Pipe Spring

Posted on October 16, 2007 in Photos Vacation Fall 2007

The wind made us change all kinds of plans: on our last day on the Arizona Strip, we avoided visiting Coral Pink Sand Dunes because I did not want the lens of my camera sandblasted. Instead, we sneaked a peek at Pliggytown* USA (aka Colorado City, Arizona) and visited a national monument meant to interpret the region’s Mormon and Paiute history.

Pipe Spring National Monument exists mostly to fill the space between Grand Canyon National Park and Zion National Park — a place where tourists could pull out for a bit of history on a plot of land big enough for forty acres and a mule. The main feature is an old Mormon “fort” — more of a ranch house with gunslits carved into the sandstone walls.

We came here for the history, but up on the Ridge Trail I found views that fascinated me. Miles of unbroken sage prairie with hints of old trails and roads. A wedge of my heritage came out of districts such as this — around Richfield, Utah — where my polygamist ancestor Jorgen Smith lived with his three wives. Pipe Spring was a place where polygamists scattered their wives: no one big happy family lived here, but isolated sister-wives hid here and helped with the raising of church cattle and passing on telegraph messages.

Everywhere there were signs of hard work: butter and cheese were churned out daily. Men minded the herds. One sister-wife kept her ear to the telegraph wire and, for her pains, was rewarded with her own bedroom. There were fields of crops and grapes. And, in the evening, when all other chores were finished, the women worked at needlepoint and the men whittled.

We went back twice in a day, the first time to take the tour of the fort (which was blessedly free of any effort by the Mormon Church to evangelize) and then, GPS in hand, to map the Ridge Trail. I spoke at length with a park ranger who gleaned what she could from my tales of my polygamist ancestors and told me about the problems the park had in keeping its livestock.

It was a day when no rain fell, only the shadows of clouds.

We wrapped up our day with a meal at Houston’s Trail’s End in Kanab, Utah, a suitable inn for our last day at the foot of the [[Grand Staircase]].

*Polygamist Town

Here is the album in my gallery (8 pics). Please comment over there.

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Grand Canyon – North Rim

Posted on October 15, 2007 in Photos Vacation Fall 2007

At the last minute, we switched our plans and visited Bryce Canyon before the North Rim because the weather forecasts said there would be extreme winds on the day when we orginally thought to go. We did not evade the winds, but it was sunny and when we dipped below the rim, they did not affect us.

The next day we visited the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park where the foehns found us. Two minutes after we asked at the Visitor’s Center about the Cape Final Trail, they announced that the road leading to the trailhead had been closed. Winds blew through the ponderosa pines and there were gray clouds overhead. It wasn’t much of a day for going out, so we spent most of it in the lodge looking through the picture windows at the gorge below us. The one trail we attempted — Bright Angel Point — led along a perilous, fenced ridge. Fifteen feet from the end — a lookout which leaned out over a cliff — I announced to Lynn that I had had enough and declared that I would not go to the end. I held onto my hat and turned back after she had taken in the view for herself.

Two ranger talks gave us something to do before we turned back to our motel in Fredonia, Arizona. On the park exit road, we came to a spot where a tree had fallen on the road and shattered into bits so small that we had no trouble driving over them. Four cars lined up next to a riderless bike. We assumed that the biker had been hurt, so we left word at the entrance station.

Rain pelted us as we descended the Kaibab Plateau. About a mile south of Fredonia, it abruptly stopped. The ground at our motel was entirely dry.

Here is the album in my gallery (24 pics). Please comment over there.

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Glen Canyon (Marble Canyon)

Posted on October 10, 2007 in Photos Vacation Fall 2007

Highway 89 travels like it is avoiding the [[Vermillion Cliffs]] at all costs before making a sharp left across some alluvial fans and stabbing across the Colorado River via the [[Navajo Bridge]]. Today there are two Navajo Bridges: a new one which can handle the heavy trucks of today and an older one — the original — which now carries only walkers. both mark the only gateway within Arizona to the region known as the Strip.

We stopped on the “mainland” side of the bridges to walk across and read the signs placed by the NPS. I found it a little unnerving to stop at the steel plates that join the two halves of the old Navajo Bridge or to look over the side at the great, green, greasy-looking Colorado River whose banks are quite barren of fever trees. We spent but little time there, mostly coaxing a ranger to give us a brochure about Lee’s Ferry — just upriver — so we could hike the River Trail and explore the ruins of a small town founded by one of the perpetrators of the [[Mountain Meadows Massacre]].

For whatever reason, the area is under the jurisdiction of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area rather than Grand Canyon National Park which begins just south of the new Navajo Bridge. Signs along the short access road explain the geology of the Vermillion Cliffs and point out odd features such as chunks of [[Navajo Sandstone]] that have rolled off onto pedestals of the [[Moenkopi Formation]].

We performed all our obligations by stopping at turnouts and hiking the River Trail up to the last set of ruins. There wasn’t much difference between these nineteenth century relics and [[Anasazi]] pueblos — they were made of the same stone, using the same mortar. Pieces of a steamboat poked up in the water and a piece of cable from the original operation lay on a beach covered with desert pavement. When we were finished, we watched some packers set up their boats for a raft expedition down river. The concrete ramp and that alone may have been the reason for the separation of this area from the national park. Or maybe it was just too far from the main area of operations.

Here is the album in my gallery (10 pics).

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Grand Canyon – South Rim

Posted on October 9, 2007 in Photos Vacation Fall 2007

I am not [[Ansel Adams]] and I make every effort not to frame my photos as he might have done. For every scene, I endeavor to create a unique take. And yet there are places on this planet where my camera turns out material like that being engendered by the legions of shutters being pointed by those beside me, as engendered by the legions who came before me, and by those who are yet to come.

Photographing the Grand Canyon and maintaining one’s peculiar artistic vision sucks. Thank the Universe for the condors, the clouds, the split-twig figurines at the Tusayan Museum, and for the junipers beside the rim trail.

The canyon was once a wondrous discovery for Pedro de Tovar who came on orders of [[Francisco_Vásquez_de_Coronado|Vasquez-Coronado]] and, having no camera, found himself unable to relay the vibrant magnitude of the gorge. Somewhere near Desert View, he and his men scrambled into the abyss, aiming for the river they saw in the distance. Palisade after palisade thwarted their desire to drink of the muddy Colorado. Perhaps Tovar was a lucky man because he did not have to bring home images that looked pretty much like all the other images that people have taken over the years of what one writer described as “an erosion-control engineer’s nightmare”. All that pinkness and yellowness squashed together in layers that Fundamentalists have tried hard to read as incidents in the course of The Flood despite the reality that the canyon is an amazing indictment against Creationism. Yet its magnitude overwhelms its details, so the story is not heard. We see it as a backdrop, a canvas without a voice, the epitome of what [[Alfred_Stieglitz|Stieglitz]] held to be the accessibility of all Nature to the amateur photographer: you see one picture of the Grand Canyon from Grandview Point, you’ve seen them all. Or just about.

We started our day at Mather Point where we made our acquaintance with the condors who were a sensation two days ago when we posted them to our blogs. (See Lynn here.) We then rode the bus designed for the hordes to the El Tovar, had a fine lunch with a mediocre view, and then rode back to the truck. Because the Red Line was down for the day, we drove out to Hermit’s Rest, gave a ride to a stranded girl back to the Village, and then went out by way of the Tusayan Museum (where I scryed the famous stick figurines*) and Desert View.

In other words, we did our tourist duties.

It was at Desert View, while others were trying to capture the colors, that I aimed my camera into the sun and the mist:

Was this more like Adams or Stieglitz? Or could I claim it as distinctly my own?

Here is the album in my gallery (20+ pics).

*Check out the Quicktime plug-in of the split-twig figurines on this page.

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