Last week, my wife and I took a vacation in Arizona (mostly), New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. We flew into Phoenix, picked up a rental car (a Mustang GT, not the convertible we had reserved—thanks, Hertz) and drove up the Oak Creek Canyon scenic route to Sedona, where we spent our first night in an outwardly plain but well-appointed and centrally located motel. We had a late dinner at the Sound Bites Grill, overlooking the mountains while we listened to the music of Estaban and his ensemble. We were, at that point, at about 4000 feet above sea level, and we’d stay at least at that height for the rest of the week, though we were often above 5000 feet and, at one point, as high as 8800 feet.
The next morning, we completed the drive up Oak Creek Canyon and turned east. Our first stop was in Winslow, Arizona, a little town made famous by “Take it Easy,” the first hit single by The Eagles. The town itself looks terribly depressed, and I’m not sure it would still exist if not for the song. According to the legend, Jackson Browne came up with the line “I’m standing on a corner in Winsolow Arizona, such a fine sight to see…” but got stuck until Glenn Frey convinced him to lend a hand, coming up with the line about the girl and the flatbed Ford. There’s a statue on a corner that is supposed to represent Browne and a more recent one added to depict Frey, and a permanently parked flatbed Ford with a painting on the nearby wall that looks like a window reflection showing the girl. It’s a place rooted in nostalgia, as evidenced by the average age of the people hanging around the corner that Sunday afternoon.
From there, we continued west, driving through the Petrified Forest National Park and the Painted Desert. We stayed overnight in Gallup, New Mexico and headed north the next day toward Cortez, Colorado. From there, we went east to Mesa Verde National Park, which is famous for it pueblos. We spent most of the mid-day hours there, viewing the types of accommodations the natives used hundreds of years ago. Also saw a very large snake outside one of the Anasazi pit houses. From there we drove west, passing through Cortez again on our way to Four Corners. My wife had been here decades ago, when it was just a disk in the middle of nowhere, but it’s fairly built up now, with souvenir stands, and a lengthy queue to take a picture standing at the junction of the four states. We decided to skip the line and take a few stealth photos nearby.
From there we continued west in Utah, driving through some of the most spectacular landscape this country has to offer, namely Monument Valley, which has served as the setting for many classic Westerns and other movies. Breathtaking at every turn. We ended up in Kayenta, Arizona for the night. The next day we moved on to Page, where we took a cruise on the Colorado river into Antelope Canyon, joined a tour of a slot canyon where the colored walls and lighting from above made for some spectacular views, and ended the day at Horseshoe Bend, a scenic overlook that is, again, breathtaking.
We drove up to Kanab, Utah the next day and had a fairly relaxing afternoon in the low-key town. We took a drive up the Johnson Canyon trail, where one of the attractions is the dilapidated remains of a set used to film Gunsmoke, and had a fantastic meal at Sego. We also learned the importance of keen attention to detail at an artisanal deli where we both misread “roast beet sandwich” as “roast beef.” It was like those old Wendy’s commercials: where’s the beef? Much amusement.
The next day, we drove down to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which is much less frequently visited than the South Rim. This part is at least a thousand feet higher than the other side, and it’s closed in the winter. A deer dashed across the road in front of us while we were driving up the mountainside, which gave us a fright. Then a few minutes later there was a sign on the side of the road warning of bison, which was worrying, although we didn’t see any that day. I tried to keep a mental list of all the things we were warned might be crossing the road during our journey: deer, antelope and elk (they each had their own unique picture), bison, mountain lions, children, old people, ATVs, snowmobiles, motorcycles, trucks, and boulders. I’m probably forgetting some. (We did see some snow on this side, tucked in at the edges of the treelines, and on the tops of some distant peaks, but I didn’t think there was much chance of snowmobiles.)
The north rim visit was really nice. There are a number of hiking trails that take you along the edge of the canyon overlooking some spectacular vistas. The crowds were relatively small (compared to what we’d see the next day), and it was all very low-key and laid back. However, a thunder-and-lightning storm rolled in (and we were at 8800 feet at that point!) so we hid out in the general store for a while and purchased a couple of $1 ponchos that kept us dry and warmer on the long walk back to where we’d parked. By then, the worst of the rain was over and we had a pleasant drive to our penultimate destination, Tuba City, which is east of the Grand Canyon on Navajo/Hopi land.
On Friday, we drove to the Grand Canyon again, approaching from the east to get to the South Rim. It was my birthday, so we splurged on a 1-hour helicopter tour that took us over the entire canyon from about a mile up, at about 130 mph. Truly spectacular. There was a controlled burn in one part of the mesa that we flew right through, and a section where we saw some bison from above. The pilot told us that the herd was a few hundred in number and that they had moved 100 of them to another part of the region a few years ago, but within a week they had returned to their original location.
We spent the rest of the afternoon hiking along the rim and taking in the vistas one last time before the three-hour drive down to Phoenix, where we caught our return flight on Saturday morning. We drove 1600 miles from start to finish. I posted some of our many photos on Facebook, but I’ll put together a slideshow here in the coming days, too. It was a fantastic vacation. We had mapped out the stopping points in advance and reserved all of our motels/hotels, which took most of the stress out of the trip. We always knew where we were staying, so we could just enjoy ourselves and take in the scenery.
Since Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time, but the Navajo reservations do, we had fun pinpointing exactly what time it was during most of the trip. We switched back and forth an hour at least once a day, it seemed, and sometimes more often than that.
I picked a Tony Hillerman novel (The Blessing Way) as our night time reading on the trip, and we were thrilled to find many of the places we visited mentioned by name: Gallup, Window Rock, Teec Nos Pos, Four Corners, Monument Valley, Mexican Water, etc. We could visualize the locales as they came up in the story.
