Day 1

Day 1

“For an occurrence to become an adventure,

it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

It was nearly six AM when the initial signs of dawn appeared. The smell of feed-lot hung heavy in the air outside of Clovis New Mexico as I said goodbye to Texas. It would be three months before I would make the return trip home.

A small time later, the sun’s first rays raced across the Llano Estacado, quickly erasing any lead Corey and I had built up in the hours since we left Lubbock. I have always wondered what drove men to speed to their destination with such haste. After years of travel, I believe it is a desire to control time that pushes us to get where we are going as quickly as possible. There is no force more unyielding than time; and yet by speeding down the highway we feel as if we are somehow saving it.

Out of the driver’s side window, I saw a pronghorn antelope leap a fence and gracefully bound towards the horizon. The antelope has no concept of time: she is only concerned with the next rain that will fill the draws and playa lakes where she quenches her thirst. I felt a connection to the antelope and contemplated the journey at hand.

The adventure we had embarked on was to take us from Texas to Oregon. After staying a few days with our friend Henry, I would drop Corey at the airport in Portland and make my way to Seattle for job training. From there, I would head east towards the Continental Divide and Glacier County Montana. I liked to think that our trip was, in a loose way, similar to journeys made by map-makers and fur-traders of centuries past. I believed Corey felt the same way; though he had not expressly stated as much.

                It was high-noon when we reached the borders of Navajo country. The area near the New Mexico-Arizona border was filled with white mesas, red sandstone escarpments, and pink rolling hills peppered with Yucca in bloom. The distant figure of Ship Rock butte came into view and served as a striking reminder of how foreign the great American west was to me.

                We made our way into Arizona and traveled parallel to Monument Valley, a relatively flat area with many tall buttes and pointed remnants of towering sand dunes that occupied the land millions of years ago. I looked over the landscape and easily understood how the Indians came to find god in that place. There are few things more spiritual than to stand in awe of nature and yet the same experience also has the effect of making one feel entirely insignificant.

                An hour went by as the highway meandered through collections of rocks and buttes that all surely had been given names by the Navajo. After jokingly saying “are we there yet,” three smokestacks came into our purview: a sure sign that we had reached our first stop of the trip. A canyon opened up on our right and Lake Powell lay directly in front of us. We passed the Navajo power station that had been a beacon for us and turned onto a dirt Indian road. I pushed the pedal down which caused dirt and rocks to kick up from behind the tires. After nearly twelve straight hours of driving we had made it to Lower Antelope Canyon.

                The upper and lower Antelope canyons outside of Powell Arizona are slot canyons created by whipping wind and the rise and fall of water in Lake Powell, combined with millions of years of nature’s determination. The canyons are very protected and require a guide to tour them. Corey and I paid our twenty-six dollars to a Navajo man and took our place with the other travelers underneath an awning. A call came out: “all for the three o’clock tour follow me.”

We were entirely unaware that portions of Arizona were either on Pacific Time, or did not observe daylight savings time. Either way, we had arrived an hour earlier than anticipated: a revelation that annoyed Corey since we had skipped stopping by Four Corners National Monument in order to make the last tour at the slot canyon. We had a quick laugh about the situation just before our guide began to point out dinosaur tracks left near the entrance to Lower Antelope Canyon. I didn't really see the tracks, though I nodded approvingly to our guide and took a picture anyway.

We reached the entrance to the slot canyon. It was a slit in the ground so small in comparison to the surrounding country that it was as if a great force had sliced the earth’s crust with a mighty sword. I envisioned that the first person to discover the top entrance of the canyon was someone who simply tripped over it hiking near the lake.

Canyon Corey

Canyon Entrance

One by one our party descended into the slot canyon and posed for pictures just inside the entrance. Our guide spoke at length about the forces that had shaped the canyon over millions of years. I barely heard her over the constant clicking of my camera’s shutter. The sandstone in the canyon had been carved out in such a way that there was not more than a fifteen-foot gap between the top of the canyon walls at any one point; while at the bottom, the walls either formed a trough, or opened wide to form majestic rooms of red and orange rock with sand covering the floor. The walls of the canyon were not uniform; they were made up of swirling lines of sandstone that looked as smooth as flowing silk, yet felt as rough as sandstone’s name would suggest. Our tour climbed down a rather large ladder to push deeper into the canyon and it was there that we saw the arch room.

Walls in Lower Antelope Canyon

The arch room was the grandest part of the slot canyon. It allowed for a photo opportunity of a lifetime underneath a large flat sandstone arch that appeared to be a truss between the two walls of the canyon. After posing for a picture, I went back to snapping photos of every flowing sand surface in the canyon. Shortly thereafter, Corey and I had tired of the tour. It was time to get back on the road.

Arch Room

After we took a break for lunch in Powell, we got back to pounding pavement and headed north into Utah. Our next

stop: Zion.

It took us a couple of hours to make it to Kanab Utah. Even Kanab’s gas station had a better view out of its front door than the vast majority of businesses in the country. We passed the Coral Pink Sand Dunes on our way out of town. The dunes were tall and appeared to be dipped in dye, as that color did not appear natural on sand. The car climbed up switchbacks until we went over the pass and saw a golf course ahead on our left, signaling that the entrance to Zion was just around the bend.

We turned left on the Zion Scenic Byway and blew past a closed entrance booth to the park. From the entrance until we would leave the canyon, every view was worthy of being immortalized by a master painter. We entered a tunnel carved out of the rock. Every hundred yards or so in the mile long tunnel, an opening in the wall showed that the wall of the tunnel was the same cliff wall that we would gawk at momentarily. As we came out of the tunnel and descended to the river bottom, the red sandstone cliffs stood over a thousand feet high just above our heads. Corey and I parked the car and I hurriedly set up my tripod in an attempt to catch the last signs of sunset in the canyon. The sun dipped behind the canyon wall and we got back in the car, which was something I dreaded wholeheartedly after having spent fourteen hours on the road.

Canyon Wall - Zion

Next, we stopped at a restaurant in the shadow of Zion canyon to grab a beer. Apparently, in Utah you have to order food to be legally allowed to purchase any alcohol. The beer they do serve is nearly half the strength of its counterpart from any other state. We begrudgingly drank our watered down porters and snacked on a surprisingly good guacamole. Half an hour later, we were at the hotel. I hauled my valuables upstairs and said goodnight to day one of the adventure. It had been a long day, but we made it to Zion. We made it to sanctuary from the road.