is limestone.) Sandstone is much softer and easily sculptable by wind as well as water. It’s very easy to start seeing images in the stone.

These looked like a lady’s butt. Your mileage may vary.

As always, scale is difficult in these shots, so if you click on the following photo to get a full-size version, look in the distance for a tiny little pale blue-white dot. It’s along the shoreline, about halfway to the right of center. That’s one of the rafts in our flotilla, about 20 feet long.

We finally stopped off at a point that has ancient petroglyphs and restrooms. Both are marvels: the restrooms are solar-powered composting jobs, and at that point the shade they offered were as much a relief as the facilities. (There are actually seven campsites along the river with these wonders.)

The petroglyphs are from several different periods, and the guide gave an appropriately fuzzy “interp” of what they might be pictures of, mostly antelope and other fauna.  The hurky little figure to the right is most likely a deity of some kind.  You can tell because it’s elevated above the rest.^[3]

The black surface is called “desert varnish” and is a microthin layer of clay and oxides that accrues to certain rocks in certain environments. It coats a great deal of the canyon walls in phantasmagorical patterns, and here the Native Americans scratched through the surface to create the glyphs—for reasons that are absolutely unknown and unknowable.

We went back down the river to Horseshoe Bend, pictured here from above:

The Colorado makes a 270° loop here, much like I-85 South as it splits from I-75. Here Kim cut the engine and we drifted for a while in the silence. There were mallards and herons, and the water was clear enough to see the bottom 30 feet below. (This clarity is due to the dam; previous to its completion in 1963, the Colorado was notoriously muddy. “Too thick to drink and too thin to plow,” was Powell’s assessment. And yes, ecologically that’s a problem.)

At this point, we were all hot, sunburned, and increasingly ready to be done with the adventure. Finally we made it back to the crossing. Like they say at the Canyon, it’s a long way back up.

Despite my fears of a three-hour van ride back to the airport, we were welcomed by the luxurious bus with a charming and informative bus driver, and even an interesting onboard documentary about river runners.

Arriving back in Tusayan, we cleaned ourselves off and went back down to the Best Western for a simple meal of tapas.

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^[1] Officially known as the Scenic Canyon River Adventure Tour
^[2] “Smaller” is always a relative term in these parts: the walls of the canyon were hundreds of feet tall.
^[3] It’s always been my opinion that perhaps scholars should consider that these are doodles by bored shepherds, or even by children whose mothers told them to go amuse themselves.

All you need to know at the moment is that I survived.  I’ll give a fuller report tomorrow after we have decamped to Sedona, away from this exhausting, astounding place.

 

And so we decamped to Phoenix yesterday for a week of sightseeing and spiritual exploration.  (We in this case meaning my lovely first wife plus our friends Marc and MF.^[1])

Our first stop was Flagstaff, which has never popped up on any list of places I wanted to go, but it’s quite a cool little city.  The  downtown is like a smaller version of Asheville: hip, self-aware, revitalized and renovated, with shopping evenly divided between outdoorsy types, New Age Woo types, and artsy types.  How odd that these days I’m all three.

We’re staying at the Hotel Monte Vista, which began the downtown revitalization with its renovation.  The rooms are not luxurious, but they’re nice enough, and the bar/lounge is phenomenal—great craft cocktails and great staff (and luscious coffee in the mornings).

We walked downtown and saw several lovely things that we did not buy, a windchime in particular that had a different and lovely sound.  The store was filled with beautiful soundmaking items: bowls and gongs and tubes and even a sound therapy chair in which you sat and thrilled to the deep thrums of the strings on the outside of it.

They are not open today, alas.  If we come back through Flagstaff next Saturday, I’m stopping and making a few purchases.

Dinner was at the incredible Brix, up the hill from the hotel.  We trudged up there to check it out and were there when it opened exactly at 5:00—and they weren’t sure they could fit us in!  Fortunately they could, and it was divine:

In the foreground, shrimp and grits to die for, and behind that, pork belly on polenta with a beet sauce.  From beginning to end, an exceptional experience.

This morning, we’ll hit the weekend art fair here, then on to the Grand Canyon.

We are travelling in style—when Marc got to the rental counter, the best option was an enormous Chevy Tahoe Suburban LT, the most important attribute of which is not its capaciousness but the multiple outlets for charging phones and iPads.
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^[1] This is the usual disclaimer that we did too leave someone guarding the house so it’s no use planning to break in and steal all the muslin walls for the 3 Old Men labyrinth.  Some of us worry about that.