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!

day 16 -- zion; hiking with kim jong il

spun down the long road at dawn and got dawn pics that no one but fishermen on their way to kolob reservoir likely see, caught an early shuttle to the angels landing trailhead midway up the canyon, and hiked without too many companions up to a breathtakingly scenic rock 1200' above the canyon floor. the pictures tell that narrative well enough, but this is where the dear leader comes in...midway up I passed a huffing and puffing caricature of kim jong il struggling earnestly up the switchbacks. he honestly looked more like KJI than the team america caricature, and given the real version's tendency to sneak out of north korea once and a while on secret trains, I figured even money it was him. and the can-do spirit that he substitutes for food to his starving people was there, too. thought there was no chance he'd tackle the last, rock-scrambling chain-grabbing last half mile to the pinnacle...but just as I started down after reclining on rocks for a while and snapping photos for various families (including a german one whose father was terrified I was going to back off the cliff in an effort to get a good shot of them), here came our hero. when he reached the top he waved frantically to his wife waiting on a lower shelf and exulted in his triumph for the fatherland. (not really.) all this excitement about asian dictators was part of creeping delirium from a lack of food. at the bottom of the trail I tacked on a loop around the 'emerald pools' to the lodge, and along the way I saw a woman in a teal top and dark sunglasses sitting beside the trail. she turned out to be a cactus. and so on.

the way down was a touch crowded, as was the rest of the day's exploring. crammed on the shuttle bus, herded up the riverwalk into the narrower stretches of the canyon with crying babies and squirrel-feeding new yorkers. wished I had planned this all better with backcountry hikes up the narrows or the trail back to the campsite (now it was too late to trudge 14 miles up), but another time. I did get to ride a shuttle driven by ned beatty, though, even after I'd foraged some food. another quiet night at the campground away from the crowds...the first night I'd occupied the same bed/patch of ground on the trip.

day 15 -- north rim to zion; starvation camping

dutifully dragged my camera out of bed before sunrise so as to make up for missing the grand canyon sunset...though I doubted that even that would top the dazzlingly starry and meteor-y night sky. strapped on the vibrams for more free advertising (kids love 'em) and wandered out to bright angel point with the intrepid masses. the standard cast of characters...talkative bespectacled middle-aged guys from chicago with fancy cameras, can't-miss-this-moment families with disinterested kids, showoff teenagers clambering around on rocks as if a foot higher/closer to the south rim will make a difference in photos of cliffs five miles away, the tai chi guy, southern europeans in their hiking-inappropriate footwear (only americans, brits, and germans wear hiking boots to walk a paved, level path...or any hiking trail for that matter), and chattering japanese with their backpacks full of who knows what. the show was predictably stunning though a summer haze was in the way, the sort of scenery you can't really capture with a camera. peaceful and quiet with the exception of a couple of loudly unaware english kids yammering away in that inimitable english way. snapped some decent shots of hummingbirds on beebalm and headed back to the lodge to sit on the balcony and catch up on writing. and listen to more visitor varieties, like brooklynites giddy at the big skies but at the same time nervously filling in that unaccustomed space w ith shouts of 'echo.' repeatedly. chatted with a handful of passersby, but not the same as the locals I'd encountered before...that local contact slipping away was inevitable in the park detour section, but I missed it.

back up over the humpbacked kaibab plateau on the way to bryce and zion. hadn't really worked out how to cover southern utah, only that I knew there was too much to cram in without losing time later on in the trip. I figured that saturday night in zion was a no-go on campgrounds, esp with a likely late-ish arrival, so I aimed the bike straight up US89 toward bryce with a loop up to cedar breaks for a campground stop in mind. but the cliff-dwellings siren was activated when I saw in fredonia a sign for pipe springs national monument. I had no idea what was at pipe springs, but nat'l monuments are usually human-made sites. I also could have checked on it, but I like the surprise, so I detoured west and on the spot changed the plan to zion first. so pipe springs was nothing like what I expected...instead of cliff dwellers I found mormon homesteaders and, later on, an LDS tithing ranch. steer donated to the church by cash-strapped faithful were shipped south to this unexpected spring in the desert, in what everyone thought was utah but was actually across the arizona border. milk and butter and occasional steer fed on arizona rice grass were then sent back to st george to feed the men building a temple there. what remains at pipe springs is a grand house/fort that was erected as a bulwark against raids from all comers...indians and the feds alike. not quite the case of mormons-barging-in that some would like to tell, since the original paiute inhabitants were already encamped some distance away since hanging around the springs exposed them, one of the more pacifist tribes, to slave raids from apaches and utes. these settlers weren't very good at accommodating the native way of life, naturally, and their cows ate the rice grass on which the paiutes subsisted, but blaming the mormons doesn't work perfectly. anyway, just as interesting was the use of the ranch as a shelter for illegal wives. when LDS honchos realized that the ranch was in arizona and hence a different federal court jurisdiction, they sent extra wives there to hide out when the feds conducted anti-polygamy raids. no direct evidence of multiple wives-in-residence, no arrest.

all this from a drawly NPS ranger speaking to a group with only one native english speaker (me). pretty sure everyone followed, though one dad was translating the best parts for his kids along the way. the stop turned out especially fortuitous when the next town I rode through on the revised route west was colorado city. western town signs as you probably know record two of three bits of information (whichever two are most notable?) -- population, elevation, and date of foundation. this one had #1 and #3, and I took a double take when the foundation date was 1985. now I know the arizona strip is rough country, but it was likely filled in more than 25 years ago. stopped briefly at a car wash to check the map and adjust luggage, saw a woman in a long orange and yellow plaid dress washing a minivan, and rusty gears started to crank. warren jeffs, fundamentalist mormon separatists, and federal raids came to mind. dawned on me that this is was the core of breakaway polygamists now on the run from not only the feds but split from the mainstream church as well. same factors in play as in the 19th century...arizona jurisdiction not so dialed in on polygamy, out-of-the-way towns that the feds can't be bothered to raid (though not nearly so wild as it's often portrayed). of course jeffs doesn't exactly inspire much sympathy as a crusader for his religious beliefs given his penchant for expelling dozens of young men for the community so there are more wives to go around for the community elders, but in broad outline not much has apparently changed. and at a gas station in laverkin outside of zion I saw the expected 15-passenger van crammed with a conservatively-dressed crowd of women and kids. later on I checked up on colorado city and learned that it's not exactly brand new, but the result of a schism within the schismatic community engineered by jeffs, and that recently arizona authorities (state, not federal) have moved against the community, seizing municipal records and alleging misuse of public funds (though surely they were checking marriage records, too, right?). heartwarming to see gov brewer acting with equal opportunity suspicion against all 'immigrants' to arizona.

at this point I was on the wrong side of zion to get to bryce or cedar breaks, so I headed for the one campground that I figured might have open sites...the 'primitive' campground at lava point, high above the canyon in the northwest corner of the park. I knew it was a long way up and far away from services, and likely waterless, so I vaguely considered stopping at subway to grab a sandwich to take with me and fill up on water. but I was pessimistic that I'd find a campsite even there and in a go-go mood, so I just fired up the long twisting hill past the western cliffs of the park, burned out juniper forest, and cattle grates when I came to the turnoff from the main route through the park. so the good news was that only three of six campsites were occupied when I arrived, the view over the park from a nearby overlook was sublime, and the campground was quiet except for chirpy chipmunks. the bad news was that I had no food and only an emergency liter and a half of water. really this was only a problem because I was thinking more about food than about enjoying the sky and the views and the serenity...I considered muscling in on the neighbors' campfire feast (they had a fully-stocked SUV and trailer), but figured I'd make it. in retrospect the real problem was that I had to drive down to the park entrance and explore the canyon from the shuttle bus instead of hiking down a long trail into the canyon from lava point (named for a thick cap of basalt on top of the sandstone layers for which the park is famous), and then finding a ride from the various outfitters who advertised trailhead rides from the visitor center. but this was the cost of not over-managing the trip, so in the end it was fine. waited for the hunger to subside, took in the view, watched the spectacular sky until I caught some more perseids, and turned in early for a pre-dawn rise.