March 2008 Archives

Red Rock Canyon * Zion * Bryce Canyon * Capitol Reef * Arches * Mesa Verde * Monument Valley * Grand Canyon

Two parks in one!  Yes, in Utah there are national parks so thick on the ground that you can leave one and be in another in a matter of hours!  They're practically teeming!

I opened our day at Bryce Canyon by taking advantage of our rural lodgings and going out before sunrise to do some birding.  I was not put off by the foot of snow on the ground or the nineteen-degree temperatures, because I had done my homework and was loaded with winter gear: hiking boots, thick wooly socks, sweater, winter coat, gloves, Turtle Fur toque, the works.  The homework I perhaps should have done was the homework that mentioned the distinct lack of bird life on the high ridges of southern Utah in winter. 

In fact, it wasn't just birds that were missing: the whole area seemed utterly silent.  There wasn't a breath of wind to shake the ponderosa pine needles, and even the occasional car passing by in the distance seemed to keep its engine noise close to its chest.  Perhaps the blanket of snow added to the lack of sound, or perhaps the thin air (we slept at about 7000 feet above sea level) didn't carry vibrations so well, but I soon got the impression that atop the Rockies, nature doesn't settle down for a long winter's nap--it's more like a coma. 

I was able to spot a few ravens, sure, but I had already realized that they were the region's default animal, easily visible and present everywhere.  I heard two birds that were NOT ravens, but never got even a glimpse of one.  When the sun finally rose, I marched back to Ruby's Inn along one of the many cross-country ski trails, getting at least a good walk and a beautiful winter morning for my trouble.  I can also report that the breakfast shift at Ruby's restaurant was the complete opposite of the previous evening's crew: crisp, professional, and efficient.  Alas, the coffee was, well, diner coffee.  Its primary similarity to real coffee is that both are brown and warm.  If you put enough cream and sugar in, they taste kind of alike.

But finally we loaded our gear into the Silverado and headed south into Bryce Canyon itself, stopping by the visitor's center to get a little information on birding (Sunrise Point was recommended) and post-park navigation (Route 12 was recommended).  The park itself has only one road (though several loops branch off the main course) and it runs along the ridgeline.  Periodically there will be a place to pull off in order to march out and get a view of the canyon floor, and once you do, you stand amazed.

From the ridge, you look down into a bowl, but the bottom of the bowl is not smooth like a crater.  Instead, it is peppered with spires, minarets, bulbs, fists, mushrooms, and stalks of sandstone, glowing rose and brick and salmon and terracotta--scores of them, perhaps hundreds.  Streaks and patches of snow draw the color out of the stone even more vividly, as does the occasional spatter of deep-green pine and juniper.  The shapes (known as "hoodoos") are both strange and spectacular, but they're so numerous as to drive the eye into retreat.  After a few moments you stop knowing where to look.  If there were only one or two of them, they'd be famous enough to draw viewers from quite a distance, but here they grow in such profusion that each seems to have no individuality.  It's as if nature had thrown seven hundred Bengal tigers into a single valley.  If you came through the woods and saw only one, you'd be completely fixated on it--fascinated, horrified perhaps, maybe even hypnotized.  But if there were seven hundred, after a while you'd simply be left staring at the interplaying patterns of black and orange stripes and the deliberate blinking of great golden eyes.

Dad and I spent our first such period of staring at Sunrise Point, where we finally tore our eyes away from the hoodoos in a futile attempt to identify a middle-sized grey bird flapping about in the low scrub on the canyon walls.  (Leading candidates: Clark's Nutcracker and Townsend's Solitaire.)  We were in no such doubt about the bird that landed in a small patch of snow roughly five feet from my hiking boot, however:  a Dark-eyed Junco, a bird with which I am extremely familiar.  My hometown version, the "Slate-Colored" Junco, is a darkish grey with a creamy white belly.  I'd also seen the chestnut-backed "Oregon" Junco in California.  This one, however, displayed both a chestnut back and a pale grey head; it was the "Gray-headed" Junco, a specialty of the southern Rockies.  Aside from this, the mystery bird in the scrub, one wayward Robin, and a White-breasted Nuthatch in a nearby stunted pine, Sunrise Point was largely bird-free, but the hoodoos more than made up for it.

Sunrise Point did not, however, prepare me for the splendors of Bryce Point, which juts out into the canyon to reveal wind-carved windows and grottoes to the west, sunlit patterns of snow and stone to the north, and row after row of hoodoos to the east, stretching out to the layer-cake horizon where the Escalante lay.  It was stunning enough that I barely noticed the Peregrine Falcon winging across my field of vision.  Honestly, it's one of the most beautiful spots I've ever set foot in. 

We drove on to Rainbow Point, at the very end of the canyon road at an elevation of 9115 feet, which made it the highest point on which I'd ever stood.  It would remain so for several hours.

Taking the ranger's advice, Dad turned right out of Bryce and onto Route 12, which we discovered to be one of the great scenic roads in America.  As I said later, it was just 110 miles of one damned thing after another...

...curves between snow and sandstone down from the ridge where Ruby's and the Bryce NP road lie...

...small towns, with cars in the yards, and the high school's initials painted on the hillsides, BV for Bryce Valley, E for Escalante, and so on...

...yellow cliffs on one side, grassy fields on the other...

...a river valley running below the road, with marshland and trees below...

...the huge open vista east of the town of Escalante, showing nearly 180 degrees of Utah stretching out to the mountains, with a sign indicating what each feature of the landscape was...

...great slabs of red and yellow stone, canted and lined like a real-life Road Runner cartoon...

...the Hogsback Road, running up ledges, then atop ridges, with thousands of feet to fall on either side...

...a forest of low ponderosa pines running up into the mountains...

...fields full of snow lying on either side of the road--four or five feet of it, banked and solid...

...up into the white trunks of aspen, punctuated by an occasional fir... Norway at 9200 feet...

...above the desert, and then down into it again at Torrey...

From Torry we took Route 24 east through Capitol Reef National Park, which is something of a red-headed step-youngun among the Utah Parks, but its red sandstone cliffs (and the piles of eroded red stone piled below them) are just lovely.  As you travel along the Fremont River, there are places where the wind and water have whittled holes and struts in the rock that are almost like the lacy structures inside bones.  Beyond the park, near Cainville, all color seemed to be leached from the land, leaving only cliffs like piles of lunar sand for nearly twenty miles.  Ash grey, dull yellow and sickly pink shades touched the moonscape here and there, but the colors seemed as low-density as the population.  Eventually we came to Hanksville, where a parking lot full of houseboats lay on the south side of the road and a service station carved into a hillside lay on the north.  I'm not sure whether the Hollow Mountain Store was more or less improbably than the impromptu desert boatyard, but since Lake Powell was a good 50 miles away, I'm inclined to go with the boats.

Armed with a fresh Diet Coke for the rest of the drive, I pulled the truck onto 24 North (passing a surprised-looking Ring-Necked Pheasant at the side of the road) and pulled onto the most linear road I've ever driven: two lanes, almost no traffic, a cow every ten acres or so, a featureless ridge to the right, and the top of the San Rafael Reef maybe ten miles to the left.  For 44 miles, there's no human habitation or sign of human activity other than the road itself and the fences on either side of it.  Where the rest of the drive had been startling and oddly beautiful even when it was stark, this was just... empty.  A very big empty.

I was feeling a bit empty myself by the time we reached Green River, and I was more than ready to indulge myself in a southwestern specialty, but we chose not to search out a Mexican place, settling instead for the Tamarisk Restaurant, right next to our hotel at the edge of the town's eponymous river. Our waitress was on top of the whole serve-the-customer situation, happily, but because we were still in Utah, Dad was denied his glass of chardonnay; only bars can serve alcohol, though if there's a bar attached to the restaurant, even the folks in Utah see how it makes sense for the bartender to be allowed to bring a glass of booze to someone at a table in the restaurant.  It's a polite fiction, but it depends on the willingness of a restaurant owner to set up a bar, and the Tamarisk's had not seen fit to do so.

It had also not seen fit to do much in the way of seasoning, as I discovered when I got my chicken burrito.  It wasn't bad, and it was entirely well-meaning, but I'd have to characterize it as merely bland, white, and full of cheese.  A Mormon burrito, perhaps.

But if the food left me a bit dissatisfied, I could say nothing of the sort about the day's birds... and what birds!  A Scrub Jay darted across the road near Escalante, a spot of blue against the brick-red rocks.  In the high snows along Lookout Peak we saw a Golden Eagle being chased through the aspens by a raven, while a magpie flickered black and white amongst the firs.  A Steller's Jay whipped in front of us coming down the slope into the desert, and the gorgeous turquoise-blue of a male Mountain Bluebird set off the deep green of the junipers outside Torrey.  Kestrels, Western Bluebirds and the occasional Western Meadowlark appeared on the wires along the road.  It was as though we'd finally come down into the part of Utah where all the birds went for the winter.

Near Henrieville, we stopped to look at a large hawk atop a tree.  When it eventually launched into the sky, I had a brief hope that it might be a Swainson's Hawk, but when it finally came overhead, I saw the black wrist marks on the pale wings and changed my I.D. to Rough-winged Hawk.  Not a lifer, but a great bird to see again, and the flock of Wild Turkeys near the trees were a wonderful bonus.

On the far side of Henrieville, however, the birding was just plain spectacular.  A huge dark bird soared across the road ahead of us, and I demanded that Dad pull over--I knew already that it was too big to be a raven, and that there are no vultures in that part of the world.  The only all-dark bird of that size would be one I'd seen only at a great distance: the Golden Eagle.  But I was wrong.  It wasn't a Golden.  It was TWO Goldens, chasing one another in the fresh breeze blowing about the grassy yellow cliffs to our left.  I was transfixed, watching them come closer and closer to the rocks above us, never flapping, just working the winds.

But then suddenly there was a third bird over our heads.  It was smaller than the Goldens, and I could see the sunlight gleaming off its brown back, but I couldn't really see its wings.

With a thrill, I realized why: because I could hear them.

It was my first Prairie Falcon, and its wings were tucked in close to its body for maximum speed as it threw itself into a dive.  Coming practically straight at us from several hundred feet up, it was extending its wings only enough to keep it from falling out of the sky.  In the high, empty country, though, the sound of the air ripping through its feathers was clearly audible.  It was stooping at the Goldens, trying to drive them away from what was probably its nesting area, and successfully.  Within moments all three birds were heading south over the fields, and Dad and I were finally able to exhale.  For for sheer speed and wildness and daring and beauty I do not expect I will ever see anything to top it.  I have seen life birds appear in better display and for a longer time than I saw this Prairie Falcon, but never have I seen a bird that called up Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Wind-Hover" any better:  "The achieve of; the mastery of the thing!"

IN OUR NEXT INSTALLMENT: Birding in the dark!  Wiley coyotes!  Rock climbing!  The Devil's Garden!  And Carolina vs. Duke from two time zones away!

Red Rock Canyon * Zion * Bryce Canyon * Capitol Reef * Arches * Mesa Verde * Monument Valley * Grand Canyon

Escaping Vegas was fairly simple: get on the I-15 and drive north.  I'd somehow imagined border guards, determined to herd us back into the center of the city to put more coins into the slots.  (I did play a dollar's worth of slots while I was there, which resulted in me getting to push a button four times at the cost of one dollar.  Whee.)

The landscape started offering new and interesting features pretty quickly, I must say, including the Virgin River Canyon, through which I-15 runs.  It was becoming quite obvious to us that bird life in this climate consisted entirely of Common Ravens unless there was open water present.  Some of the dry riverbeds and washes we saw looked almost ridiculous: huge eroded valleys whose carving had obviously been done by rushing waters now stood utterly desiccated.  If the land's parents had walked through the door to the living room where the land and the water were furiously making out on the sofa, the water could not have vanished more completely, yet the disarray of the land's clothing could not have more clearly proclaimed what had been going on, right down to the bunching of its stony undergarments.

We stopped just short of the Utah border in Mesquite, NV, where we found a breakfast buffet at a local casino and a Wal-Mart at which could buy necessary supplies for the trip.  Yes, visions of Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo filling the Great Red Shark's trunk with blotter acid, reds, and ether did pop up in my mind's eye, but we were looking for the stuff that might save an Easterner's life while he was driving an unproven rental truck through the desert: bottled water, a cooler, snack food, and sunscreen, not necessarily in that order.

Once we crossed into Utah, the landscape seemed to hunch up into increasingly higher and more shapely masses of rock, and the colors took a decided redward turn to boot.  By the time we reached St. George, I was actively gawping at the hue of the walls behind the city.  If a brick could catch fire and burn down into coals, they might achieve that shade of glorious red.  We stopped for gas and peeled eastward along Route 9, noting the first of many occasions when a local high school's senior class would feel it necessary to carve the school initials up near the top of a ridge.  It reminded me somewhat of the hill of Uffington, except that I doubt those bronze-age carvers were intending their work to mean "Go, White Horses!  Beat Avebury!"

The ridges and valleys were starting to become overwhelming, though--the shapes, the size, the relentless layers of sedimentary stone, the cloudless blue sky contrasting with the land's pinks, oranges, and reds, all set off by flecks of evergreen and streaks of pure white snow.  Somewhere beyond Signal Peak, I finally felt compelled to turn to Dad and wax literary.  I told him about the end of The Great Gatsby, and Fitzgerald's final, miraculous page, and I tried to summon it up from memory as I looked about me, remembering what he'd written about the first explorer to set eyes on America:  "At last he had found something commensurate with his sense of wonder."  I knew in my heart that the first to see these mountains had felt the same way.

We crawled eventually into the southern end of Zion National Park, a narrow canyon carved out of thousands of feet of rock by the Virgin River.  Here, at least, there was bird life: in the cottonwood trees by the river were Robins, Western Bluebirds, and a handful of Black-capped Chickadees.  Everywhere we looked there was another beautiful rock face, or a stunning set of peaks seen from far below, but I was most impressed with the face of Weeping Rock: a pair of huge stone arches down which water flowed in what seemed like a great curtain--not a waterfall, but a steady veil of raindrops.  In several places you could climb under the flow and look down from under the overhang to see the veil from behind--sort of the same view as in "The Window on the West" from The Two Towers, or The Last of the Mohicans.  And since the nighttime temperatures were still falling well below freezing in the park, a spactacular group of dripped-ice sculptures had formed at the base of the rock face.  A lovely sight all around.

There were no more birds, however, save the ubiquitous ravens, a pair of whom posed very politely for me when we reached the shadowy end of the canyon at the Temple of Sinawava.  There we got a look at an actual waterfall coming down the sandstone into the Virgin.  How many hundreds of feet it fell I can only guess, but I wouldn't doubt a soul who told me the stream began thousands of feet above us.  The afternoon light was visible only on the peaks by then, so Dad and I decided, though it wasn't even 3:00, that it was time to head out for our next lodgings:  Ruby's Inn near Bryce Canyon.

Exiting Zion, we discovered that libertarian streak for which Westerners are legendary, but we discovered it in an admittedly surprising example: the switchback road out of the canyon had only a low rock wall alongside it.  Running a high-clearance vehicle like a Silverado over the edge would have been the easiest thing in the world to do, and hitting the lower stretch of the road several hundred feet below would have been pretty easy as well, what with gravity being so willing to help out.  The overall message we got: we'll help you drivers figure out where not to drive, but you're going to have to keep YOURSELF on the road.  I took the message seriously, both there and in later high places.

Leaving the canyon requires a trip through the mountains, too--and I do mean through them.  At the top of the switchback road, there's a tunnel.  The unusual feature of this tunnel is that it runs parallel to the mountainside, allowing the engineers to light it through the simple expedient of cutting a hole in the side every few hundred feet.  It was oddly enchanting to be in a tunnel but still able to see out into the mountain air.

On the far side of the tunnel, the feeling of enchantment increased, because we had obviously crossed some magical boundary.  On this side there were more evergreens, as well as a heck of a lot more snow, and we noticed that the outside temperature display in the truck was dropping.  It went below 50... then below 40... and as we hit 34, we were faced with the enormous layer cake of Escalante National Monument, a huge slab of pink and white and green that looks like the marble of Florence's Il Duomo, except increased to roughly the size of a continent.

Utah 89 took us north toward Bryce, passing through fields and juniper forests still buried under the winter's snows, though the road itself was pristine--the Utah D.O.T. is on the ball in a big way.  Dad took over driving, allowing me to sit in the shotgun seat and worry about my birding goals:  I'd seen almost no birds all day, and nothing I'd seen was new to me.  But then we fell in beside the flow of the Sevier River... and as we'd already realized, if you want birds out west, open water is what to look for.  I spotted a Great Blue Heron on an islet, and within seconds, there were Mallards as well... and we passed by a Common Goldeneye (only my second ever)... and then, flapping brazenly over the icy flow, a magpie appeared.

And here I must pause a moment to thank the American Ornithological Union.  I saw my first magpie over a quarter-century ago, on a trip to England with my parents.  They call it the Common Magpie there, and certainly its high-contrast plumage and long tail make Pica pica one of the world's most visible and unmistakable birds.  Here it was again, though, the first time I'd ever seen it in America.  But as I checked through my National Geographic Field Guide, I discovered that the bird I'd seen was not Pica pica at all.  Sometime in the late 90s, as best I can tell, the AOU had decided that the American variant was not conspecific with the European one.  What I had seen was Pica hudsonia, the Black-billed Magpie.  A lifer.

After that, nothing could ruin my day, but I must say there was an attempt.  When we reached the turn-off to Bryce Canyon, we took a room at Ruby's Inn, a beautiful and historic lodge established in 1916.  It has cabins, a store, a gas station, and a restaurant, and since there's not much else nearby, we decided to give the restaurant a try.  When we came in, we fell in behind a couple waiting near the cashier's register for the maitre'd... and waiting... and waiting.  The cashier made no particular effort to find out why no one had turned up to seat the couple, or seat us, or for that matter seat the half-dozen people who had by then formed a line behind us.  We could see into the dining room, where at least four tables were empty, though unbussed.  Finally, after nearly fifteen minutes, the cashier apparently decided we'd waited long enough and went off toward the kitchen.  In a flash, there was a busboy clearing the table and a host seating people.

We sat beneath a large photograph of John Wayne (who had apparently spent a few nights at Ruby's) and were confronted by a slightly geeky-looking teenager with glasses who immediately asked if we knew what we'd like.  Since we'd had our menus for all of thirty seconds by that time, we opted to order drinks instead and wait to order dinner until after they had arrived; he seemed vaguely unsettled by this radical approach to dining.  Nonetheless, he brought us the chardonnay (Dad) and Diet Dr. Pepper (me) we'd requested, but he failed to bring Dad his requested ice water.  We nonetheless made our dinner orders, which we'd chosen after examining the environs and calculating the odds of a steakhouse in southern Utah having good seafood (not good).  I asked for the flatiron steak and baked vegetables, Dad the smothered pork chops and baked potato.  He also asked for the bread that the menu said came with entrees, as well as reminding the waiter about the water he'd already requested.

The water did arrive--when our entrees did.  Dad was vaguely irked, especially since the bread still hadn't arrived, but after he'd reminded the waiter about the bread once again, he tucked into his chops.  My steak was quite good--and though I don't eat steak often, I do appreciate a good one when I get it--but the real triumph was the baked vegetables, which were flavorful and crisp, not cooked into oblivion as I'd feared.  I was just finishing the last bite when the bread finally arrived, but by then we both felt duty-bound to eat it, by gum.  Before doing so, however, we asked the waiter for our check, and we spread out butter and munched.  We had time to butter and eat a second piece each as it turned out... more than enough time... where the heck had our waiter gone?

He'd vanished.  He was not wandering the dining room, not tending us, not tending the table full of Japanese tourists nearby, nowhere.  We sat for perhaps ten minutes before I stood up beside the table and made great show of looking for him, hoping that perhaps a park ranger or someone would see me and come by to offer assistance.  I was nearly at the point of resorting to Gilly Macknee's last-ditch method of attracting a server--it involves a paper napkin, a lighter, and a willingness to risk setting off a smoke alarm--when he finally appeared from the bowels of the restaurant and handed over our check.  I'll just say I didn't bother to calculate what fifteen percent of it might be.

Nonetheless, we made it to the cashier's desk without further incident and I handed over my debit card.  The cashier swiped it, scowled at the display, and said, "Hmm.  The internet's been funny all day..."  After a few more ineffective swipes, I smiled and reached back for my wallet, saying "If it's not working, I can just pay cash."  "Oh, it'll work," he insisted, swiping the same card through the same unresponsive mechanism with the same futility.  And swiping it again.  And again.  And again.  "Let's just cancel the card transaction; I'll pay cash," I said again, much more Loudly And Firmly, and pointedly thrust a handful of bills at him.  At last he relented and handed me back my card, accepted my cash, and gave me my change.  I dropped a pointedly paltry amount on the table and ran for our room before anyone else in the food service industry could get in my way.

IN OUR NEXT INSTALLMENT: Hoodoo gurus!  High-altitude travel!  More snow!  The ride of our lives!  And my baffling encounter with the Mormon burrito!

Despite my continuing inability to get my vacation pics onto the web, I've finally decided to quit waiting around to share my account of the trip.  I mean, if I've got any kind of reputation, it's as a writer, not a photographer.  But given the expanse of territory we covered--five states and better than two thousand miles of road (plus elevation changes of better than 7000 feet), I think perhaps a park-by-park approach is the best way to manage the narrative.  Here, then, is the Table of Contents for the Tale of the Four Corners trip:

Red Rock Canyon * Zion * Bryce Canyon * Capitol Reef * Arches * Mesa Verde * Monument Valley * Grand Canyon

Those are the eight parks Dad and I visited between March 5th and 12th, and we could easily have done several other parks as well, but the natural wonders in the Southwest's parklands do require spending at least SOME time looking around in each.

In order start the trip with the proper degree of appreciation for said natural wonders, however, we spent our first day getting a thorough feel for the unnatural: we flew into Las Vegas.

For a Southerner/Easterner, Vegas is almost a parody of a city.  Around here, cities spring up because there's eomething nearby--a river, say, or a harbor, or a sheltered valley, or at the very least a convenient intersection of roads and/or train tracks.  That little bit of realistic grit produces the irritation that lies at the core of the urban pearl, so to speak..  But Vegas has no grit inside.  It's a spectacularly shiny bit of costume jewelry, flashing brilliantly in front of the onlookers, but all you have to do to understand it is drive to its edge and look back at it:  it's the Emerald City, except that all the poppies around it seem to have been evaporated by a series of nuclear blasts, but in terms of its overall character (and quite possibly its civic leadership), all it needs is a little yellow-brick repaving.  (In fact, if MGM isn't planning a theme hotel based on the Oz books at this very moment, it's only because they feel it would be redundant.)

The other impression I got from Vegas was this: nakedness.  And no, I don't mean toplessness, which is yet another feature of the, um, landscape.  I mean nakedness in a more existential sense.  There's absolutely nothing for Vegas to hide behind--no trees, no hills, no river.  You can circle it in your car and see it from all sides.  Go around it clockwise and look right: city.  Look left: desert.  You'll see yuccas and Joshua trees, maybe an odd cactus or two, and some interestingly eroded sandstone, but you'll be heading waaaaay out of town before you get to the one bit of natural beauty you can always see in Vegas: the surrounding mountains, which were still capped with snow in many places when we arrived.

And when you arrive, I must say that the city lets you know exactly what it wants: your money.  It's admirably up front about it, honestly.  The first thing you see when you get off the plane is a bank of slot machines, right there in the terminal.  If you're willing to give it money--whether by gambling, eating, drinking, lodging, or some other method perhaps better left unspecified--it will do its damnedest to keep you entertained, and it will entertain you with all the energy, maturity, and sophistication of a fourteen-year-old.

Yes, Vegas is basically Disney World, but Mickey's testicles have finally dropped.  It's big, it's loud, it's obvious it's rebellious.  You're not the boss of it.  And it will not, will not, will not hear anything about "consequences."  There ARE no consequences in Vegas.  You can cram for the test on the bus.  They won't know you're drunk if you eat this.  You can't get pregnant the first time.  You'll live forever!

Thus the place is full of what a fourteen-year-old would want if he had all the money in the world.  You'll be stopped at a traffic light and suddenly a roller coaster car full of screaming tourists will whip out of a nearby building, hurtle over your head for a moment, and then disappear into the bowels of another building.  The New York New York complex features a miniaturized NYC skyline--a thirty-story Empire State Building, a seventy-foot Statue of Liberty, basically a sub-adult Big Apple, with a police force that's deeply interested in keeping the peace, but probably doesn't use toilet plungers to do so.  (I shudder to think what they might use.)  Between the roller coaster, the live medieval battle at the Excalibur, and the Maxim-style gymnastics of the Cirque du Soleil troupe, all the place really needed was a few Bob Marley banners and a Jessica Simpson poster to look like a Woodberry dorm room writ large.

But the weirdest vibe in the airport may have been the ads.  Vegas shows are advertised with an aggressiveness I've only seen in internet pop-ups.  They leap out at you from every angle, on buildings, billboards, taxicabs, t-shirts, trailers, buses, anything that's moving slowly enough for a poster-hanger to catch up with it.  And weirdly, at least in the airport, every single ad seemed to be for performers who were at one time edgy.  Okay, not Barry Manilow, who has no more edge than a soap bubble, but just about everyone else:  semi-maniacal magician/comedians Penn & Teller ("Fewer audience injuries than last year!" said their poster) had a headlining gig.  Performance artists Blue Man Group, whom Kelly had seen in New York back before our kids were born, had a similar gig.  The off-broadway found-percussion show Stomp!, which we saw in NYC when Dixon was an infant (and which may have been what turned his brain toward percussion, for all we know) had one too.  I was halfway terrified that Laurie Anderson might be playing the Circus Circus, doing "O Superman" with a big band and special guests Steve and Eydie.

We had arrived early enough in the day to see no point in going to our hotel, so we loaded our bags into our rented Silverado and headed out into the desert toward Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.  We did feel compelled to stop for lunch, however, and I got to pick the first restaurant: I opted for a Jack in the Box.  Hey, we don't have them back east, it was on the right-hand side of the road, and I like their goofy ads featuring the giant bulb-headed mascot.  Two things about this stop were surprising.  The first was ornithological: there was the life bird in the parking lot.  This was my first-ever Great-tailed Grackle, though not my last.  Looking much like its cousin the Boat-tailed Grackle, except for the yellow eyes, these large blackbirds turned up in nearly every parking lot in Vegas, making noises that seems less like birds than like car alarms.  The second surprise was demographic: against all odds, the customers in the Jack in the Box, numbering over a dozen, were all men.  What are the odds?

But our sirloin burgers didn't take us long to power down, so we were soon heading west to Red Rock Canyon.  The desertedness of the desert was a stark contrast to the remarkable sprawl of Vegas, where everything--EVERYTHING--seemed to be either being renovated, landscaped, expanded, paved, or built.  The place was like a mating ground for hard hats.  Just a few miles toward the mountains, however, there were only a few homesteads plopped onto the reddish dirt, with barbed wire and a few slightly tended ornamental trees offering the only signs of occupancy.  The mountains kept looming, though, and as we got about twenty minutes outside the city, the desert stopped looking like a city that hadn't quite taken yet and began looking like an actively different kind of place, in this case one with yuccas, Joshua trees, and the occasional small cactus.  Huge rock walls rose up before us, startlingly red, especially if you're used to the blue-grey granite of the Appalachians.  And by the time we circled around to the entrance to the NCA, it was clear that we were in a landscape utterly unlike anything I'd seen before.

The mountains themselves were simply more abrupt than I'd consider normal: a bit too sharp, a bit too tall, a bit too bare.  But they were also layered.  These were sedimentary rocks, stratum upon stratum, different colors of sand fused into stone: red, yellow, brown, even coral-pink.  My first impression upon looking at them was that someone had been dickering with the Paint program, pouring a different fill color into each polygon.  The contrast with the blue sky (and with the occasional pair of Common Ravens flying by) made them seem even more fiery and abnormal.  They were also, I realized soon, much much farther away than I'd first thought.  With my binoculars, I was able to pick out a few human figures--rock climbers scaling one dark patch, and a few mountaineers high atop one reddish peak.  It's a sign that I've now spent enough time rock climbing, I suppose, to consider myself a climber.  I immediately began asking myself "I wonder how high that pitch is?  Are they top-belaying?" and wondering if my friend Ken had ever done any climbing here.

I wasn't distracted completely from the birding, however.  In addition to the ubiquitous ravens--the only bird we would see on every day of the trip, for what it's worth--I caught sight of something strange and sort of Mockingbird-ish near the visitor's center rest rooms.  It was about the right size for a Mocker, but its movements reminded me of something else.  It was rich brown on the back, and pale underneath, but speckled everywhere, with the dark flecks on its breast gathering in a large spot on the chest.  It was, I quickly realized, a Cactus Wren.  The largest North American wren by far, it does move like its tinier brethren, but being roughly the size of a Cardinal, it's not a bird that shrieks "WREN!" to the inexperienced viewer.  I watched this one join its partner, pulling fibers out of a nearby yucca for nesting material, and was satisfied.  I'm never going to complain about getting a life bird in a parking lot, but this was somewhat more like the way I'd imagined seeing desert birds.

We spent an hour or two poking into the visitor's center and driving the truck around the scenic ring road.  I took a ridiculous number of pictures, none of which came even close to capturing the beautiful colors of the place and the day, and as check-in time finally rolled around, we set the truck back on the road to Sin City.  It's a surprisingly short drive--thirty minutes from the Canyon to the Strip would be my guess.

We made it back to our hotel--the great black glass pyramid of the Luxor, where the headliner was loathesome prop comedian Carrot Top--and from there headed to dinner.  We wandered by NYNY and saw a sign for an Irish pub, which sounded about up our alley, which is how we ended up eating bangers and mash with a pint of Smithwick at Nine Fine Irishmen.  Yum.

We didn't know it yet, but we had already eaten the finest meal of the trip--and the only one where the service was not provided by the Differently Competent.  The next day we'd be off to Utah, and I realized, not for the first time, that I had perhaps made a bad move by recently re-reading Jon Kraukauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.

IN OUR NEXT INSTALLMENT: Weeping Rocks!  Magpie Speciation!  Snow!  And more adventures with food service workers!

The term used by kayakers when they leave a protected eddy and move back out into fast-moving current is "peeling out," and I'm feeling very much as though I've peeled out into a stream full of snowmelt just now.  Even with the short week (we didn't have class Monday, though I found this out only on Sunday morning), I've been a bit startled by the transition from spring break to school. 

Granted, the transition wasn't eased by the fact that I had the year's first baseball webcast on Tuesday afternoon, a faculty meeting on Wednesday night, and dorm duty yesterday.  Luckily, Friday is a light day for me, and best of all, I'm done with my coaching duties for the year, so I was able to mosey back home at my leisure, having already laid out the materials necessary for tomorrow's classes.  Ahhhhhh.

Unfortunately, I've been having some problems getting my vacation photos from the computer to the internet.  They came off the camera just fine, but I can't get them resized so that they'll fit on the web page properly; that's delayed my planned recap of the whole trip, but I do plan to get it written up here.  (I'm also preparing, at John Plymale's request, a short piece for the upcoming Pressure Boys reunion benefit for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, so be patient, please.)  In the meantime, trust me: sandstone looks waaaaaaay cool.

I also forgot to list one life bird in my last post--hard to believe, I know, but it was one that I spotted only momentarily, a slate-blue, short-tailed bird that looked like a small blue crow as it flew across Arizona 160 in front of our truck and settled into a pinyon pine beside the road: a Pinyon Jay.  I had hoped to see one at greater length, and maybe even see more than one, but it's still a lifer.

The Four Corners trip was intended to do several things--get me away from work for a while, let me spend time with my Dad, keep me occupied while Ian & Dixon are still in school and can't travel, allow me to see part of the country I'd never visited--but of course one big goal was to get a life bird in each state.  I'm happy to report that the plan worked in Nevada (Great-tailed Grackle, Cactus Wren), Utah (Black-billed Magpie, "Gray-headed" Junco, Prairie Falcon, Mountain Bluebird, "Red-shafted" Flicker), Colorado (Townsend's Solitaire), and Arizona (Say's Phoebe, Pinyon Jay, Juniper Titmouse, Mountain Chickadee), but I was skunked in New Mexico. 

Part of the problem with New Mexico was planning.  We spent very little time in NM, driving down from Mesa Verde National Park into the northwestern corner of the state, but not stopping for very long anywhere, partly because there's really nowhere to stop in that corner.  Other than the town of Shiprock and the Ship Rock itself, it's empty territory, belonging primarily to the Navajo Nation, and there are no state parks, wilderness areas, or other conservation areas; it's essentially open range--just high desert behind barbed-wire fences.  We probably drove about a hundred miles in New Mexico total, and the problem wasn't just a lack of life birds--it was a lack of just about everything.  I saw a few dozen ravens, mostly in the town of Shiprock itself, as well as some "Oregon" Juncos out in the scrub, a Horned Lark by the road, and a large, dark Red-tailed Hawk on a power pole, but that was it.  Clearly we should have allowed more time to drive further east, possibly into the Farmington area, or further south toward some parkland.  Still, it gives me an excuse to check the state out again, and that's not a bad thing.

The life list now stands at 344, including currently non-specific varieties such as both the abovementioned juncos, the R-S Flicker, and the Blue Goose.  But hey, I'm writing them down, because they might be split into separate species at any moment.  In fact, I benefited from two such splits on this trip.  I had seen a Plain Titmouse in the Palo Alto backyard of my friends Nan & Patrick when I visited California in 2003, but by the time I got the Grand Canyon, the bird I saw in Cali had been re-taxonomized as an Oak Titmouse and the two I saw cavorting atop a juniper near the GCNP visitor's center were Juniper Titmice.  Similarly, the scores and scores of magpies I saw in England remained part of the nominal species (Pica pica), but the ones I saw in southern Utah have been recast as members of a new American species, Pica hudsonia.  All I'm doing is making sure that when the Dark-eyed Junco complex gets split into its component parts, I won't have recalculate my total.

I think I've just about got my balance again, and my paddle's in my hands and ready, but if you see me go over in a few days, well, I've had to roll this boat before and I'll do it again.

I'm back from my more-or-less-annual spring break trip with my dad.  This year we ventured afar--much more afar than in past years--to the Four Corners, where I visited five new states (NV, UT, CO, NM, and AZ), logged eleven new bird species (Great-tailed Grackle, Cactus Wren, Black-billed Magpie, "Grey-headed" Junco, Prairie Falcon, Mountain Bluebird, "Red-shafted" Flicker, Townsend's Solitaire, Say's Phoebe, Juniper Titmouse, Mountain Chickadee), saw several new mammals (coyote, elk, ground squirrel, prairie dog), put 2000+ miles on the rental truck, bought a pair of used Chet Atkins CDs, watched UNC beat Duke in Cameron on senior night again, and blew a dollar on slots in Vegas.

I also finished three books:  David Quammen's superb Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, Hunter S. Thompson's classic of desert travel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried.

Oh, and I took just under 400 photos.  That memory chip Kelly gave me for my birthday continues to be one of the best presents I've ever received.

Coming soon: vacation pics, restaurant reviews, and tales of what it sounds like when a falcon dive-bombs a pair of immature Golden Eagles.  See you soon!