day 17 -- zion to vegas

las vegas was the destination for this day, but I still had the bryce and cedar breaks loop to cover before sin city. I managed to recognize that what looked like a short jaunt down to las vegas was a bit longer...I got it that nevada is a big state crammed onto one atlas page, so I actually counted up miles and convinced myself (grudgingly) that it was a longer haul than I wanted to believe from glancing at my ripped-from-the-atlas pages. wasn't going to miss out on bryce, but I made the painful decision to skip escalante and cottonwood canyon. hidden there are hundreds of those cliff dwellings, but most are far off the road, so riding past them wasn't of much use anyway. naturally skipping any road with the dotted-green scenic drive line was tough, but I knew that there was no way I'd complete this drive if I added any more than bryce and cedar breaks. that and I was now on a mormon history kick and wanted to visit the mountain meadows monument to see how that episode was narrated...and to find out who was doing the narrating. I had toyed with the idea of spinning out to bryce the previous afternoon and then returning to the campsite, but the spectacular and tunneled east gate entrance road to zion was heavily under construction -- rutted dirt, one-lane delays, and the like, so it was a good call to cover it only one way. back on US89, but this time more peaceful since the lake powell traffic had turned off to the south somewhere...and more rain that looked poised over bryce. I was emboldened by earlier screw-the-rain efforts, so headed up to the canyon anyway. through the spectacular red canyon and back into national park land...shuttle buses and motorcycles and RVs, but quiet enough once I rolled down up to the southern reaches of the canyon. this was a place for spectators mostly, viewpoints and turnouts more than backcountry hiking, though there's one long trail that leads from the southern point 22 miles under the red rock formations back to the visitor center. it is gorgeous, but honestly I was tiring of redrock, even if this was limestone, not sandstone, so the highlight was a couple of bored fire rangers watching a lightning strike fire burn a couple thousand feet below yovimpa point...there mostly in their soot-stained yellow shirts and walkie-talkies to discourage onlookers to 'report' this fire repeatedly.

and I was on a schedule, so back out through the red canyon (all this backtracking was killing me, I'll admit) and north to panguitch to catch SR143 up to cedar breaks. it was evident that this was a serious road...several times signs warned that snowplows operated in daytime hours only, that trucks shouldn't attempt the ascent, and that, in the words of one sign, 'this is NOT US89.' I started to worry that there'd be snow at the top though this seemed unlikely in august. in the end this was one of the most scenic drives on the trip, even (or especially) the part in the dixie national forest, not just the sliver of cedar breaks national monument. high grassy pasture, truly alpine meadows and lakes, the sharp blues and greens of pines and sky and water and grass. scrappy ranches, cedar vacation cabins with green roofs, lonely gravel roads. windswept and silent, so much so that I startled a couple of construction workers lazily idling on the wrong side of the cones when I crested a hill. and then a turn into the breaks, which, again, I hadn't bothered to investigate in advance. again no anasazi, but instead a staggering redrock ampitheater that summed up the grand canyon, zion, and bryce all in majestic spot. that adjective is overused (and possibly misused here because too weak), but it'd be completely acceptable for anyone on a tight schedule to abstract the other three parks with a quick trip here. indescribable (but I tried to photograph it anyway). a handful of tourists had found a way up here and were being led around by decidedly junior park rangers. I guess because this place is certainly closed most of the year (over 10,000 feet a.s.l.) and because it's so out of the way, it looked like this was where NPS interns are sent. and not just those on duty...like mcdonald's anywhere else in the country, the off duty rangers-in-training were hanging about on their off days.

on the way down the mountain past the by now famililar sediment layers...but here the profile was turned over on its side and pointed to the sky on the edge of some faultline. I really need to sit in on a geology class this fall at wright state. partway down I stopped at a scenic overlook where a tall (even 'willowy') blonde woman was waving an old-school radio antenna around in the air next to her pickup truck. for some reason I didn't ask her what she was doing...I was losing the ethnographer's touch after so many nights in the tent and in national parks where there were no interesting locals to interview. that and I feared she was on the frontline of a defense of america from UN invasion or muslim conspiracies...not far from sharron angle country, after all. reached the bottom and cedar city and had to skip the mountain meadows detour if I was going to make las vegas in sunlight. this was a hard failure, but I figured whatever interpretive center might occupy the site was likely closed anyway. and I realized that I'd gone through the least-heat moon progression that took him a couple of decades between books in just two weeks. in 'blue highways' he's gregarious and inquisitive, if with an angry hippie edge and mopey post-breakup malaise...but by the time of his 'river horse' journey he's grouchy and rarely gets off his boat to do anything but find sandwiches and an occasional beer. so I was updating that model by skipping the site and reasoning that I could just wikipedia it later. (turns out that I need to do some more research on that front...I did find a local korean war-style monument in several photos but no evidence of much else there. I did find an account of a memorial service at its dedication in which descendants of mormons and the arkansas emigrant victims of the massacre worked on reconciliation. though it looks clear enough to me. brigham young and company were under serious US army pressure at the time and sought to keep out any non-Mormon settlers who might complain to the gov't and invite intervention -- they likely understood how bad this dynamic was for the indians pursued by custer, for example. so, allied with some utes, a band of mormons surrounded a stranded wagon train and killed everyone. but there was much talk about 'we'll never understand the motivations here' at the memorial service from important voices like the president of BYU and an elder of the church.)

anyway, at cedar city I hopped on I-15 instead for a too-long interstate stretch down to vegas. noticed right away that even southern utah is inhabited along the interstate...the emptiness and isolation I'd seen the past week wasn't really visible from the 'superslab' as the author of a motorcycling proficiency book calls it, absurdly. time and distance are different there as well...it's self-evident that you can get places faster on an interstate -- no stoplights, straighter lines, fewer climbs -- but there's something more magical about the accelerated travel. but also more miserable on a motorcycle is the wind...no matter in which direction I travel on routes that are blue on the map, the wind is worse. open plains, broad mountain cuts, buffeting wind from other traffic...who knows, but it's actually much harder to ride fast on the interstate than elsewhere. a stretch through arizona was pretty dramatic, though, a video game rollercoaster down into and back up out of a canyon cut by the virgin river...all just-barely-highway-grade sharp turns and corkscrews down and back up again, the sun disappearing early behind rock walls. but then into the furnace blast of the real desert. desert conditions had been advertised all the way from big bend to zion, but this...this was the real desert. more exposed soil than plants, scrawny cactuses, and a glaring sun that made me uncomfortably hot on the bike for the first time. I finally saw the dusty track between power lines from 'seven' that for some reason was lodged in my head as the primary image of the southwestern desert. it was 5pm and I was still baking on the bike. the sun was ahead of me and to the right since I was heading southwest, but the back of my neck was on fire, and I felt like my nose was sunburning through my dark faceshield. while the vegas explorer who was my next host was downing a post-workout protein shake, I was downing a liter bottle of fanta at a dusty service station. dramatic enough? I nixed a proposed detour past lake meade and headed straight toward a hazy skyline in a sickly yellow light. the sun winked out behind the mountains at 7.17 and I zoomed past the strip just as it was lighting up. my destination was actually henderson, NV, which I reached after another half hour of planned community curved boulevards and streets and a few minutes wrangling with the security gate code which ended with me hopping back on the bike and squeezing through a closing gate in a very slow-motion approximation of something from a bond flick. high excitement. vegas!