Back in my parents' basement

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!

Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon with no railings, you gaze straight down into the mile-deep chasm with nothing between you and pure, immense, raw beauty – and the prospect of imminent death. It is interesting, terrifying, defining, and forbidding, yet somehow inviting. For eons people have stood in this exact place, puzzled by similar inexplicable and intrusive thoughts that spark a primal need to survive and thrive, and to know the answers to universal mysteries. Contemplation and philosophy are shamelessly aroused by the vastness of the canyon’s rugged and complex beauty.

The great gorge left behind by the timeless flow of the life-giving Colorado River left me meditative and wistful, but it also made my heart swell at its immensity and majesty. Rarely does a view evoke such a range of tangible emotions.

Ella and I walked for miles around the gorge, taking in the views from the Rim Trail on a beautiful day in March. On the sides of the path were patches of snow, still untrampled, and Ella liked to sit on them or lie down on her belly every now and then to feel the cold on her butt and her stomach. The trail overlooks the Grand Canyon’s endless ridges, mesas, cliff faces, and rock formations, and is magnificent. Erosion and climate variations over the millennia have formed strata of earth, leaving a kaleidoscope of colors in the vast depths.

Purple, red, orange, gray, brown, and white striations of shale, limestone, sandstone, and igneous rock are in every conceivable combination for a medley of swirls and textures, of rises, flats, and falls. Caves show themselves in a series of holes in the distant rock, small to the eye, but undoubtedly giant up close.  

Plant life clings to the edge of the canyon; there is none inside it. On the cliffs, gnarled limbs of dying trees twist here and there among the live ones, giving a sense of continuity, death, and rebirth. Far, far below is a tiny patch of emerald-green, the Colorado River. How on God’s green earth could it have created all this?

In some places the canyon edges have railings, but in others, their absence gives you a daring, unencumbered view, both daunting and exhilarating. Sometimes flat and broad rocky outcroppings allow you to sit on the edge, seemingly hovering over the canyon below. The distance and breadth of the gorge are unfathomable, even mystifying. Even while looking at it you believe your eyes are deceiving you. It looks as vast as the heavens.

The paved Rim Trail is beautiful and well-traveled, lined with pines, cedars and junipers that have been blown by the winds, roots twisting, trying to keep a foothold in eroding soil. The trail is marked with a man-made millennia timeline studded with polished rock samples to let you know what happened when. Although the deepest gorges are believed to be several billion years old, the real erosion of the Colorado River began around five million years ago. People showed up around 12,000 years ago. The sheer magnitude of the gorge and its history are enough to convince you people are just a blip on the scale of time. The Grand Canyon will be here in all its glory far after we are gone.

This park has been by far the most diversely populated one we have been to, with visitors of all colors, ages, and abilities. It often has been my experience to see only white people in National or State Parks, and even camping or hiking in general. It is disheartening when I realize I haven’t seen anyone who looks different from me for days or weeks. Here at the Grand Canyon, there are numerous representations of our nation’s diverse population, and it brings great joy to know that all people feel welcome and comfortable! In fact, it is glorious.

The north side of the Grand Canyon is closed in the winters because the pass is usually snowed in, so Ella and I visited only the south rim. Traveling east on the south rim leads to a watchtower and a better view of the river, emerald-green, thin, snaking its way through the lower cliffs. Gazing over the vastness of the canyon, the inner contemplations never cease. The sheer size and force of weather, time, geology, and history make simple observation impossible. The mind is held captive – kidnapped – by the natural beauty, which goes on and on and on.

Ella and I continued traveling east, stopping to take in the gorge at every opportunity. Eastward also happens to be the way to Page, AZ, with more breathtaking views, so we followed.

Petrified Forest National Park, AZ

I feel myself changing on this journey. Maybe the better way to describe it is I am discovering things about myself I didn’t know were there. I seem to thrive on the unknown – the expectation of the unfamiliar causes an adrenaline surge and makes me feel alive. I have always been a planner, and I have lived my life by researching ahead, by deadlines, and by the calendar, filled with linear tasks. This must be done before that. Complete Duty A before moving to Duty B. Our work and family lives predispose us to this necessity. But out in the wild, where there are no work or community expectations or responsibilities, the ability to focus on the Now with no regard for the Next is exhilarating. Maybe even transforming.

The Petrified Forest somehow epitomizes this revelation for me. The name itself sets an expectation for what you believe you will encounter. It is something else altogether.

At the north end of the park is the Painted Desert in all its colorful splendor. The middle of the park surprises and delights with changes in color, topography, and rock formations. The south end of the park is littered with fallen trees, petrified in beautiful, colorful quartz, and in pieces like an ancient lumberjack worked his way across the desert, felling every improbable tree he could find, leaving only cross-sections as his calling card.

Dogs are allowed on all trails in the Petrified Forest, and the Painted Desert Rim Trail in the north gives a lovely view of the colors and textures of the hills and valleys that stretch as far as the eye can see, to and beyond the horizon. The trail overlooks miles and miles of pink hills, mesas, and valleys, changing in hues from coral and auburn to yellow and sage, and changing in shades from palest pastel to dark and rich. There is a little snow on the ground, highlighting the ridges and edges. The trail leads to an old pueblo inn, no longer in service but used as a landmark and historical education center.

On this trail I met Jake, a cute, gregarious, curly-haired, 30-something, also visiting parks, also car camping. He was from New York and had traveled many different National Parks in a quest to be free from the office-grind. I couldn’t quite get the feel if he was independently wealthy and felt he had earned this lifestyle or if he had thrown the 9-to-5 to the wind with reckless abandon. Not that it matters. He was freely living his best life out here, and in him I found a kindred spirit.

Ella and I worked our way through the park from the Painted Desert to the Petrified Forest, and about halfway through, the mesas turn from pink to black. Still streaked with snow, the dark and dusky hills and mesas are in stark contrast to where we were. Strange and ethereal rock formations emerge out of flat, yellow, grassy plains. Then, just as suddenly, the colors transform again back to the pinks and corals, but also to blues and purples.

Here at the Blue Mesa is a trail through the ancient canyon, striated with colors. The blues start subtly, a pale turquoise-gray and soft magenta that grow richer the deeper you go. The trail is a pretty good heart-pumper with a nice elevation change as you go from the top of the mesas to the bottom of the canyon. Ridges in the mesas have been formed by eons of water trickling down from the crown, forming individual rivulets in a beautifully balanced cascade. Every once in a while, there are segments of petrified trees collected in the valleys.

Snow is still accumulated in areas that don’t get full sun. At the center of the hike is a giant piece of petrified wood, a taste of what is a few miles away. It is pink and orange with a crystalline surface.

At the southern end of the park, in the Crystal Canyon and the Rainbow Forest, hundreds of thousands of pieces of petrified wood cover the landscape. Some are as big around as Ella is long. On each, the rocky bark is striped with red and brown, like redwoods, and the centers are bejeweled with colorful quartz. On some, the rings were clearly visible belying a hidden yet decipherable history. Where the wood was chiseled away at the edges by erosion, time, or people’s hands, the pieces fell in chips looking for all the world like fresh wood chips. Each segment was a marvel.

These trees are believed to be hundreds of millions of years old – conifers in an ancient forest inhabited by dinosaurs. After eons of floods, lava flows, tectonic shifts, and erosion, the petrified trees have unearthed, and as they did, they broke into sections with the shifts of the earth’s surface. Because they are quartz they break on a cleavage, so it looks like they have been segmented with a chainsaw. It’s a little disconcerting seeing these once majestic, living giants preserved as crystalline firewood. At the same time, it’s mysterious and awe-inspiring.

Leaving the forest and marveling over the vast changes of the park from north to south, I am reminded of how similar we are to these ancient trees and their landscape. There is so much happening inside our psyches as our minds and hearts constantly evolve. What people perceive of us on the outside – and even what we know of our own selves – is only a fraction of the work that is being done on the inside, sometimes without us being aware of it.

The discoveries of self here have been as surprising as the discoveries of nature. Meeting like-minded strangers like Jake helps guide my unraveling awareness. Casting off the past and diving into the unknown began as an uncomfortable necessity but has become invigorating and intoxicating. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from this park, but it sure wasn’t all this!

White Sands National Park, NM

Every time I set foot on one of our National Parks, my heart swells with patriotism! I feel so freakin’ proud that our federal government has set aside these lands for protection and conservation and for us to enjoy and learn from. I rejoice every time I see the American flag waving in front of a visitor center. Amazing! I am so incredibly blessed to be on this trip – this adventure – to enjoy and indulge my right as an American citizen to plant my feet and feast my eyes on these magnificent parks.

God Bless America!

White Sands is one of those parks you don’t hear much about. It’s only recently become a National Park in the past year or so. Before that it was a National Monument. It absolutely deserves its new standing.

Approaching the park through Alamagordo, there was a hazy fog of white dust shrouding the town. The winds were high, and the temperatures were dropping. I timed my arrival to an hour and a half before sunset so I could enjoy watching the sun dip behind the dunes. This park, unique in so many ways, stays open for a few hours after sunset so parkgoers can linger in the twilight. White Sands is also awesomely dog-friendly. Ella was allowed on all the trails, to traverse the dunes off-trail, and to participate in Ranger-led activities.

There is one road through the park and several trails that lead off it. The road is paved until halfway, then it is all sand. For the first half of the drive, the topography is flat, grassy plains, but as you continue the drive, the dunes begin to make an appearance. They are low and covered in tall grass, yucca, iodinebush, and saltbush at first. As you continue the drive, the low grassy dunes give way to larger and sparser ones. It feels like driving on the beach in the panhandle of Florida.

The drive continues until the road ends in a grand loop through huge, rolling, white, fluffy dunes with no plant life. They look for all the world like snowy mountains.

The sand at this park is actually gypsum, the same thing gypsum board is made from. The trails to the dunes, packed with the footsteps of millions of visitors, look and feel just like drywall. Once you are off the path, the sand is soft and white, blinding in the sunshine. With the wind blowing, Ella and I had sand in our eyes, but we didn’t want to stop exploring. I took off my shoes, and our feet sunk into the cool softness with every step.

A favorite recreation here is sliding down the dunes on saucers. Families, children, adults, couples would slide down a big hill to cheers of onlookers, drag their saucers back to the top, and sled down again. There was a youth group from Minnesota who divided into teams and were having races. It was so much fun to watch!

Because of the high winds, there was no Ranger-led sunset walk this night. That was actually perfect for us. Ella and I explored the park on our own looking for the perfect spot to watch the sunset, and we found it. I had expected it to be very colorful, and maybe it is on other nights, but this night the sunset was a soft, glowing, and peaceful white light that grew dimmer and dimmer, until a warm, pastel haze fell over the horizon. The effect was calming and seemed to make even Ella contemplative.

One of the reasons I love National Parks is because they showcase our country’s vast array of unique landscapes, and this one is toward the top!