You know how someone shows you their favorite thing, raves about it, is super proud to share it with you, saying you will love, love, LOVE it … and you don’t love it? Landscapes can be that way. What makes one place attractive to one person may make it utterly repugnant to another. To some, the desolate and stark desert is peaceful and tranquil, a paradise worthy of uprooting their family and abandoning lifetime friendships for. To others it is lonely and forbidding.
Indigenous peoples made homes out of the austere, natural landscape by necessity, incorporating its beauty with utility. Today we adapt the landscape to us, using it as a backdrop. Either way, what the natural environment means to us – does for us in a spiritual sense – is what matters most, and the sheer variety of landscapes in this nation is enough to evoke dumb wonder.
The areas between the National Parks are a veritable abundance of vistas, some rich in color and texture, some barren and bleak. There are folks who are in love with each. In mid-March Ella and I visited the following places, and each had a rugged, ethereal quality that took my breath away, but the places that were perennial favorites to some were not my cup of tea, and vice versa.
Sedona, AZ
Driving from the painted desert to Sedona and the Grand Canyon, I had grown accustomed to the dry, dusty desert. Mountains were sometimes visible on the distant horizon, but the stretches in between were vast and empty, except for some desert scrub. As I drew nearer to Sedona, the distant mountains drew closer and closer, then rose sharply, suddenly, and unexpectedly. Formed by yellow, gray, and auburn-colored boulders, they were topped by pine and cedar trees, the first green I had seen for miles. The road hugged the base of the mountain cliffs, so the clifftop trees seemed impossibly tall from my vantage point. Bending my neck back to look almost straight up, I had to squint to make out the treetops because the sun was so bright.
The mountains rise so high and so suddenly that the speed limit is 5 miles an hour and the winding switchbacks are often 180 to 270 degrees, sometimes even 360. The route on the GPS screen legit looks like a plate of spaghetti.
The lush green of the trees, still covered with snow, was a very welcome sight after the long, dusty, and drab drive. The leggy branches covered the narrow, winding roadway with shade, something I hadn’t seen much of anywhere in Arizona. Ahead, even beyond the foothills and pines, more bold, bald, orange and rust-colored mesas and mountains peaked toward the blue, cloudless sky.
There was a half-moon visible above the mountain horizon, starkly white against the deep blue sky. The mountains kept rising, becoming mountains on top of mountains, in all sorts of shapes and colors, mostly oranges and reds. Ridges steeply dropped off at the end of one rim and disappeared, then picked back up on another like a roller coaster. Some formations were conical, some like giant block towers, and some like the ruffle on a very roughly starched, medieval blouse collar.
Ella and I stopped at a crowded overlook in Sedona to take in the scenery. A hundred or more people were gathered in families and groups, posing for pictures and selfies while dogs and children played. Rock formations in the distance were bright red and orange in all shapes and configurations. It looked like a giant potter had abandoned a collection of haphazard, avant garde earthenware.
Visible from the edge of one mountain to the ridge of another, a basin far below, full of nooks and crannies, held whole towns with red-tiled roofs and shopping centers.
Sedona is tricky because it looks so wild and untamed, but it’s a popular, bougie hangout. A little too Gucci for me – specialty markets and boutiques, kitschy restaurants, high-end grocery stores, and the lot. But after looking for a bit, I was able to find the perfect camping spot!
A little way out of town, on Bureau of Land Management land, I found a dirt road that was so deeply rutted it dissuaded RVers and others from passage – a welcome sight for me. It was sunset, but there were no bright colors adorning the sky, just a fading of blue on the horizon, giving way to grays, deeper blues, and cold night air. The morning view, however, looked over those gorgeous, orange and rust-colored, ridged cliffs. A beautiful array of hot-air balloons in all sorts of splendid colors dotted the sky, rising into the warming air.
Marble Canyon, UT
Marble Canyon, at the Utah-Arizona border, is on the way to Page. The desert here was almost all gray – even the green plant life was dusty gray, and there were no inhabitants for miles and miles. Ella and I stayed at a stunningly stark campsite down a washboard, rutted, dirt road. We arrived during another colorless sunset, where the evening light faded into gray-blues and seemed to blend into the landscape.
The focal point was a looming rocky formation that looked like a cross between the Sphinx and a Great Pyramid, peppered with holes and caves, with a neat and tiny coral-colored fringe at the top.
In the far distance the pale caves gave way to rocky, colorful ridges and mesas in pinks and corals. A stark contrast from the prevalence of wan grays and whites.
The land between was a long, very gently rolling, sandy vista with the smallest of shrubs. No animal life was noticeable. No crickets. No coyotes. A single hawk’s cry – absolutely one of the coolest places ever. It was very cold that night and very windy. The wind kept me awake, but the night sky and moonrise were beautiful.
I find I prefer this type of peaceful, stark desolation to the Sedona views that attract such busy mercantilism.
Page, AZ
We stopped at Wahweap Overlook on the way to Page to get a view of the bright blue lake fed by the Colorado. The gray, dusty landscape from last night’s campsite in Marble Canyon looked like it had been scooped out and filled with the sky. The contrast of blue lake, gray land, and blue sky magnified the fact that there was no other color.
The drive out of Marble Canyon, however, was splashed with pastels, hills that were pink, coral, and green – green, not because of vegetation but because of the hue of the rock. I’d never seen anything like it. On the drive eastward, giant rust-colored boulders appeared, stacked upon each other, and textured all over with horizontal ridges, like they were iced with a serrated knife.
The rocks continued this way all the way to Antelope Canyon, where the famed Wave rock formation is. We were not able to tour the Wave because dogs aren’t allowed and because tickets are hard to come by, but Ella and I went to the river at Glen Canyon and took in the scenery there. The water was serene and blue, and the edges of the river were very well-defined by a coral-colored rocky bank. There was no vegetation, only water, rocks, desert, and dusty, rust-colored dirt. There were a few people fishing in folding chairs on the shore.
We hiked to Horseshoe Bend, where the river has cut a canyon that forms a deep Omega-shape into the dry earth leaving a towering mesa in its center. The water is murky, gray green, but I heard some other hikers say they had seen it before when it was bright blue.
The rock formations were stunning – more of the serrated ridges running around each of the large, red, stacked boulders, some worn away into shallow steps that led to a flattop where visitors climbed and stood triumphantly, with their arms spread wide for pictures in an I-made-it pose. Ella was eager to stand triumphantly with them, tail and nose high in the air, trying to catch what little breeze she could.
Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, AZ & UT
The Marble Canyon, where we previously overnighted among the dusty, gray boulders, is part of Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, which is in Arizona and extends into Utah. The area is huge and encompasses a wide variety of canyon and desert scenes.
The Navajo Bridge, centrally located in the cliffs, is an overlook to the Colorado River that cuts into the purplish-orange mountains. In the lower reaches, tan and beige cliff faces line the brightest of green stretches of the Colorado River. The sky is brilliant blue – all the colors are vivid – adding an ethereal and mystical quality.
Indigenous people used to reside in these cliffs and some of their dwellings have been preserved. The inhabitants used the big, beautiful, sandstone boulders and built around them to make shelters, lookouts, community spaces, and houses. Using the rocky overhangs as roofs, the cliff dwellers augmented them with hand-hewn bricks and whatever wood was available.
It’s truly amazing.
Lake Mead, NV
That night I camped at a recreation area near Lake Mead, a free campsite on BLM land. It was one of the most extraordinary places I have seen yet!
The red hills full-on looked like piles of clay, like the lumps of clay my fifth-grade art teacher had next to her pottery wheel. They were surreal, vermilion-red and rust-orange lumps of earth – like a Martian landscape or a gigantic mud daubers’ nest. Wild.
From here, from all this natural and fantastical beauty, I’m headed to Las Vegas. On my way, I contemplate the differences between building civilization out of nature versus building it in nature. The cliff dwellers made holistic and adaptive use of the resources surrounding them. They created communities out of their natural environments and preserved the beauty of the landscape. We, who build our civilizations in nature, bring progress, economy, development, growth – all the things that make a society thrive and elevate our way of life. But to be sure, there is a cost.
It is precisely this reason that our forefathers – the conservationists bent on preserving our nation’s most beautiful environments – wanted to protect these lands from ever-expanding development and mercantilism. Whether in bougie hipster towns or remote desert locales, grateful citizens everywhere rejoice.
I really can’t wait to see what’s next!