Sunday, June 27, 2010

Early Sunday morning we drove north from the Kaibab Plateau to Page, AZ, arriving about 9:30.  I'd read an effusive description of the Hanging Gardens Trail: 'a half mile walk to a desert oasis on a mesa high above the Colorado River.'  The writer took a large dose of poetic license with that sentence!  It should have stated 'This is a half mile slog across hot sandstone in the blazing sun to a bunch of weeds and shrubs growing in an alcove.'    

Our search for a cool, shady spot to eat our picnic ended at the Glen Canyon Dam visitor center.  It has two items scarce in Page--a pair of large, old shade trees and a lovely lawn.  After lunch we located the headquarters of the rafting company which was to take us for a 15 mile trip down the Colorado River, slathered ourselves with sun block, grabbed the essentials for the excursion--hats and cameras--and prepared to embark. 

Good thing I didn't know in advance about the dark, two mile-long tunnel we had to go through on the bus to the loading site or the shoe-snagging gangway to the dock or the hanging stairs to the raft. Getting there and on-board was the scariest part of the whole experience! The raft had an outboard motor but the guide only used it in a few places to avoid riffles (little rapids) or move through cross-currents. Floating 15 miles of smooth water took about three hours including a pit stop (literally--the 'facilities' were pit toilets). The braver rafters ventured into the 47* water but none of them stayed very long. I waded in halfway to my knees--that cooled me down real quickly. Fred and I went with the guide and a few others to a petroglyph wall. Most people declined because of the heat and lack of shade but it was well worth some discomfort. The guide's 'interpretation' of the symbols was suspect and the dates he gave were way off but we were happy to see them.

We landed at Lee's Ferry, AKA Hell on Earth, about 4:30 and had a short wait for the bus--the wonderful air-conditioned bus--to take us back to Page. Echo Cliffs, running along Route 89 from Bitter Springs almost to Page, offers some of the most magnificent scenery on the planet. Although we'd been on that same road earlier in the day, I couldn't appreciate it fully because I was driving. The colors of the rocks and the desert were deeper and more intense at 5 PM than they'd been in the bright light of morning.


By the time we checked into the motel (a very nice one this time!), we were hot, tired, dirty and hungry. We were cleaner and cooler after showers but too tired to put much effort into handling the hungry part. The easiest option was eating at the motel's restaurant, serving 'Navajo cuisine.' An oxymoron, for sure. My navajo taco tasted fine but contained plentiful acid-reflux ingedients and Fred's 'country-fried steak' somehow morphed into fried chicken.

Last night's dinner made us leery of the complimentary breakfast buffet but it was very nice--pancakes, eggs, sausage gravy, fruit, muffins, yogurt, juice. Fueled up for the morning, we headed out to 'the rez.' (Page was carved from, and is surrounded by, a 27,000 square mile Navajo Reservation.) We obtained the permits required to hike Water Holes slot canyon at the tribal chapter office. This canyon isn't heavily visited so there are no established entry/exit points. Fortunately, previous hikers had erected rock cairns to indicate the route over bare rock and we descended at a relatively easy angle.

I was hesitant about going into a slot canyon because of tales about hikers trapped in narrow places, unable to scale steep walls or surprised by flash floods.  The heat in the canyon was nearly suffocating and its configuration offered only small, scattered spots of shades.  Nevertheless, we threaded our way east until confronted by a 10' high vertical wall with nothing more than a small opening visible beyond the wall--it looked too iffy to continue.

Although the formations aren't as spectacular as Antelope Canyon and the colors aren't as vivid as The Wave, the opportunity to explore a place that hasn't been extensively written about or photographed and wasn't filled with others made the exploration and our discoveries a very special experience.

(The most unexpected and unusual discovery was a ram's skull propped on a rock ledge at chest height.  Who? When? How? Why?!!)

Hot, dirty, tired and hungry yet again, we decided to tackle 'dirty' first by going to a laundromat then returning to the motel for showers.  We had a simple but delightful lunch on our balcony with views of Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell and the desert toward the Vermillion Cliffs.  Later in the afternoon, we went to Lake Powell National Recreation Area, stopped at several scenic overlooks, drove around the Wahweap resort and marina area and out to the Lone Rock Beach.

We had an All-American evening--dinner at McDonald's and shopping at WalMart.  We would have finished up with a couple of hours in front of the TV but a long day and an 5:45 wake-up call necessitated an early bedtime.  We had stretched out our weekend by spending two nights in Page so we needed to return to the Plateau on Tuesday in time for work.