OK that’s not ALL we did in Phoenix.  Far from it.  No, really.

We’ve learned how much we appreciate variety while on the road.  A little bit of primitive “dry” camping, some cushy private RV “resorts,” a generous smattering of wooded state parks with a ton of space, the very occasional beach cottage…  We haven’t been traveling long enough this go-around to really need what we got in Phoenix, but it was most certainly appreciated.  In fact, I would classify the week as “epic.”

My best friend from college with whom I commiserated on day 1 of Naval ROTC training back in 1986 is now an Emergency Room physician in Phoenix.  He lives on what I can only call a “compound” (in the very best sense of the word) in the middle of a fairly dense but entirely pleasant residential area with his lovely wife and four kids, whose ages match my kids’ perfectly.  We don’t communicate nearly enough and see each other even less, so a visit to Phoenix was a must, and when he suggested that we take over a corner of his 1.5 acre lot cousin Eddie style, I jumped at the opportunity.  This visit would entail a work trip out of PHX, so it would be a relatively long stay.

Regarding the wine… I can’t really call him a wine enthusiast or aficionado, as neither of those words convey the level of commitment.  At the same time, “freak” goes too far.  Essentially he’s the best kind of wine geek – he’s been a well-educated fan since college and has aggressively collected and studied wine as a hobby since then, with his cellar size more or less tracking with his means.  For years it’s been so large that he needs to store it off-site.  But he’s not ostentatious or pretentious about it – he likes to drink it and enjoy it with friends, not display it and save it.  And yet he’s not really a “drinker,” so a very basic calculus problem will demonstrate the degree to which his cellar growth has vastly outpaced his rate of consumption.  At some point he played that math forward and realized he needed to slow down his rate of purchase and find more occasions to pull out the really good stuff.

This, lucky for us, was one of those occasions.

We drank well.  Oh man did we drink well.  But even more fortuitous was my being in town during one of his annual “wine dinners” with a few like-minded friends of his.  It’s a ridiculously exclusive thing where they pull out all the stops for a night, have a catered dinner, and taste 6-7 wines centered on a theme.  This year’s theme was Andy Beckstoffer grapes, which I knew nothing about previously but rapidly got up to speed on.  It was by no means a given that I would be able to attend this dinner, but he was able to grease the skids for my attendance.  I’m convinced this was a once in a lifetime kind of thing for me.

But I’ll stop there with the wine geekery and put the details in another post for the curious.

The overarching theme here is that the visit was a smashing success and fed the soul.  Our kids got along famously and will likely continue to keep in touch.  The weather was perfect.  The adults, with several nights lounging by the pool while the kids played, had enough time to catch up and reconnect in earnest.  So often time constraints rush that sort of get-together; not so this time.  Even with school, work, and the typical life stuff we all manage, we were able to cook together, eat together, watch our kids play together, and do just the right amount of reminiscing.

Every morning I would get up and wander over to their enormous grapefruit tree to pick a few for breakfast – incidentally that’s the best way to make your kids grapefruit fans.

Keeper and I pulled out our drones and took advantage of their enormous yard to practice flying them around and scaring their dog.  OK, that part wasn’t on purpose, but was an amusing discovery, after which we steered the drone clear of him.  He really didn’t like that thing.

One day gave us the opportunity to head north (and up) to Sedona.  On another we met up with some old Whidbey Island friends at the Musical Instrument Museum.

Sedona was stunning, but felt a little commercial to me.  Back in Washington there are a few mountain towns that took an emerging theme and decided to go whole hog with it as sort of a marketing ploy.  Successful marketing by the way — they’re fun towns and get a ton of visitors.  But still, there’s a veneer of inauthenticity to it that you have to either ignore or decide it’s part of the fun and roll with.  Sedona, to me at least, felt like “hey, come visit the New Age theme town!”  I don’t know how deliberate that was on the town’s part and it may be an unfair characterization, but that was my take.  The crowds and horrible traffic (on a Monday!) didn’t help.  And it certainly doesn’t need the marketing – the scenery is spectacular and stands on its own.  I’m told there is also a very real energetic feel to the place that undergirds its reputation.  Both Tacco and one of my friends’ kids mentioned sensing it.  I didn’t, but I did appreciate the red rocks and jaw-dropping vistas.

We took a short hike along a stream that runs through town and stacked rocks within an “energy vortex.”  Vortex?  Maybe not — it might have been an energy perturbation or a confluence.  The ranger at the park entrance even mentioned it when we paid our entrance fee.  But I forget how he billed it.  It looked cool though.

It would’ve been nice to take a dip or at least wade there, but the weather was actually quite chilly despite the sun.  It sits at about 4500’, so even in the summer it can be crisp.

 

We drove (crawled?) through town thereafter, on the way to Slide Rock State Park.  It’s billed as a refreshing antidote to the summer heat – which, as a mountain stream cascading over some slippery red rocks, it would be.  It’s less of an antidote to a bracing March afternoon, particularly when you arrive there after the sun dips behind the canyon walls.  The kiddos were nothing if not game, though, and Keeper made waves as it were by being the only one there to go full immersion in the chilly water.  That’s my Pacific Northwest boy!

He tried to do some sliding in order to get others to join him, but the rocks turned out to be not especially slippery.  I guess Sit On Your Butt And Push Yourself Over The Rock State Park is a less catchy name.

On the way back down the hill we split off from the others and enjoyed an excellent dinner with Tacco’s aunt and uncle, whom she hadn’t seen in years and was looking forward to catching up with.  Loving these Target Of Opportunity visits — huge benefit to this lifestyle.

Easter Sunday was another highlight.  A sizable chunk of their extended family calls Phoenix home, and Easter is a traditional get-together time for them, so we were able to take part in a perfectly chaotic Easter Egg hunt for the kids as well as a sunny, lounge-y, nibble all afternoon sort of day.

We had planned to depart on Monday after Easter, but we all agreed that one more day just hanging out with nothing at all to do (they weren’t working and their kids started Spring Break) would be a far better use of our time than trekking east to City of Rocks State Park in New Mexico.  So we stayed another day and chopped City of Rocks off the list, rationalizing that if we did a dawn patrol departure on Tuesday we could easily make it to Carlsbad Caverns.  So glad we made that call.  More swimming, more running around the yard (the kids, mostly), some insanely good pizza, and yes, some more wine.  Perfect.

We said our goodbyes in the evening and pre-positioned Davista+Toad for our planned 4:30AM departure.  My intent was to get up, make a cup of coffee and shower to wake up, open their gate, and roll with everyone still asleep.  Prior to the goodbyes, though, I decided it would be a good idea to fly the drone one more time.  Why on Earth would you do that, you ask?  Exactly.  It seemed really smart at the time though, and yes, there was wine involved.  I flew it straight up to clear all the palm trees and also to show off a little bit, and it almost immediately caught some upper level winds and took off to the north.  Not being GPS stabilized like the more expensive drones, it’s both very susceptible to such things and tricky to orient so as to get it flying back toward you.  More so once it starts tearing away and the tiny lights are all you can see of it.  Had I been able to orient it perfectly back toward us and get it back down out of the higher winds I might have had the chance to show them what an amazing pilot I am.  “I’m going to be impressed if you’re able to recover that” was the last thing I heard (along with the beeping of my controller, informing me that its commands were no longer reaching the drone) before I watched it disappear behind some distant trees.  I felt like I was in high school again as he and I tooled around the neighborhood in the dark, scanning the trees and walking quietly up to people’s backyard walls and peering over them, hoping to catch sight of my wayward drone and wondering what I’d say if the lights in the house suddenly came on and the resident asked what an almost-50-year-old man with a baseball cap on was doing climbing their wall.  It was fun.  Didn’t find the drone though.

[P.S. She found it the day after we left and shipped it to one of our future stops.  Awesome.  Evidently it went far further than he and I had been looking!]

Overall we hated to leave, but appreciated having such an opportunity.  The kids made new friends and got some solid play-with-kids-our-age time and we got to have the kind of week with friends that you really only get a few times per lifetime I think.  It strikes me in retrospect that that’s a large part of why we wanted to do this trip in the first place.

One prediction I nailed at the end of Phase One was how Joshua Tree would age in the kids’ memories.  While back in Maryland, we were often asked by friends what our favorite stops over the past several months had been, and the kids generally answered “Joshua Tree and Zion,” sometimes leaving out the “Zion” part.  There may be some recency effect involved in that answer, as we could generally elicit other favorites by reminding them of the eclipse, the beach, the mountains, the river float, etc. but regardless I don’t disagree with them.

Hence our decision to commence our traveling lifestyle re-engagement with a day spent scrambling on Joshua Tree’s rocks.  I realized this go-around how fortunate we had been previously to snag a reservation at the campsite with so little lead time – all I could manage this time was one night.  But it turned out to be enough, as Tacco had to leave at dawn (or so she thought, but that’s another story) to catch a conference in Phoenix, and without our Toad, we had a much smaller exploring radius.

Backing up slightly… I had been skittish about everything involved with the sudden transition back to travel.  We hadn’t given it nearly as much thought this time, and were slightly hobbled in our planning capability by not having Davista sitting in our driveway for a few days while we loaded her up and fine-tuned our itinerary.  Plus our mental space was entirely booked out by home sale preparation.  Among the things I had forgotten was the fact that I had left all my clothing drawers in Davista completely full upon our departure in December, and would not have had to add a thing to them in order to successfully re-launch.  So the full suitcase I brought, not to mention the extra clothes I had stuffed into a few of the six extra boxes of “stuff” we sent to our friends in Long Beach, qualified as pure bloat.  Fortunately we have room for it all and it’s not heavy, but the inefficiency bugs me.

More significant, however, was my skittishness about basically everything else – the condition of the car and motorhome, my presumably long lost big-rig driving skills, and most of all, the ability of the family to so abruptly re-adapt to our tiny new home and life on the road.

It wasn’t necessary.

Davista looked like new, and fired right up once I re-connected her battery, as did Toad.  Supplemental systems all fully operational as well.  And remembering how everything worked and fit together took me no more than the half-day in Seal Beach we had set aside for that purpose.  The forecast LA deluge never really materialized, the kids set up their spaces quickly and excitedly, we had dinner with our friends in Long Beach, and by the following morning we were back into the groove and Joshua Tree bound.

The kids bolted straight for the rocks upon our arrival.

OK, me too.

Tacco joined us for part of a family climb, but her vertigo issues caused her initially to stay lower on the rock and then to return to base and watch from afar.  The kiddos, however, and Firebolt in particular, attacked the climbing with a confidence I hadn’t seen before, which warmed my heart.

Later in the day I was able to take Keeper with me for a more sporty climb that involved a few “I’m not sure I can manage that, Dad”s, all of which he deftly conquered immediately thereafter.

It was a very, very good day.

Interestingly, Tacco had another unsettled night and attributed it to the Joshua Tree vibe once again.  I’ll be interested to see how she fleshes that out in writing.  I had no such disturbance and awoke happily to the cool desert air and blanket of quiet.

Some more rock scrambling gave way to a nature trail hike prior to our noon departure, and we were out of the campsite and on our way to Phoenix by noon.

I opted to take the extra half hour to make the drive through the park rather than around it, with the intention to stop at Joshua Tree’s Cholla Garden for lunch.  Cholla, a variety of cactus, are more commonly known as “Jumping Cholla” due to their tendency to attach themselves both readily and doggedly to anything that happens to brush against them.  They don’t actually jump of course, but they do have tiny barbs at the end of their spines which make them tenacious hangers-on, as well as lots of pieces that tend to dry up and break off of the main cactus body.

Keeper had been more or less pooh-poohing the Cholla lore, or maybe more accurately, tempting fate by brushing against them lightly or even picking up a few of the fallen pieces when we came across a plant or two.  A bad dad idea intersected with his luck running out on that front when we stopped for lunch and I tried to set up an album cover-ish photo among the cacti.

The photo’s reasonably cool even if I didn’t quite get the “our album’s about to drop” thing nailed, but Keeper’s reaction when we stepped on some wayward cholla chunks was less so (rightfully).  What dad plops his kids into the middle of a field of Jumping Cholla in the name of a picture?  This one does, I guess.

Fortunately we were able to escape this situation relatively unscathed, with only Keeper cactus-pricked and only one spine needing to be removed from actual skin.  His shoes took me quite a bit longer to de-spine, but within a half hour or so we were intact, fed, and on our way to Phoenix, where the plan is to take over a portion of my closest college friend’s driveway and lawn for the upcoming Easter week.  Not only do they have four kids whose ages approximate my kids’, but we have seen each other for years.

This is a great start!

Actually there isn’t.  There is no trouble with the trees.  Sequoia National Park suffers from zero maple v. oak issues — the sequoias dominate, unopposed.  The unrest is probably limited to Canadian forests.

While you recover from that severely nerdy / cringey reference, let me describe the drive to Three Rivers, just outside of the park, where we spent the next few days.  As it happens, I was correct to be concerned about the grade in our escape from Death Valley.  Here’s the picture of our route.

It turns out Death Valley really is a valley; quite a deep one in fact.  The section in purple is a long, steep upslope.  It takes you from -200’ to just about 5000’ in about 20 miles.  That was tough, but manageable at 20-30 mph or so and in low gear.  The section in yellow is a very steep downslope.  In about 12 miles you lose a good bit of that elevation again, at a 9% grade.  For some perspective, 6% is the highest grade allowed on interstate highways.  So if you think about infamous stretches of highway with runaway truck ramps and the smell of angry brakes, you’re likely thinking of 6%.  There are small sections of steeper grades on tiny roads in hilly urban or mountainous areas, but this was my first brush with 12 miles straight of 9%.  It was not enjoyable.  Not at all.  You want to stay in the lowest gear you can manage in order to let your engine tackle as much of the slowing down as possible, but with this kind of slope I had no choice but to get on the brakes repeatedly.  Once brakes heat up enough they start to “fade,” i.e. lose effectiveness, until they have no ability to do their job at all.  I don’t know at what temperature this happens, but I was in no mood to perform experiments.  I did learn that Davista will in fact upshift automatically when the RPMs get so high that engine/transmission damage becomes a possibility.  This happens at about 5500 RPM (= a screaming engine), and causes a very abrupt and uncomfortable speed increase.  Sweating profusely about halfway down the hill, the brakes smell hit us strongly.  A few seconds of wondering what it would feel like to push the pedal and NOT SLOW DOWN convinced me to urgently seek and subsequently spot a turnoff on the opposite side of the road, into which I guided us to let the brakes cool.  In an A320 we have brake fans and a brake temperature gauge to help with such things – not so in Davista.  We sat there on the side of the desert road, me with my fancy IR thermometer taking shockingly high temperature readings I wasn’t sure I understood, for a good half hour before I was satisfied that they had cooled enough to take us the last 5 miles or so.  Luckily by that point it was more or less a straight shot – if nothing else I could scream into the valley at 100 mph and let the next uphill section dissipate our energy.  (Not really… I think Davista would shake and shudder herself into oblivion at about 85)

Disaster averted and lesson learned, we pressed on through the desert past some really rough little near-ghost-towns and then over the Tehachapi Pass into California’s fertile Central Valley again.  Though we stopped in Bakersfield for the night, it was a short and non-noteworthy, so I’m considering this just a two day drive to Sequoia.

Sequoia is the southernmost of California’s three national parks in the Sierras, and shares a border (and a Junior Ranger badge) with Kings Canyon national park.  It is, of course, most famous for its trees, but it also contains some of California’s most remote wilderness and extreme terrain, to include Mt. Whitney, the continental US’s highest point.  We stayed at a relatively low elevation just outside the park, along a stream feeding the Kaweah River.  Great call, as not only was it one of the best private campgrounds we’ve visited, but here’s the road up into Sequoia.

Davista would not have liked that at all.  Even our Subaru didn’t like it.  Our campsite, however, was right on the stream and hammock friendly, as well as spacious and populated with enough kids to allow our own to throw together a nerf gun battle or two.

Our original plan was to drive up to Sequoia and do a bit of hiking the first day and then do a second drive on day two past the sequoia groves and into Kings Canyon.  Nixing that plan became very easy after that first day of driving.  Though technically not very far, driving through Sequoia into Kings Canyon would have entailed a solid 4 hours on the road, through torturous (because they’re so tortuous!) (yes, I just learned the difference) switchbacks.  Nah.  Fortunately the girls were able to bag their Junior Ranger badge for both parks while only visiting one.

The hike through the sequoias was predictably spectacular.  Though not quite as tall as the giant redwoods, sequoias are more girthy and therefore massive.

We’ve found that as a family we have some of our best conversations while hiking; this time some of our more interesting conversational meanderings took us to the things that were happening in the world when these trees were young.  One feature I found especially interesting about sequoias is the degree to which they’re scarred.  Every one of the older trees sports heavily blackened areas, from forest fires and/or lightning strikes.  Evidently they are able to survive forest fires quite well, and when you’re around a few thousand years, you’re going to see a few of those.

That idea of extreme longevity spurred me to take Keeper with me on a conversational tangent about this interesting podcast I heard in which they were discussing how, if all diseases were curable and aging effects were stoppable, we would essentially all die of accidents, and what the graph of age vs number of people alive would look like.  He may have found it less interesting than I.  He stuck with me though.

The reverent vibe that we had previously sensed in among the redwoods was definitely present here among the sequoias as well, though there are significant differences between the biomes – redwoods are low in elevation, sequoias are high, and redwood forests felt more lush and dense, whereas the sequoias seem to be more or less the only vegetation within their groves.

It proved an ideal place to sit and answer Junior Ranger questions.

We rounded the General Sherman tree at the last bit of our hike; it’s the largest (by volume) living single stem tree on Earth, and looks it.

Tree hike complete, we braved the curvy road again, but opted to stop at Moro Rock just before sunset.  Moro Rock sits like a sentinel at the top of the Kaweah River canyon and commands stunning 360 degree views.  Great place for a sunset.  Unfortunately that translates to crowds, which don’t mix well with precarious trails that cling to steep rocks.  On top of that, these crowds were speaking very little English and seemed to have different ideas than we did about what constitutes personal space, making the whole endeavor a little dicey.

Keeper was not amused – first Angel’s Landing and then this?  “You do know I’m not kidding about the acrophobia thing right??” Sorry man…

The views though!

Having decided not to make the drive up the mountain again the following day, we spent it relaxing in the campground, followed by a short drive down to Slick Rock Recreation Area, at the eastern/upstream side of Lake Kaweah, where the river empties into the reservoir over a series of smooth rocks.  With the lake level quite low, there were quite a few rocks on which to play, though visiting just before Thanksgiving was a mixed blessing – no crowds, but no crowds because the air and that water is cold!  Fortunately our kids, especially Keeper, don’t mind cold water.  Check him out being the great big brother and carrying his sisters out to the middle of the river…

Later he opted for some full immersion swimming on the condition that I videoed him doing so.  “Pics or it didn’t happen” indeed.

One of the more interesting occurrences on that day was meeting, for the first time this trip, another family doing more or less the same thing as we were.  (!!)  Leave it to Firebolt to make the introduction.  She still sees herself as “shy,” but will find and introduce herself to just about any kid her age and will be playing as if they’ve been friends for years within 15 minutes.  I don’t think she realizes what “shy” means.

The family hailed from North Carolina, and had settled for the winter right there at Slick Rock Recreation Area as “camp hosts.”  This is an amazingly good deal which I wish we had previously researched and considered.  Essentially you stay for free at the nicest spot in the camp (and may even get a small stipend?) in exchange for minimal duties.  For them it was collecting the fee envelopes from the box each day and ensuring things were reasonably clean and that people weren’t doing prohibited things.  Not taxing during the very slow winter season.  What was interesting about this particular gig was that Slick Rock wasn’t even a campground… in fact theirs was the only site, and was well-appointed.  So essentially they had the entire park to themselves, and they told us about how they had dialed themselves in with the Three Rivers community, and had been brought into the town’s fold immediately.

While this was no longer any sort of option for us, I did note it for future reference, and scold myself slightly for not researching such options prior to our trip.  They seemed to be a fun family; I wish we could’ve hung around a bit more, but alas, the sun was setting and we were leaving the following morning, so we said our goodbyes.  The following day would bring a drive up to Grass Valley in the northern Sierra foothills to park in my sister’s in-laws’ driveway in preparation for a full on extended family Thanksgiving, which was something we had been able to do last year (minus the motorhome) and were greatly looking forward to.

We set our park-Davista-and-return-to-Maryland day as December 7^th (a day that will live in infamy).  We’ve got strongly mixed feelings about bringing this period of travel to a close.  The sense of not wanting to stop is deepening.  We still don’t have a destination, but the itinerant lifestyle, or at least this version of it, has become very easy and almost natural.  Breaking that rhythm doesn’t feel like the right thing to do, yet we haven’t come up with a viable alternative.

In the meantime some Big Family time will do us good.

This makes no sense, but turning around and backtracking to the west along the same road we had traveled a few days prior rubbed me wrong.  It felt vaguely counter-productive, as if we’d already gained that ground and were giving it back up, even though we were headed to new destinations.  Like I said, no sense.

Possibly though, it’s related to this tiny, deep-seated sense of relief I experience each time we complete a leg of our journey, with nothing having broken down or disabling us in some way.  I used to get the same feeling back when we had a boat in the San Juan Islands – I loved going out, but every time we pulled back into the dock having cheated maritime disaster once again (never a given; we got into some pretty sketchy situations in that boat), I would feel this tension release.

So here we were driving back through the Virgin River Gorge and around Vegas toward California, not sure of what to expect in Death Valley.

As we turned northwest out of Las Vegas and left civilization behind, I was struck once again how massive and remote Nevada is.  We only saw a small corner of it, but the entire state is mini mountain range after mini mountain range, wide valley after wide valley, rocky, dry, and empty, forever.  And by “mini” I don’t mean that they are small mountains.  They’re huge.  But the ranges themselves only stretch for 50-100 miles, and there are so many of them that you wouldn’t even know their names unless you lived in Nevada.  Maybe even then you wouldn’t.

There’s truly a “you could find anything out here” feel to the area, which helps to explain Burning Man, Area 51, legalized gambling and prostitution, and the little town we drove into just prior to turning west back into California.  There were only a few scattered semi-decrepit buildings, but evidently one of them was a brothel run by Mr. Dennis Hof, of HBO/Cathouse infamy. How did we know?  Well, the town, if you could even call it that, is full of billboards with his enormous face on them.  I’m not a fan of the man and can’t fathom how he managed to build his fortune on brothels situated literally in the middle of nowhere, but he’s nothing if not an expert self-promoter.  I wish I had a picture to share.

The weather, as it has for most of our journey, cooperated.  Winter is of course high season in Death Valley, and the forecast called for low 80s and sunny, but with a good bit of wind.

I’ve previously mentioned Davista’s, and therefore my, severe sensitivity to grades.  Highway grades I mean.  Slope.  I nixed an entire leg of the journey due to not wanting to crest a few 8000’ passes (ok, and also because of the snow), and here we were about to descend steeply into a valley, the bottom of which sits at -282’.  It’s also bordered by a range of snow-capped mountains to the west, which would be the direction of our egress in a day or two.  Point being, as the engine shifted into low gear and began to whine once again as it tried to prevent us from reaching warp speed, I gritted my teeth a bit and hoped she was up to the task.

Semi-interesting side note here:  Many people know that Death Valley has the lowest elevation in the US.  What fewer people seem to know is that Mt. Whitney, the highest elevation in the Continental US (get outta here Alaska!), is only 85 miles away as the crow flies.  In fact, the two points are in the same county.  What’s more, there’s an endurance footrace called the Badwater Ultramarathon that starts at the bottom of Death Valley and ends at the Mt. Whitney trailhead.  California’s got a lot going on.

The scenery was interesting in an extreme desert sort of way.  Though Tacco and I were fascinated, we’ve long since given up on demanding that the kids put down their screens / books and look out the window though, at least for any extended period of time, by which I mean more than it takes for Firebolt to say “cooooooolllll.”  We figure that if Yellowstone, the Tetons, and the rugged Pacific coast failed to provide enough visual stimulation to hold their attention, then nothing will.  At least they’re not fighting with each other.

We arrived at our campground without incident, but discovered fairly quickly that “play it by ear” wasn’t going to be a viable tactic here.  The official National Park campground was ok, if a bit shrubby and windswept, but the other options (if you recall, we were only able to get reservations here for one night but planned to stay two) were full-on Lunar Base Delta.  Zero vegetation, zero hookups, not even close to level, and, well… ugly.  There’s a time to be hard core; this was not it.

So The Plan morphed, as it’s wont to do.  One night in Death Valley.  We’d check out the Ranger Center in the evening, drive around to see a few sights in the morning, and then continue west.

The wind really kicked up as we walked over to the Ranger Center to see whether it would be feasible for the girls to bag another Junior Ranger badge (it was).  One of the surprising things we learned about Death Valley from the exhibits was the fact that there’s a Native American tribe that has made their home at the bottom of the valley for, well pretty much forever.  So many questions about that…

I also discovered to my consternation that the path out of the valley to the west wasn’t nearly as forgiving as it had looked on the map.  Though it avoided the 7000’+ pass through the highest mountain range, it didn’t avoid passes altogether, and in fact would take us up about 5000’ and down pretty quickly.  I filed that away for later.

It wasn’t our best night.  We slept ok all things considered, but on top of the incessant wind making noise and shaking our home, there was not only a loudly partying group nearby (who I noticed were being evicted by the NP staff the following morning) and a dog next door that decided it was important everyone knew he existed most of the night.  It’s safe to say that none of us was complaining about breaking camp and moving out in the morning.

We did decide to go check out Devil’s Golf Course, which sums up Death Valley nicely.  It’s otherworldly and worth checking out, but after a few pictures and comments about how alone we were out there, it was time to move on.

We took one more side jaunt through an area called Artist’s Palette, and then departed.

It wouldn’t be fair to call our Death Valley detour a swing and a miss, as it’s undoubtedly extraordinary, and something to check off The List.  But one night was plenty.  Back to the mountains!

How is it that my image of Zion before we went was so far from reality?  I really have no excuse – I’ve been there.  It was long ago, and I don’t think I even spent the night, but still… my general thoughts about it went something like this:

• It’s one of the many National Parks in that area of the country and similar to them
• There’s a canyon, but it’s not as striking as Bryce Canyon or as massive as the Grand Canyon
• It’s isolated, so sparsely visited and primitive
• It’s worth a day’s visit, maybe an overnight, but that’s about it

Though the broad lines of those statements have a kernel of truth in them, not a single one of them is correct.

Zion is mind-blowing; I could spend months there.  Though it is indeed somewhat isolated in an area of Utah known more for renegade polygamists than any of the actual nearby towns, it’s actually the fifth most visited National Park, ahead of even Yellowstone [late edit:  The 2017 numbers are in, and it was actually third, ahead of both Yosemite and Rocky Mountain].  And the town of Springdale, which abuts the southern (and main) park entrance, is nicer than any “gateway to xx park!” town I’ve seen, with good eats, cool shops, almost zero touristy chintz, and stunning 360 degree view houses perched on various rock outcroppings.  I know when I glance to my right while driving and see Tacco browsing the local Zillow listings that we’re equally impressed with the real estate.

To say “there’s a canyon” is akin to visiting the Norwegian fjords and saying “there are cliffs.”  Technically true, but wholly inadequate.  It’s also technically true that it’s much smaller than the Grand Canyon, but in seeing it you realize how beside the point a size comparison is.  I spent three days overwhelmed.

And no, it’s not really similar to any of the other National Parks in that area.  It’s more like a “greatest hits” compilation of all of them.  It’s now unfathomable that I was waffling on whether to bring the family to Zion.

Our drive took us northeast out of Las Vegas, through mostly uninspiring desert scenery until we reached the Virgin River Gorge in the far northwest corner of Arizona.  Crossing into Utah on the upper end of the Gorge, the rocks became redder and the plateaus and peaks more dramatic.  Turning off the interstate near St. George, we rejoined the Virgin River (the north fork of which is responsible for carving Zion Canyon) and followed it through the eye-popping vistas into the park.

Fall is a slow time in Zion, but it really shouldn’t be.  The weather was mild, it was uncrowded, and though the Fall colors had long since peaked, plenty of color remained.

A few deer greeted us as we pulled into our campsite, and Keeper was thrilled to find that we had not only full hookups, but as solid a cellphone / internet signal as we had seen anywhere thus far.  As it was a bit too late for any serious hiking, we did some low grade exploring of the area, had some dinner, and turned in fairly early after planning our upcoming few days.

Much like Yosemite, the main attraction in Zion is the canyon through the center of the park, but the expansive backcountry is riddled with rewards for the more adventurous.  Unfortunately we were limited on several axes in our ability to be adventurous this visit (time, kids’ abilities, accommodations, conveyance, etc.).  But also like Yosemite, the hikes within the valley/canyon are famous for good reason.  The two most well-known in Zion are Angel’s Landing and The Narrows.  The former is a switchback intensive climb 1500′ up the canyon wall through widely varying mini-biomes, culminating in a knife edge clifftop walk to what seems like an unreachable point of rock when you see it from a distance.  The last bit of trail drops off very steeply on both sides and is only as wide as two people or so in places. There are metal posts driven into the rock with chains hung between them that give you something to hold onto.  Everywhere we read about it advised “CHILDREN NOT RECOMMENDED.”  As it turns out we have three of those.  That could be problematic.

The Narrows is sort of the opposite of Angel’s Landing, and is essentially a mostly flat hike up the river.  The catch, though, is that the canyon becomes narrower and narrower, until the only way to keep hiking is IN the river.  It continues this way (and becomes even narrower!  Wait, I think I just realized how they came up with the name…) for more than 10 miles, and the standard way to do it is with semi-dry suits that look something like fishing waders and a long wooden walking pole for balance in the water.  Needless to say, this is not something you would attempt with rain either in the sky or in the forecast, nor is it something you should put your six-year-old through.  Which isn’t to say we didn’t make our best effort to do so; unfortunately you could fit two Woodsprites simultaneously into the smallest sized dry suits they had available for rent.

Nevertheless undaunted, and invigorated by the scenery, we decided we would try semi-abbreviated versions of both hikes, reasoning that we could get up to the point on Angel’s Landing at which the chains/knife edge started and stop there if it didn’t look reasonable, and that we could hike the Narrows just up to the point where you had to get your feet wet, and then maybe wade a bit further if we were feeling it.  We also decided to do another hike on a side canyon which was short but led to more stunning views.  It was a good compromise, we thought.  Have I mentioned Keeper is acrophobic though?  Yes, spiders and heights, and in the last week we had climbed more steep rocks and seen more tarantulas than in his previous 11 years combined.  Nothing wrong with terrifying your kids, right?

The girls were excited to tear through their Junior Ranger challenges once we woke up the following morning, and we took a walk up the river to the Ranger Station to get that process rolling.  More deer, more scenery, more fresh air.

As our visit fell on all weekdays, we did have homeschooling tasks to accomplish prior to “playing.”  That’s tough.  Especially in a place like this.  While I know that we are not on vacation and that we can’t just run around on a rock or in a river and call it “school,” sometimes I really, really want to.  Fortunately Tacco keeps me honest.

Angel’s Landing was, in a word, amazing.  Yet again, I’ll defer to the pictures.

Even the lower part of the hike was better than most any hike I’ve taken, anywhere.  But the top was simply beyond description.  There was enough flat area for everybody to safely loll around and take in the view, but Keeper opted to lay down to get his fear of heights in check.  A sign warning of the entirely obvious danger informed us that six hikers had lost their lives due to falls over the last few years, and though this was clearly meant to alarm us, all Tacco and I could think was “that’s all?!?”  I was speculating that more than that had died from bee sting allergies or having a tree branch fall on their head – this place looked like people would be sliding off of it daily at a minimum.

I so wanted to keep going.  Tacco, rightly concerned about her issues with vertigo, did not, but I sat and contorted my brain into about a dozen different rationalizations for taking one or more kids up to the top with me, all of which failed even the most basic risk vs. reward analyses.  So in the end I took Firebolt and Woodsprite, separately, up to the part where the chains begin.  It was cool.  We got some pics.  Next time we’ll conquer it.

And I have to give a special shout-out to Firebolt here, because she continues to surprise us.  As a self-proclaimed non-risk-taker, she was the first to join me at the chains, and would’ve definitely gone to the top with me had I not reluctantly eliminated that option.  She even laid down on the rock and put her head over the edge of the 1300’ cliff, and then asked me to take a video of her looking down, then looking at me with an “are you kidding me right now?” face.  It seems like everything she tells us she can’t do, she then tries, and excels at it.

Later in the day we did the short Canyon Overlook Hike, which turned out to be almost as vertigo-inducing as Angel’s Landing.  Keeper was not amused, particularly at this section of rickety wooden pathway bolted into the rock.  He might think we’re trying to kill him.

Again though, views forever.

Our last day started with somewhat more threatening weather, which did not bode well for a hike up The Narrows.  Fortunately though, the ominous clouds below dissipated before homeschooling was complete for the day, and we were able to enjoy a pre-hike riverside picnic lunch in sunshine, if not exactly warm temperatures (it was November after all).

The trail up the river to The Narrows’ beginning delivered yet another palette of Utah river/rock/trees for us to gawk at, as well as several rocks to scramble upon.  This has become a favorite activity of the kids’ since Joshua Tree.

Though we easily reached the point at which wet feet (or a dry suit) became mandatory for those continuing, we opted to stop there rather than risk ruining the rest of the day by having one of the kids misstep and convert wet feet into wet everything.  Did I mention it was a little chilly?  Both the water and the air.

As it turned out, however, Keeper managed to check that particular block anyway on the way back.  Shortly after turning around to hike back downstream, he ventured off-trail to scramble on some rocks down by the river.  What 11-year-old wouldn’t, right?  I know I would’ve.  I could see that he was getting himself into increasingly tricky situations with smaller margins for error.  Mentally noting that the current wasn’t particularly strong and there were several potential egress points, however, I didn’t bother to keep too close an eye on him.  I did manage to snag a suitable “before” pic though.

Within a few minutes, I noticed several other hikers staring and pointing toward his vicinity.  Quickly climbing up to get a better vantage point, I caught the tail end of his jump-gone-wrong, which was him completely submerged in the cold river and swimming toward a calm spot from which he could climb out.  When a quick “are you ok?” netted a thumbs up, I smiled and watched for a few seconds before scrambling down to take pictures help my son.

Evidently what happened, a common river-rock-jumping failure mode, is that he jumped from a higher rock to a lower rock without fully strategizing how to get back to the higher rock.  His attempted jump back up plastered him on the rock’s steep side without enough purchase, and he had a solid few seconds of slow backwards sliding to think about the water temperature and the fact that he’d found his not-previously-considered path of least resistance back to dry ground.

Not that he was especially hurt other than a few rock scrapes, but Keeper’s a tough kid, which is one of the many, many things I love about him.  He doesn’t make a big deal out of things that aren’t.  And if you see him wincing in pain or God-forbid, crying, you know he has some serious hurt going on and isn’t just embarrassed or wanting some attention.  He took the whole thing in stride, even laughing about it and posing for some “after” pics.

The hike back in his soaked clothing got a little bracing when the wind kicked up or we got in the shadows, but he never complained.  Good man.

So what are we taking away from Zion?  Primarily a desire to come back.  There’s so much to see there, particularly in the back country.  More confirmation that that high desert/mountain climate very much suits us.  And a deepening sense of not wanting this phase of travel to end I think.

One thing I touched on tangentially with my comment about needing to push myself (or be pushed) to get the kids to actually sit down and do their school tasks — the larger point there is this sense we’re discovering that every day is a Big Day.  There are no throwaway days, they’re all huge ones, ones that we want to wring every last moment out of.  And while that sounds in many ways ideal and exhilarating, which it absolutely is, we’re finding it to be a double-edged sword in that it’s a difficult pace to maintain.  We find ourselves far more physically and mentally exhausted than we feel like we ought to be at times, with decreased desire to take care of the mundane life tasks (education being only one of them) that need to get accomplished, and this seems to be one of the root causes.  It’s tempting to blow off math and writing and reading entirely, because holy cow, kids, look around!  Zion!  But when you’re doing that every day, hmm…  While we know our kids are logging countless amazing experiences as we wander, we don’t want to do them a disservice by neglecting the things their peers are learning.  And they need us to maintain high energy as well.

I suspect it’s something we could and likely will adapt to with more time, but in the meantime it’s a bit of a surprise.  And I do wonder how the process will work in reverse when we settle back down.

Zion, though… incredible.  Definitely in at least the top five of my favorite national parks, probably more like top three.  Even without the benefit of distance, the kids are all saying the same.

We now turn back west and head toward Death Valley, which I’m not so sure about (then again, I wasn’t so sure about Zion either).  Like Zion, I’ve been there before and my recollections tell me that it’s unique and worth seeing, but maybe not mind-blowing.  We also couldn’t get a reservation at the National Park’s RV campground there for both nights we’re staying, so we’re playing it a bit by ear.  Maybe not the best thing to be doing in, you know, Death Valley.

But nah, we’ve got this.  Where have I heard that before?