Vegas to Taos

The morning we awoke in Vegas we rose as early as we could manage. We were anxious to get to Zion and hike there with the kids before it became roasting hot. But it was ridiculous to go to such a lovely place without a camera, so we stopped at a town next to St. George to acquire one. One hour later, we were finally on the road again. In Mormon country the soil was redder and the rock formations were much more dramatic. It was already noon, but no matter, we shlepped the exhausted kids into the shuttle that took us into the canyon and hiked in the midday heat up to the first of three emerald pools. There, an arc of rock sprinkled mist and droplets of water onto our foreheads. The water seemed to fall from a hidden source, and some streams were dripping right out of the rock. Zach wanted to finish the 2-mile loop uphill, so I headed back with Zora on my shoulders and motivated Jonah through promises of ice cream and competitive encouragement (to beat daddy back to the visitors center). The hardest part, though, was standing in the ice cream line for a half-hour with two exhausted and overheated kids. Zora started wailing towards the end. People stopped to ask her, “what’s wrong, baby?” “Long line,” I replied, and they sighed, but no one thought to help us buy a cone so we could exit the line and spare their nerves.

The kids revived with ice cream, made it back to the Odyssey and then fell asleep for several hours while we raced to the north rim of the Grand Canyon, arriving just in time for the sunset at Bright Angel point. A stone path led to an outcropping of rock just a few feet in diameter that seemed to hang suspended over the deepest part of the canyon. Even I – who love heights – gasped and had to stand back after looking down. When most of the canyon was filled with shadow, we headed back through the lush national forest through which we had come. Apparently someone with a ranch on that land had once tried to cross a heifer with a buffalo, and the progeny now roam free. We didn’t see any but Jonah and I had fun thinking up names for the unlikely bovines – from “beefalow” to “cow-a-low” – and settled on “buffamoo”. Camping grounds were all filled up, and motels were closed for the night, so we pressed on across the Colorado River.

We spent the night at Page AZ, a town that rises from the red dust at the point where humans built a dam on the Colorado river and created the 150-foot-deep Lake Powell. The next morning we stopped by the dam (impressive as a work of man, but a wimpy counter to the work of nature we had seen the prior day) and started on the long, dry backroad to Taos. We stopped at a Shonto reservation, then passed through the lands of the Navajo nation. Shiprock rose out of the desert, the hard blackened core of an old cindercone volcano. After seeing several dust devils in the distance, we ran into one up close. The devil hit us upside with a puff of air and a swish of grit, pushing us off course. We passed by a town at the “entrance to Monument valley” that may have been the inspiration for Radiator Springs (“the entrance to Ornament valley”) in the movie Cars. In Farmington we filled our tanks and I was surprised to see fields growing in the rocky desert dust. As we neared Chama, the desert turned into pine-covered hills and clouds gathered overhead. We were in horse country now, with grass and pines in the hills and sagebrush in the flats.

We passed Tres Piedras and plunged down into the foothills below Taos mountain. Immediately, it felt as if we had entered a very different sort of place. Pinnacles of "earthships" rose from the ground - houses built into the earth by dreamers with visions of a funky future. A collection of "affordable homesites" peppered the naturally radioactive ground with old buses and shanties. These families, it seemed, had started with a vehicle of one type or another and then built outwards, adding rooms as needed. In some cases brambles had grown up around the collection to tie it all together. By the time we reached Taos we were seeing mostly "standard" housing, which in Taos means lovely round-edged adobe houses with protruding vigas (round wooden roof support beams). We searched for a hotel in town, and with few choices still available decided to stay a night at the Historic Taos Inn. The kids had slept so long in the car that it was easy to explore the town's old Spanish plaza long after sunset flamed the Sangre de Cristo mountains and the 7000-foot-high desert air surrendered the day's heat without a hint of protest.