A week of Grand Canyons (Part 2)

What, no comments on the last post! Is anyone reading this?

Part 2 of this post has been a while in coming, but I'm pointing the finger directly at Microsoft - one complete computer rebuild later, I'm ready to continue posting. Recommendation: DO NOT USE VISTA. I should have bought a Mac & a Wii......

Ok, now where were we? Oh yeah, in Moab where they have decent coffee and free dirt.

That evening we headed up into Arches national park towards dusk. After about a 1/2 hour hike from the car, you reach the top of the sandstone ridge where you find the quite stunning Delicate Arch. From a distance it does look quite delicate, but up close it's a pretty solid piece of rock.

Supposedly towards dusk the arch changes colour many times, so while we were waiting for the sun to set Gator Girl got snap happy and took many photos. I'll leave it to you to decide whether or not the colour change is significant.
The hike up to delicate arch.

Some of the cool patterns in the rock on the hike up.










































By the way, that's me (Swamp Boy) underneath the arch in the 3rd picture. Taking lots of photos of the same thing over an hour or so can get boring, so what do you do when you're bored? Well if you're Gator Girl, you take photos of lots of other things.

Like the people you've been travelling with. A better shot here of my "Utah Rocks!" cap.
My feet.
Some stranger's knees.

You know, looking back through these photos has been a very entertaining experience. Gator Girl + boredom + camera = entertainment.

I mentioned last post we were staying about 10 miles out of town in some cabins. There's a bunch of reasons that we really liked them.

First of all they were pretty cute, even with a Volvo parked between them.

The view from the seats out the front was quite spectacular.

And there was fun for the whole family.

But most of all I think it was the atmosphere.

Or maybe I just enjoyed hanging out with the locals.

The next day was supposed to be our rest day. However only the Purple Homme was the only one of the group who actually understood the concept of rest. Gator Girl, Violet Femme and I hired mountain bikes and went on a slickrock mountain bike tour. It was seriously hard work out there. The trail ran basically uphill the whole way, with lots of high frequency ups and downs which were seemingly designed to give everyone carpel tunnel.

Gator Girl looking comfortable.

Violet Femme looking for a rock to throw at me for suggesting this.

But once we got to the top then everyone was all smiles. I have no idea of our guides name anymore, but that's him on the right.

Once at the top we had some more stunning scenery to check out.

Yet more scenery.

And the most exciting thing of all was this was not just ordinary slickrock. This was slickrock with DINOSAUR FOOTPRINTS IN IT!

For some reason I get very excited by dinosaurs, can't think why.

Anyway, check out this size of these claws. Note the very stylish shoe reference point.

And the most exciting thing about these footprints is apparently they are from Velociraptors. Yes, you know, the scary smart ones from the Jurassic Park movie*.

Other odd things we saw in Moab:

Do you think this is where the Moab pirates stay?

Can anyone spot that nearby river? Anyone? Bueller?

I know I posted it last time, but really - is anyone actually short of dirt out here?

Ok, moving on, just like we did. The next day we saddled the Volvo up and headed on a long trek south-east. It may be hard to believe, but we'd had just about enough of stunning scenery, so thought we'd do something a little more cultural. We were on our way down to Mesa Verde, where the remnants of Pueblan cliff top dwellings from around 1100 AD still exist. But before we get there, we found one more stop full of true tourist rubbish.

That's right, it's a tourist attraction blasted into the side of a sandstone cliff. Sadly enough we weren't permitted to photos inside, but the memories will remain with us forever. It was built by a very strange man called Albert Christensen who had a number of odd hobbies. The main one seems to have been painting, mostly very bad portraits of Jesus all of which are cross-eyed. No matter where you went in the room, at least 1 of the eyes in each painting was looking at you.

Unfortunately his other hobby was taxidermy, and poor Albert was just as bad at that as at his painting. When his favourite donkey Harry died, Albert couldn't bear to live without him, so stuffed him and put him in the living room. Not just stuffed him, but stuffed him really really really badly. In fact, it's face is so covered in stiches it looks less like he died of natural causes and more like he was an actor in some kind of snuff donkey zombie film.

The $5 we spent on the tour was probably the best value for money in the entire trip. Sadly all our photos are from the kitsch petting zoo outside, but they give you the flavour of the spectacle.

The hillbilly lawn mower.

Some familiar faces.

Some online pictures of the house are given at the website below:

http://www.theholeintherock.com/photos.html

Now we return to the culturally significant part of the journey.

Mesa Verde is a national park containing a series of cliff side dwelling inhabited by the Pueblos during the 12th and 13th centuries. They built these amazing structures, lived in them for a couple of hundred years, then mysteriously left them behind and never returned. They were amazing buildings as they appear to be pretty much inaccessible, and very hard to spot. For the most part if you didn't know they were there, there's a good chance you wouldn't see them.

This is the largest of the dwellings, known as Cliff Palace. The rooms go all the way back into the rock, and appear to have been home to hundreds of people. When exploring we split up, with Gator Girl and Purple Homme touring this one, while Violent Femme and I headed across the other side of the valley to a more inaccessible dwelling.The view from Cliff Palace - can you spot the dwelling on the other side?
Here's a close up to help.
The dwelling that we went to was very hard to get in and out of. This ladder is the way up now, but I have no idea how they used to get in.

The view from the top down.

The ceremonial fire pit (called a Kiva, I think).

Some of the remnants of the buildings.

And in the other direction.

The somewhat steep way out.

Make that vertical way out.

Another cliff dwelling - this time one we could easily walk to.

Gator Girl just about bored with cliff dwellings now.

And to finish off, one of the classic contradictory American warning signs (you will need to zoom in on the sign in the background).

We then began the long trek back into Arizona for the final stop of our tour, the grandest of the canyons. However when we looked at the map we realised with a short detour we could check out another famous American landmark.














Yes, that's right, Monument Valley. I'd love to say it was a worthwhile side trip, but in fact it was probably our least favourite of all the parks we went to. Apart from the vertical pieces of rock, there wasn't much else to see or do, unless you're into native American handicrafts which really didn't do it for us. And considering the amazing sights we'd already seen on this trip, some steep rocks alone wasn't cutting it.

The only thing left for us to do was.................

Replicate the shot on the front of the Lonely Planet, of course.

Onwards! The end of this post is now within sight!

We finally made it back into Arizona and to the edge of the Grand Canyon. And it well deserves the capital letters. As you may have been able to tell, by this stage we were a little 'stunning view'-ed out. It's hard to be continually amazed all the time, and the string of incredible sights we'd seen over the past week was very hard to top. We were so glad we left the Grand Canyon for last, as it managed to overcome our scenery cynicism and get us back to the Zion/Bryce stunned level.

For a while we just took photos from the edge, but it's hard to truly capture just how big this canyon is. I'll post a few photos, but I don't expect any photo to capture how amazing it was to stand at the edge of a canyon that's up to a mile deep.



We stayed overnight at a lodge near the canyon. The next morning Violet Femme and I got up before dawn as we wanted to hike down into the canyon as far as we could. Sensibly, Gator Girl and Purple Homme were having nothing of this, and slept in until very late in the day.

We needed to get up early as we had a helicopter flight over the top of the canyon booked for 2pm, so in order to get any kind of useful distance down the canyon we had to allocate a long time. All the recommendations say to allow twice as long to come up as go down, so we hiked down for about 2 hours, then just after dawn had to turn around and head back up.

The path down was very tight and at times the drop off the side was quite intimidating. I can see why people would really start to struggle on the hike back up in the middle of summer.

The start of the trek down. Can you see the hairpins in the rock face at the back?

The path around the edge of the cliff.

Walking the ridge.

The path winding onto a plateau a long way beneath us.

My favourite shot of the whole trip.

Violet Femme relaxing at Cedar Ridge.

The view from Cedar Ridge further down the track - you can just make out the path cutting across to the right of the mesa.

The canyon from Cedar Ridge (1).

The canyon from Cedar Ridge (2).

The view of the Colorado river from Skeleton Point. This is as close as we got to the river before we had to head back up.

More cliff side walking.

The view beyond Skeleton Point, more hairpin bends which we couldn't be bothered hiking down and straight back up again.

The view on the way back up.

The mules chasing us back up the canyon.

Chilling out on the edge.

After we hiked back up we had to rush to the airport for the absolute best thing we did on the entire trip - a helicopter ride across the top of the canyon. I've been on a couple of helicopter rides, and in my experience the best rides always have a slightly crazy pilot. When he started playing 'Danger Zone' through our headphones while flying ~20 metres above the treeline, I knew we were in for a good trip.

He then played March of the Valkyries while approaching and then power diving over the edge of the canyon. Wonderful stuff.

He was not actually supposed to go below the rim of the canyon, but as you can see by some of the shots below, I don't think following the rules strictly was in his nature. Anyway, some shots from the ride are below, enjoy.



















































And that's about it for this part of the trip. Violet Femme and Purple Homme then headed back to Phoenix and then New Orleans with us for the rest of their trip, but sadly I didn't take any photos.

And that's also it for this epic post, hope you enjoyed it as it took most of the day to do. Gator Girl has promised to post next time a summary of the last 8 months. Hopefully she can be a little more efficient than me as it's taken me two posts to cover 1 week.


The fine print.

* Yes, yes I know that Spielberg got it a little bit wrong in the movie and they're not as intelligent or big as he said. And technically the Velociraptors that they put into the movie didn't actually live in Utah**, so the story can't be strictly true.

** But there were similar dinosaurs found in Utah which may have been more like the raptors in the movie than the ones they based the movie raptors on, but that's a coincidence***.

*** I realise no-one cares anymore****.

**** Well, I still care. I bought Gator Girl a dinosaur tooth, but after telling her it was from a dinosaur then had to point out that it was really a Pleiosaur tooth, but it was still 65+ million years old so really that's what counts. And it's a cool looking tooth*****. But accuracy is important.

***** Where was I going with this?