Grand Canyon (Arizona Trip -- August 2008, Day Three)

DAY THREE:  Sunday, 17 August 2008

Day’s Starting Pedometer Mileage:  813.

Remember the “Tick” cartoon that started with the alarm going off?  That what I was thinking when I woke up half-an-hour before my alarm went off.  I woke up at 4 am, by the way.  Quickly getting ready, I was on the road by 4.30, with the idea I could see the sunrise over the Grand Canyon.  I took Route 89 north past where Sunset Volcano was, and in the open road I hadn’t seen before.  A full moon helped with my visibility, but I still kept an eye out for critters.  It was about an hour to reach Cameron, where I turned west on to Route 64.  While the sun wasn’t up yet, the light was peeking over the mountains.  On one side was a dark blue sky with the moon lighting up the clouds, and on the other a sea of orange.  It was beautiful.

I passed a huge mountain on one side and a gorge (the Little Colorado Gorge).  I snapped what pictures I could, but I had to keep an eye on the road, for what little traffic there was, and press towards my target (and I still had twenty-some miles to go).  I always passed a few road-side stands where the Natives would sell their craft items.  Obviously, there was no one there this early in the morning.  I had limited space in my luggage, so I couldn’t buy a lot of things.

Money really wasn’t an object this trip, and I know it’ll take me a year or two to pay this off completely.  I was determined to have fun!  The entrance fee to the Grand Canyon was $25 per car (for a seven-day period, mind you).  That’s a steal for a car-load of people, even if you’re just going for the day.  For me, it was going to be a dent in my budget.  Strange how things work out.

Getting up at 4 am paid off, as the checkpoint gate-house was closed, but the gate was open.  A sign posted said “This station is closed.  Drive on in, and enjoy your stay.”  Don’t worry, I will!  Early bird does get the worm!  Now I have no problem paying to support my national parks, but if I don’t have to spend money on something, I am there!  A short distance later, I came to my first stop, which I had been planning to be my main target.

The area was called Desert View, and it was the eastern-most look-out point of the park.  There’s a watchtower which was built in the 1930s, and overlooks the eastern edge of the Canyon.  The sun was just up by then, and it made shadows on the walls.  It was majestic.  One thing I had always wanted to do, and I drank it in.  The Watchtower, which I wanted to go inside and get to the top of, wouldn’t open for another two hours at 8 am, so I decided I would stop here again on the way out.  There was maybe a half-dozen people around, and that increased my enjoyment of the whole experience.  No crowd noise of the tourists, just “oohs” and “aahs” of people who appreciated the beauty of the wonder before them.

After soaking in the energy from here, and letting the pyramid draw in a bit, I headed westward, and pretty much stopped at each pull-off point I found.  They were sparsely populated as well, a few people here and there, and that was great.  One place I stopped off was called Moran Point.  The name was special to me because the real name of my character Super Tiger is Tom Moran.  (Super Tiger was the first character I created back in 1975.  He still gets written about now and then, and had a quite a bit written about him within the last year or two.  Just an FYI there.)  There was no one at this locale, so I took some time to mediate with the pyramid.  There was a lot of good energy I was able to get from the Canyon in general, but much more from that point in particular.

I pretty much decided this would be the point of the Grand Canyon in my book were Sid’s enforced vision-quest takes him.  I sort of rewrote that scene in my head.  It would be something like Sid comes out of the mists seeing a sign that says “Moran Point,” and wonders where the hell that is (note the sign is a little way from the look-out point, so I’ll fudge it to be a little shorter).  Sid sees the sign of the Spanish Exploration, and comments “Ok, I’m at the Grand Canyon.”  Passing beyond the sign, and through the small copse of trees, Sid comes to the look-out point.  But beyond the stone wall and metal-railing fence where Sid should be seeing the majority of the expanse of the Grand Canyon, all Sid can see is this natural wonder filled with bodies; the bodies of those who vanished on the day that was lost.

DAMN!  As I’m writing this journal, the muse slaps me in the head.  All this time the working titles for the book were “The Missing Day” or “Journey Through Emptiness,” but neither of them ever sat well with me.  I know have the title for my book:  “The Day That Was Lost.”

While that would reference the day the population vanished, it would also reference the climax.  When an army loses a battle, they usually comment that “the day was lost.”  That would fit to everything Greyfox had been putting Sid thru in The Great Game.  Thank you very much, my muse!

Now we return you to your regularly-scheduled journal entries.

After all the brief stops along the way, I came to Maher Point, where the Visitor’s Center was.  I hiked part of the Rim Trail there (down to past Yavapai Point, and back), and then drove into the Grand Canyon Village, parked at a place called Marketplace, and sometime after 8 am had my first food of the day (roast beef and cheddar cheese on wheat, with a V-8 Fusion).  Grand Canyon Village reminded me a lot of Lake George Village in certain aspects.  It was a small village where the locals lived year-round in order to care for the tourists when they were in town.  Pretty small village from the size of what I saw, although I didn’t go into the village proper.

I took more shots from the walls into the Canyon from the Village, but the energy wasn’t as good as it was earlier in the day.  There were a lot of buildings you could go into, but since it was a nice day out, I only really stuck my head into a few of them.  One was the Hopi house (an authentic building that was now a gift shop), and one lodge that looked like it was made from dark mahogany (complete with mounted moose and elk inside) as you went into the hotel it was.

I found what was known as the Shrine of the Ages, expecting it to be something interesting, but it was just a fancy name for their church.  Not even interesting architecture.  At Marketplace I ran into a British family that I had seen the day before at the Meteor Crater (recognized only by the Mickey Mouse the little girl was wearing).  Near the Shrine I saw a man wearing a shirt that said “Adirondack Park.”  When asked if he was from there, the man replied in a heavy foreign accent that he had purchased the shirt in San Francisco.  Of the people I heard speaking various things, I heard a lot of French, and a lot of British accents.  Overall the European tourists were friendly and cordial, as opposed to the horde of Californians who were very pushy and annoying.  Ok, I gathered these were Californians not just because of the license plates I saw, but the large amount of UCLA shirts.

I located the Bright Angel Trail that would take me down inside the Canyon.  To do the Trail fully, it would take a day.  I wasn’t that adventurous on my first visit.  I started down the trail, and eventually you pass thru an archway where on the other side you can see how the Trail snakes down with its twists and turns and switchbacks.  I took a shot of what was the half-mile mark, and would walk there, and then take shots looking back towards the archway.

The hike was pretty easy, and I could’ve gone further down, but I only had half-a-bottle of water with me (and no more in the car, hence another reason for not going to far).  The path gradually descended and was an easy hike, but I knew what it would be like trying to go back up if I didn’t have water and/or energy.  The path was literally carved out from the cliff.  At its widest point it was five feet, and no guards to keep you from going over.  I ventured a look, and while this section wasn’t straight down, you would bounce for a ways.  I put my foot right on the edge, kept my center of gravity back a bit, and took a picture of that section.

After my stint on Bright Angel Trail, I replenished some energy with a chocolate milkshake.  (Think for a minute about how much walking I’ve been doing, and how much energy I was taking in.  A calorie-laden milkshake was a good thing.)  I headed back to Marketplace to buy another bottle of water, as there were no places I found to fill the ones I had.  While the water was probably clean and safe-to-drink (this wasn’t a foreign country after all), I wasn’t going to fill the bottles up in the bathroom, and strangely there were no drinking fountains.  My plan was to go directly back to Desert View so I could get up in the Watchtower.  I heard sirens go by, and traffic ended up being blocked between Marketplace and Maher Point (the Visitor’s Center).  Some rangers let us know that someone had fallen over the edge.  I’m gathering it was probably near Yavapai Point as that’s where the emergency vehicles were, although I heard no other details.  Couldn’t even comment if it was completely an accident or natural selection at work.  I sat there for about ten minutes before they let us on thru.  All time I was waiting, I had the windows down because there was a nice breeze and no humidity.

After following a pokey-ass car who went 40 in a 55 zone, I made it back to Desert View.  It was now swarming with people, and I knew I had made the correct choice to get up at 4 am.  Going in the Watchtower was worth it, because of the Native-style drawings inside there.  I took a few shots of the landscape I had shot at dawn (trying to get similar shots to compare the two different hours I was there).  I tried to call Shawn & Veronica from here to tell them where I was, but the phone had no signal here.  Bummer.  By that time I had pretty much seen all there was.  The visit to the Grand Canyon was everything I had hoped it would be.

I have to add being able to see all the places and enjoy the view without the hordes of people around really made it special for me.  I had already gotten pretty much all the good things out of Desert View on my first visit, so the jabbering noise made by the other people when I was back there didn’t bother me one bit.  Views of nature are best enjoyed in silence.

As it was about 3 pm, and anything I wanted to see in Flagstaff closes at 5 pm, I considered heading towards the Dinosaur Tracks near Tuba City.  I quickly made some calculations on the map.  It was about 20-30 minutes from Desert View back to Cameron, and Tuba City was probably another 30-40 minutes north of that.  Add in the fact it’s an hour from Cameron to Flagstaff, and the lack of gas stations around, I decided I would do that another trip.  There was a gas station in Desert View I could fill up at and then shoot on to Tuba City, but then I would be pushing my luck.  I would let nothing keep me from continuing to have a damn good day.

The drive back to Flagstaff was nice, but where I had driven this road in the pre-dawn hours and couldn’t see much, I saw in the light of the afternoon there wasn’t much to see.  Just vast tracts of open country.  I got back to Flagstaff in time for the usual monsoon to hit.  It was a bit heavier, and there was a lot of flooding on the streets on the east side (the Route 66 area).  The water was brown and muddy, so it was coming from somewhere other than the sky.  I’m quite sure the ground was so soaked with water from the previous days, that this was all run-off.

After getting back to the hotel, the rain had let up and the sky was sunny.  I decided to go for a walk to build an appetite for dinner.  I wandered thru the campus of Northern Arizona University (which was near my hotel) with the idea I would locate the Riordan Mansion (which was near NAU).  I overshot my mark and came out way north of the Mansion, and by the time I got to it, it had closed.  It wasn’t high on my list of things, so no big.  Following a previous recommendation from my hotel front desk, I made my way to a restaurant called Buster’s.  It was a bit pricier than I had been lead to believe, so I just got an appetizer of chicken tenders and a bowl of chicken tortilla soup.  I polished it all off with a Banana Explosion, which was a dish of three scoops of vanilla ice cream, chopped up bananas and strawberries, in a caramel-rum sauce.  Mmm, very good.

On thing that struck me funny at Buster’s was the beer menu.  It’s pretty common to have a beer club to drink “X-many” number of beers, and thusly the beer list is broken up by type (ale, stout, lager, et al), and the country of origin was listed parenthetically after the name of the beer.  So it would read under (for example) “Lagers:  Molson (Canada), Red Stripe (Jamaica), Dos Equis (Mexico),” and so forth.  All the American beers were labeled “(USA)”, all except one.  Under the heading of “Bocks” was “Shiner Bock (Texas).”  That just struck me so funny, that I wanted to get a copy of that page.  My waiter offered to let me steal a menu (because they didn’t have a photocopier); he couldn’t explain why it was like that.  The hostess gave me a card with the beers listed on it, but it didn’t have the funny distinction for Shiner Bock there.

I shared my funny observation with Lee that night when I called to put her to bed.  She didn’t find it either funny or interesting.  “Yeah, of course, Shiner’s brewed in Texas.”  She missed the point because no other American beer listed what state it was from.  It didn’t say “Samuel Adams (Massachusetts),” but “Samuel Adams (USA).”  Places inside Texas you expect that because of the state pride that some times outweighs national pride, but not in a place like Arizona where Texas is generally no different than any other state.  When I looked at it with an objective eye, I found it to be funny.  Some times my humor just falls flat.

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