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Road Trip III - A Bad Place to Lose a Cow Posting Date: Jun 23 2008 12:26AM In 1992, I took a road trip to celebrate graduating ... ah, you know the rest. Read back a couple of weeks if you don’t.
Eagle, Colorado, now famous as the location of Kobe Bryant’s sexual assault trial, must have come by its name the same way as Buffalo, New York. All the city’s founding fathers sat around, getting drunk, and saying, “Name an animal you never see here.” There are no eagles in Eagle. An old man at the Eagle gas station told my faithful travelling companion that Eagle had originally been called “Rhinoceros, Colorado” until one came through town with a circus.
Despite its confusing name, Eagle makes a great place to spend the night between seeing the really good stuff. We stopped in Eagle because it claimed to be hard on the banks of the Colorado River, the famous torrent that carved the Grand Canyon and waters Las Vegas. Arriving in Eagle at night, we couldn’t wait to wake up in the morning to experience the river. We wolfed down breakfast and wheeled hurriedly to the nearest bridge. The only problem was that in Eagle, the Colorado River looks like a leaking garden hose.
We moved on without taking pictures.
If you follow the Colorado River into Utah, you get the opportunity to turn off the friendly interstate onto a country road called Scenic Byway. Always the adventurers, my travelling companion and I bid adios to the interstate at exit 212 and rolled on down the byway.
The first few miles made us itch to turn back. We were in the middle of nothing. We saw desert, the road and two signs. One sign was a yellow diamond with a picture of a bull on it. This presumably indicated that there may be stationary bulls around the next bend. The other sign read ominously, “No services for 53 miles.”
But then suddenly, our lonely road was surrounded by the Legoland of the Lord. All around us, towers and escarpments of orange-red rock spiked skyward from flat scrub land. We were awestruck.
A little farther along the road and I found myself guiding mom’s Corolla between a sheer, red cliff on my left and the now-mighty-ish Colorado River on my right. On the riverbank, dozens of randomly-erected tents, along with mountain bikes and kayaks, peeked out from a forest of small trees. This riverside collection of sporting goods served was advance warning that the Scenic Byway was about to end at a town called Moab, the unofficial extreme sport headquarters of the world.
If you were to stand in the middle of Moab’s main street, three things could happen to you. You could be run over by a Jeep carrying mountain bikes, you could be run over by a Jeep carrying kayaks, or you could be run over by a Jeep carrying climbing equipment. If anything else happened, I would be shocked.
Just outside Moab is a rather small national park called Arches. Arches National Park is impossible to describe in print unless you have seen a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoon backdrop. Huge red boulders teeter precariously on top of thin spires of rock. Perfectly flat walls of stone shoot hundreds of feet out of the desert floor. We saw formations that looked like giant containers of Pringles, like huge petrified Elvises (the Vegas years), and massive lollipops. There are monstrous stone formations with holes poked through them like Flintstones windows. And behind all this, seemingly close enough to touch, is a range of sharp, snow-topped mountains.
Of course, the battery in our camera died that day, so you have to take my word for it.
The next day, my travelling companion and I went to Bryce Canyon, Utah which Mr. Bryce once described as “a hell of a place to lose a cow.” Not the best marketing slogan, if you ask me, but Utah ain’t Madison Avenue.
Bryce Canyon’s floor is almost invisible beneath towers and walls of chalky rock that look like they have been rolled on the largest lathe in the universe and carefully installed to create a maze that a mouse couldn’t navigate with a thousand pounds of gorgonzola at the finish line. White, yellow, pale orange, bright orange, pink, purple and red veins of colour run through the rock structures and the canyon walls like the ancient crayon lines of the giants.
We were so enamoured with Bryce Canyon that we descended to the floor in a rainstorm, without a map or guide, in dwindling daylight and proceeded to make like a couple of cows. We survived, clay caked and dampened and returned to the gleaming Corolla in awe of the miracles of nature, so naturally, we drove back out to the interstate and headed for Las Vegas.
Next Time: Vegas, Baby, Vegas! |
