Julia and Ronnie recap, Petrified Forest (6-10 August)

One of the planned stops along my summer route was Julia’s and Ronnie’s wedding, in eastern AZ, on August 8. I’ve missed a cluster of weddings in the past few years, starting with those on the east coast while I lived in Idaho from 2009-2011, and those out West during my time in Baltimore. It was worth the drive from Idaho to AZ and back up to the northwest to be able to celebrate with friends. The wedding, and the whole weekend, at Ronnie’s family ranch in rural AZ, was delightfully fun and very special, and both families went out of their way to make me feel welcome as a solo traveler.

So many great memories of the weekend. Started things off right with a Friday night jam at the ranch, couple guitars and a mandolin, including a cameo by Ronnie’s dad (his parents play bluegrass all over) and an everyone-sings late-night rendition of Social D’s ball and chain. I spent half the evening playing my mando and half hand-whistling or singing along with a tiny grey kitten curled up in my lap. After some wedding set-up the next morning, I buzzed out to the nearby state park for some short hikes to a pueblo ruin and petroglyphs, and to take a shower and clean up for the wedding. The wedding was very special, full of kids running around and later dancing (including a choreographed MJ dance, excellent), and Julia and Ronnie looked absolutely lovely. Let’s not forget Narnia – the secret, muraled kid’s room accessed through a wardrobe in the kitchen, created by Ronnie’s folks over the past few months. And the food was of course fantastic- anchored with a pig Ronnie had helped butcher and then roast underground, for the wedding feast. After helping myself to breakfast at the ranch on Sunday (breakfast beans, yes!) and saying my goodbyes to the folks I’d met and the newlyweds, I headed north around 10:30 or so.

I stopped a few hours at the Petrified Forest/ Painted Desert for some hiking and sightseeing, to break up my day of driving. Hiked down a dry wash for a ways to a prominent feature named Martha’s Butte, known for a few long petrified logs and petroglyphs, including a spiraled solstice calendar marker from long ago. I enjoyed inspecting the streambed and banks of the dry wash, with acute interest in the streambed morphology with the meanders, dry streambed patterns in eddies, eroded channels…and imagined what it was like, full of water. The configuration of every rock and slope in this desert clearly identifies the surface flows that shaped the landscape, on large and small scales.

The petrified forest, and the areas around Phoenix, are the dry, stereotypical AZ desert…but much of my travels last week were through portions of the state I’d not visited, elevations over 5000, characterized by alternating green grasslands, aspen and pine forests, and occasional volcanic cones rising from the flats; the landscape was surprising, and refreshing. Discovered the Mogollon Rim, a several-thousand-foot forested scarp cutting across a large portion of the state, and found the biggest aspen trunks I’d ever seen east of Show Low.

Recap – Phoenix visit (4-6 August)

One of the primary goals for my trip is to spend time with friends and family, that I haven’t seen much in the last few years under the constraints of limited vacation time from work. I’m fortunate enough to have friends in practically every western state, and they are awesome about letting me crash for a day or two at a time! And shower…! You guys rock.

This week I was able to visit my friend Loren – a former colleague, we’d worked together remotely for two years and become good friends without ever meeting face-to-face! She lives in Phoenix with her husband and two kitties. We had a fantastic time hanging out and catching up (since we no longer chat on the phone every day at work)…and during the day while she worked, I was able to clean my clothes (and wash my sleeping bag, which over seven weeks of daily use had acquired an odor), complete correspondence and route-planning, catch up on news I’d missed, start a blog, and try to erase my sleep deficit from an overnight hike a few days before. Their house is an oasis, complete with blackout curtains, a pool, and renovated kitchen. I was thrilled to make meals for two days. Cooking is one of my favorite ways to unwind, and all I wanted to do was chop vegetables. And eat them with great company. Oh, homemade coleslaw, I’d missed you…

Phoenix seems like an awesome town to explore, but not so much in August in the 110-degree temperatures. Loren’s husband Josh is an avid mountain biker, and he was kind enough to invite me on his pre-work morning ride and lend me a SICK bike (fancy enough that it had the seat-height lever on the handlebars, wow)! I was able to avoid any major spills and had a great ride. Phoenix has a number of park-protected hills scattered within the urban area, complete with trails. Josh and Loren have great single track options available a mile or two from the house. I can’t wait to return for another visit in the fall!

I headed out of town after 2 days, enroute to Julia and Ronnie’s wedding in the eastern part of the state. I’ve noticed that the adopt-a-highway signage in Arizona allows some creativity for group names. So far, I’ve noted the following adopt-a-highway groups:

• Pickup Chicks
• Sheriff’s Mounted Posse
• The Loner’s Club
• Payson Lion and Lioness Clubs (I’m assuming these are kids groups…I hope…)!

Grand canyon by moonlight (Part 2 of X)

Continued, from https://waterrockwoman.wordpress.com/2015/08/05/grand-canyon-by-moonlight-part-1-of-x/

I arrived at the park midday on August 2nd, coming in from the east and an early morning spent at Wapatki National Monument, touring a few pueblo ruins before the sun got too hot and other visitors arrived. Cloudy skies early, a few fat-drop rain showers on the drive. Met a family from France outside the GC backcountry office, also waiting for the office lunch break to end so we could ask the staffers a few questions about trail and weather conditions. The French were on the last stop of a month-long vacation, and were preparing to hike to Phantom Ranch for a night. They kindly did not make fun of my lunch, a recently-discovered cheap coleslaw replacement – helpings of broccoli slaw ($1.29 at walmart, or $1.50 or so at Safeway) in a plastic cup, doused in yogurt-base bleu cheese dressing.

At 1300 the backcountry information office reopened, and I spoke to a woman there about my hiking plans, down the South Kaibab and back up the Bright Angel, starting after dark. She didn’t know the expected moonrise time but told me a bit about a hike she’d done a year ago, down the Kaibab and across the Tonto trail to Indian Garden, at night. Sounded like a worthwhile, minor, changeup – the Tonto trail runs four or so miles from Tip-off to Indian Garden, bridging the two rim-to-river trails, and the views would be better on the plateau than in the canyons descending and then ascending the last 1000 feet or so to the Colorado River. Weather report indicated clear skies after 2200, so I figured I’d play my start time by ear based on the cloud cover – I should have plenty of time to hike down, across, and back up the 12 or so miles starting even that late – with a goal of ascending the last mile or two of switchbacks around sunrise.

Map! http://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/upload/corridor_map.pdf . Note the tonto trail is not labeled- it’s the dotted line bridging the trails above tip-off and then below Indian Garden.

I also asked the staff about mountain lions – I’d seen a cluster of game crossing signs driving through the park that morning, including a pair of mountain lion signs, which concerned me enough to inquire about their prevalence below the rim. Don’t get me wrong, mountain lions are way cool, but not an animal I’d care to encounter unawares, hiking alone at night – they’re not dangerous to groups of hikers but have been known to stalk solo hikers. I’ve since tried to remember the exact response I received to this question – at the time, what I recall was, mountain lions are not active in the area of the Corridor trails. But later, I was thinking the response may have been – hikers don’t typically encounter mountain lions on corridor trails. Regardless, I left the office not worried about cats, and decided I didn’t need to carry my bear spray (which is not bear spray at all, but gel pepper spray my friend Jules gave me and another cyclist, back in Baltimore, last year).

Spent a lazy afternoon dozing in the back of the truck, hoping the cloudy skies would clear. A decent thunderstorm hit just before 5 pm, but as it passed and the sun returned, I decided to get an earlier start – boiled some cheesy pasta for dinner and filled my pack, with a gallon of water capacity to fill at the trailhead, 2 headlights, various emergency contents, long-sleeved wool shirt and tights, a rainjacket, and 2-inch knife (the Gerber knife Amanda gave her bridesmaids last year, what she calls her “bra-strap knife”, for its small size). By six-thirty I was on the bike headed the five or so miles to the South Kaibab trailhead. The skies to the west were almost cloudless and I decided to begin before dark, to catch the sunset at the beginning of the hike. I left the rim and headed down some steep switchbacks around seven fifteen, with sunset shortly following about fifteen minutes later.

To be continued…

Grand Canyon by moonlight (Part 1 of X)

Caution: this is not a short story.

Six years ago, I drove cross-country with my buddy Emily, who was moving from Huntsville, AL to Davis California. Crazy week, which included an epic hike in the Grand Canyon, down the Bright Angel Trail from the South Rim to the river, and back. We started at 0900 due to tight travel constraints (after waking at five a few hours drive from the park), and made it to the river around noon…took until almost dusk to get back to the rim in the heat of the day (April, 120 degrees at the bottom…). We were aware of the dangers of dayhiking in that heat with 5000 feet of elevation gain, took plenty of breaks, had plenty of water, etc, so it was fine, just a long day. After we finished, though, all I could think about was how AWESOME it would be to hike at night with a full moon. Fewer people, lower temperatures, beautiful moonlit scenery. As a teenager, I loved backpacking with my father and sometimes sister in the late fall and winter, when the leaves were down in the Blue Ridge and we could hike from camp without packs along ridge trails in the moonlight. And then, in college, memories of numerous nighttime missing persons searches, in the winter; an open-grid task in the snow in the early morning hours (followed by a harrowing car ride down Afton on I-64 in the dark with inches of fresh snow under the tires, later learning a friend’s jeep was pulled out of a ditch near search base by helpful firefighters the same night); a dog team task in southern Virginia, around midnight on new year’s eve, with towers of dormant kudzu creating a surreal landscape of wetland slopes; closed grids through stubbled hay fields in Greene County in March with dozens of volunteers, searching for a woman who’d be found the following day, by the water, a suicide.

Walking through the hills at night is a different, solitary, quiet experience, especially when you turn your lights off and carefully work your way through the moonlit shadows.

Anyways…so I’ve had this idea of a moonlight hike at the GC in the back of my mind, percolating, for a while – and the PDQ, combined with a scheduled stop in Arizona August 8 for a wedding, and a full moon a week before, presented a perfect opportunity. The full moon, a blue moon, occurred on July 31, with fortuitous evening moonrise timing, but I didn’t get to the park until August 2. I postponed the hike a day due to weather – a significant pressure front moved through the area on the first, with thunderstorms and rain showers. I wanted clear cloudless skies.

I’d asked a few buddies who lived in the area (well, within 500 miles, or so), if they were interested in hiking a few months back, but I certainly didn’t, and don’t, mind traveling alone. Hiking solo is not inherently dangerous, in fact it’s very fulfilling, but you do have to take additional precautions and make sure you’re on your “A” game. Especially at night.

To be continued…

(because I’m staying at my friend Loren’s house and want to enjoy her pool this afternoon in the 100-some-degree heat, and maybe take a nap or listen to the Orioles day game on the radio. It’s a rough life.)

Off pavement

Toured Arcosanti this morning. Learned of its existence from my Baltimore cycling buddy Mike, who lived there for a time probably 15 years ago. Anyway, it was directly on my route – a small concrete-formed, quarter-sphere architecture community on the interstate between Sedona and Phoenix, about 3 miles off an exit down a slightly washboarded gravel road.

All I can say is, it wasn’t what I expected. I’d always assumed, for no reason, that Arcosanti was a stereotypical hippie commune, but of course it was a horse of a different color, an urban experiment in the desert. As an environmental scientist, I always think first of the ecological and energy efficiency of any shared living environment…but Arcosanti was formed for different reasons, in a different time…designed dense cityscape as rebellion to suburbanization and sprawl in the 1970s. The community is adapting now, to new technologies and new ideas, with infrastructure improvements and changes such as grey water reuse systems. Guess I’ll have to stop teasing Mike about his time on a hippie commune. Architects are nerds too.

Anyway, the point of this story, is an encounter with a stranger, around quarter to noon as I walked to my car following the guided tour and a quick hike to a nearby bluff.

Middle-aged man getting out of his vehicle in the visitor parking lot, empty at nine thirty, now full- “Hi, do you live here?”

No.

– “Oh, you’re visiting, what did you think”

It’s interesting. (Not engaging, but polite…as one who frequently offers unsolicited conversation, I’ll at least go a round, here, until he gets to the point)

– “I’ve gotta say, I just can’t believe that the road here isn’t paved. I mean, what type of image are they trying to present to visitors? Don’t you think it’s odd that it’s not paved?”

Uh, sure. (turns and walks away, rounds the corner around his vehicle’s bumper)

– “Sounds like you don’t really mean that!” (fair observation)

True. I can see what you mean, but I’ve got no problem with dirt roads. I find I like better, what’s at their end.

(End of conversation. Walk the few yards to truck, roll down windows in hundred degree heat, change cd, drive out in 4wd over gravel)