Author: barry.j.bentley@gmail.com

We set off at about 10:00 on Wednesday, September 6 for Crater Lake RV Park,  Prospect, Oregon. As the name implies, that is close to Crater Lake National Park, our next sightseeing destination. It was a comparatively short trip – we arrived at about 1:30, with the odometer reading 6882 (182 miles). Crater Lake RV Park was nice. Not many sites were occupied, since many prospective visitors had cancelled due to the fire in the area.

Most of the trip was on Interstate 5, which is pretty scenic in that stretch, with some pretty steep uphill and downhill sections in northern California and Oregon. Of its own accord, the Dutch Star would slow down to about 50 mph on most of those uphill sections, which I believe to be about what a typical medium-loaded semi truck would do. The tricky part is navigating lanes with those big trucks – the heavily loaded ones can slow down to 40 or even a bit slower, while the lightly loaded ones want to roar up the hills as fast as possible. Typically, the road widens from 2 lanes to 3 for the steep parts, and trucks take over the right two lanes – the faster ones passing the slower ones. No truck (or RV) wants to give up any speed, because it is hard to recover that momentum once you’ve lost it, so it can be tricky to decide when to change to the middle lane. If you pull into the center lane in front of a faster-moving truck, they will not be happy, but if you stay in the right lane to slow down for a slow mover, you will have a hard time accelerating to pass them when the center lane is clear.

The Dutch Star has cruise control, which it really needs because the gas pedal is more difficult to push than a typical car’s and also has a longer travel. However, it isn’t the greatest cruise control, and in particular it allows about a five mph faster speed going downhill than the “set point”. That doesn’t sound like much, but since most downhill sections are in mountainous areas, they usually have curves. Five mph too fast in those curves in a rig the size of the Dutch Star makes a pretty big difference. I have found that those yellow signs with advisory speeds (which everyone driving a car ignores) specify about the right speed in the RV.

The approach I have gravitated to for going down a long steep section (the steepest ones are about 6% grade) is to turn off the cruise control, and control speed using the engine braking system, which has low, medium, and high settings. Low is usually not enough, and switching back and forth between medium and high usually gives good results. The actual friction brakes are a last resort – they will definitely overheat if engine braking isn’t used for the bulk of speed control.

But getting back to the cruise control, what I would really like is a hand operated knob or lever to set the precise speed I want, and then have the rig hold that speed (unless it can’t on an uphill section). As it is, there are two buttons, labelled “Set” and “Res” on the steering wheel. To initially set a speed, you hit the “Set” button, and a green “Cruise” indicator comes on in the dash to show that cruise control is active. To slow down about 1 mph from the set speed, hit the Set button again; to speed up about 1 mph, hit the Res button. It takes a lot of button pressing to fine tune your speed, and the downhill overrun mentioned above makes it more difficult. Alternatively, adaptive cruise control would also be an improvement, but given a choice, I’d take the knob or lever mentioned above.

The closer we got to Crater Lake, the smokier it got, until visibility was down to about a mile by the time we arrived at the campground. The actual fire was about 25 miles north of us, on the north side of Crater Lake National Park, and consequentially, that section of the park was closed. Since the south part was still open, we decided to head up there and see what we could see. It was a scenic 40 minute drive to the park visitor center (it would have been more scenic if it wasn’t so smoky), where they had an informative 20 minute video about the park and the lake. The lake is in the caldera of the volcano, and the water comes  entirely from the rain and snowfall (which averages 44 feet per year). There is no river or creek draining the lake. It is up to 400 feet deep, and is claimed to be the clearest and cleanest body of water on earth.

From the visitor center, we took the road through the park, which has a number of scenic vistas, some looking outward at the surrounding mountains and some overlooking the lake. We promptly discovered that the answer to “what we could see” was not much. At the first lake overlook, called “phantom ship”, we could make out the rock that does look like a ship, and the thick haze made it look more phantom than it otherwise would, but we could see hardly any of the lake.

The next scenic overlook was Sentinel Rock. We could see the rock, but the lake was mostly a no-show.

By all accounts, the scenery is absolutely stunning, but we cannot attest to that, as all we saw was grey smoke. Oh well, we bought a postcard that shows how great it would have been.

Conditions are harsh at the rim of the crater, which is at about 8000 foot elevation. In addition to the 44 feet of snow, it is very windy, with the prevailing winds from the west. Only hardy evergreens survive that, including the “flag” white-bark pine that you see in the picture below.

We continued on to more vistas, but after about an hour of mostly looking at the haze, we gave up and turned around.

On returning to the campground, we decided to move on the next morning rather than spend the day as we had originally planned. There was a light rain overnight – just enough to make the already filthy Jeep look even dirtier and rinse the ash and dust from the top of the Dutch Star down its sides to make it pretty dirty too. That did clear the smoke from the air somewhat, and we briefly debated staying on, but in the end decided to go. we will never know whether that was a good call or not – our route to the next stop took us by the west side of the park, and it was definitely clearer than the previous afternoon, but definitely not completely clear, either.

The news and predictions regarding Hurricane Irma and its potential impact on Florida continue to get worse.

Having seen Sequoia and King’s Canyon on Saturday, we did pretty much nothing on Sunday. It was hot again (105 or so), and we spent time indoors (where again the Dutch Star stayed quite comfortable with only 30 Amps of air conditioning) figuring out where we wanted to go for the remainder of the trip. We would have departed early, except it was still the Labor Day weekend and thus impossible to find a place to stay.

On Monday morning, we got a pretty early start, about 8:15, headed for Redding California, which is near Lake Shasta. We took California 198 west to Route 99, and followed that for a few hundred miles, with the last 150 miles or so on Interstate 5. Most of the way, we were in the agricultural heart of California – San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys. Temperatures were between 100 and 110 , but the irrigated crops and trees were green and healthy-looking despite the heat. In contrast, everything that wasn’t irrigated was brown and dry, a constant reminder of California’s dry climate. On Route 198, about 30 miles west of Sequoia, we passed Lake Kaweah. It is a pretty large lake, or rather it would be if there was more water in it. As it was, it was about 40 feet below full, and that is despite the fact that California actually had a pretty wet winter of 2016-17, after six or eight years of drought. It struck me that we don’t have a shortage of water in this country, we have a distribution problem. Houston gets 50 inches of rain in under a week, and California as a whole averages less than 20 inches per year (and of course less in drought years). At any rate, we all should hope that California gets more rain – it makes a huge contribution to feeding the rest of the country.

The terrain in the central valley is pancake flat, and California has a speed limit of 55 for trucks and any vehicles towing, which we stayed pretty close to. Those factors led to our best gas mileage of the trip, a bit over 8 mpg. We pulled into the campground, Mountain Gate RV Park at about 5:00, with the odometer reading 6700, for a distance of 412 miles.

With a few hours of daylight left, we unhitched the Jeep and drove about 20 miles further north on I-5 to see what Lake Shasta was like. It is a very large lake, California’s largest reservoir, with a surface area of 30,000 acres. It too was down about 40 feet from full pond, but that is a much smaller percentage of its average 150-foot depth, so it doesn’t look anywhere near as forlorn as Lake Kaweah. We got off at Holiday Harbor, which is a hiking/boating area with a marina. There were about 80 houseboats on floating docks there, some of them for rent, and there were also smaller sport boats and jet skis for rent. We looked into it in case we decided to return on Tuesday to do some boating on the lake.

It is unfortunate that those are the only two pictures we took at Lake Shasta, as it is quite pretty despite being far from full (as you can see in the second picture). We thought we’d be back the next day, but in fact, Therese consulted her book about the National Parks and determined that we should instead visit Lassen Volcanic National Park, which was about 60 miles southeast of the campground. Trying to beat the heat (forecast for the high 90’s), and any possible crowds, we got rolling about 8:00, arriving at the North entrance about 9:00. Our first stop was the visitor center, where we watched a good 20-minute video about the park’s geology, history, and scenery. The most recent volcanic activity was a series of large eruptions in May of 1915, one of which was the first volcanic eruption in the US to be captured on film. The photographer, Benjamin Franklin Loomis, was also instrumental in getting Lassen designated as a National Park. Lassen is one of the few places on earth where all four types of volcanos are found (shield, cinder cone, plug dome, and composite, for you geology enthusiasts out there). It’s a rugged landscape, with altitudes ranging from 4000 feet up to Lassen Peak, which is 10,457 feet. A road winds through the western part of the park, you have to be a serious hiker to visit the eastern side of the park.

From the visitor center, you can take a 2 mile hike around Manzanita Lake, a very picturesque mountain lake with clear cold water. That was when we discovered that we had forgotten our fancy new camera, so all the pictures from Lassen are taken with Therese’ Samsung phone. At least it doesn’t conspire with the OpenPress software to make all the pictures come out upside down. The lake was completely full, with healthy inflow and outflow from snow on the surrounding volcanic mountains that is still melting from last winter.

Back on the winding park road, we stopped at Hot Rock, which is a 300 ton rock that was carried five miles by the avalanche that accompanied the 1915 volcanic eruption.  It’s at the edge of what is called the “Devastated Area” where the forest (all evergreens at that altitude) was buried and/or bulldozed by the avalanche. 100 years later, it is on its way to reforesting, and the 100-year time lapse photographs of that process are on display at the visitor center.

The whole park was gorgeous, particularly since large parts of it were nice and green. They got a huge snowfall last winter, so the streams were still running and the lakes were full. Maybe the higher than normal temperatures were accelerating the melting of the remaining snow and causing a high flow in the streams. While it was a comfortable temperature range of 70-80 degrees at park altitudes, it’s usually colder than that when not in the middle of a heat wave.

We stopped at every scenic overlook, since the park was not crowded, and every one of them was spectacular. We had a leisurely picnic lunch at Summit Lake North picnic area, with a great view of the mountain lake and ideal temperature at an altitude of 7000 feet.

At the Kings Creek overlook, we were intending on a short walk down to a meadow that we could see from the parking area, but when we got about half a mile down, we ran into some other hikers who suggested we continue on to Kings Creek Falls. They said it was only another mile or so, but their distance estimating ability turned out to be pretty pathetic, and the total distance we covered was closer to 4 miles, with a pretty challenging switchback section. Since we hadn’t intended any more than a short walk, we didn’t bring any water with us, and although it was not particularly hot, parts of the trail were out in the sun and we experienced a certain amount of TTGS (Thirsty Therese Grouchitis Syndrome) and maybe even a little TBGS. Part of the walk was right next to Kings Creek, which looked like the cleanest water on earth, but Therese refused to countenance any drinking of it. While on the trail, we ran into about six National Forest Service rangers who were looking (in the wrong place, as it turned out) for a hiker who was reported to have cut his head. Just as we were finishing the hike, we heard that they had found him on a different nearby trail.

We continued on to the Bumpass Trailhead, where you can walk a few miles down to some calderas and hot springs, but at that point we were hiked out for the day. The final stop was at the Sulphur Works, where there are boiling mud pits and steaming holes in the ground and a distinct rotten egg smell.

By this time it was after 4:00, so it was good that we were near the South entrance of the park. We left that way and headed west on Route 36. Unfortunately there was a stretch of about four miles that was under construction, and we waited about half an hour to get through.

Our next stop was supposed to be Redcrest, California, from which we were planning on seeing Redwood National Park. However, the only feasible route to get there was California 299, and that was all but completely closed by a forest fire adjacent to it. The website and AM 1610 radio message said they were letting traffic through at 9:00 am and 1:30 pm, but there were also construction delays. We decided that was too much hassle, since we have both seen the Redwoods before (they are spectacular, and we’re sorry to miss them). So we called our first audible of the second half and headed up to Crater Lake National Park in Oregon two days early. Therese called them to change our reservations, and they told her that there was no problem changing the reservation, particularly since they had a lot of cancellations due to a forest fire in the vicinity of the park. Barry, ever the optimist, assumed that they would put it out, or the wind would shift, or something, and voted in favor of going there anyway. Therese, although reluctant, spotted a possible “I told you so” opportunity and acquiesced.

We’ll let you know how that went in our next installment.

In the meantime, we are keeping an eye on Hurricane Irma, which is headed for Florida, where we have a house and multiple siblings, cousins, and friends likewise have houses. Hopefully that doesn’t turn into the catastrophe that seems to be shaping up as of this writing.

(We have had pathetic internet and cellular data coverage, which is why this post is so delayed. A few more are coming soon!)

On Wednesday evening August 30, I flew to Los Angeles to continue our On The Open Road adventure. Therese had flown out the previous week, and was visiting family and friends, so she was able to pick me up at the airport. Surprisingly, on the Philadelphia side I made it through security quickly and without even taking my shoes off or my stuff out of my carryon; the flight left on time and arrived 45 minutes early; and at Los Angeles my luggage was just about the first to arrive at the carousel, so it was about as smooth as commercial flight ever is these days.

We headed back to the home of Therese’ sister Patti and her husband Scott, where we ended the first leg of the trip. Therese had been there since Tuesday morning, retrieving our towed vehicle (the Jeep), which she picked me up in. Patti and Scott were again great hosts as “home base” while getting ready to head out. This time, they were not able to arrange any controlled burns for our entertainment, but they did manage to conjure up some triple-digit temperatures. Southern California is getting hit with unseasonably (even record in some areas) hot weather. Ventura is normally cool, but even there it was getting into the low 90’s.

Thursday morning about 9:00, we drove from Ventura to Chatsworth to pick up the Dutch Star from Valley Indoor RV Storage, where it had been in hibernation for the past three months. Traffic was light, and when we got there, they had it pulled out just as we had arranged. The batteries were all charged up, and it had stayed pretty clean in their indoor facility. We were pleased with our choice of storage area – they did everything they said they would do and the costs were not too exorbitant.

Even though it was only about 10:30, it was already over 100 degrees while we hitched up the Jeep. We got going (with the odometer reading 6020) and hadn’t gone ¼ mile before our lack of practice showed up in the form of books falling out of one of the cabinets that we left open while looking for the GPS or something.

Other than that, the 43 mile trip went smoothly back to Patti and Scott’s, where we parked the unit in front of their house (Patti having secured a parking permit from the city of Ventura for that). Again we lucked out on traffic and encountered not a single traffic jam. Fortunately, even the residential streets of Ventura are pretty wide, and we had no trouble navigating them in the ponderous Dutch Star.

We spent the remainder of the day on Thursday procuring groceries, an electrical adapter so we could hook the rig to a standard 15 Amp outlet (enabling us to run the refrigerator while running up Patti and Scott’s electric bill), and a few other items.

Therese and I had been expecting to escape the heat by heading to Sequoia National Park, but when we decided to actually fact check that by looking at the weather forecast for Three Rivers (where the RV park we had reservations for is located), we discovered that the high temperatures there were expected be somewhere around 105. Then we got an e-mail from Sequoia RV Ranch (our campground) telling us that they had our reservations for a site with 30 Amp power, rather than the usual 50 Amp hookup. Whoa – that means we will only be able to run one of our air conditioners at a time! Any of you who know Therese will recognize that as a crisis – she is what I call a “heat pansy” and you don’t want to be around her when she gets too hot. That being the case, I made one final run to a nearby Lowes store to buy a fan (which I think we will be able to run at the same time as the air conditioner) to head off that disaster. The hardships we have to deal with are legend.

We got up pretty early on Friday to start the trip. Barry Optimum-No-Rinse washed the Jeep, added a little air to the tires, put in some water, hooked up the Jeep all by himself, and got everything else ready for liftoff while Therese washed her hair. Then, for reasons obscure, she decided to set a newly purchased curling iron to its highest setting and proceeded to burn off some of that lovely thick hair. Luckily, she has quite a bit more of it, so it isn’t that noticeable. That didn’t stop her from fretting about it, however.

We did get going on schedule at 10:00. We were apprehensive about hitting a lot of Labor Day traffic, but again we lucked out and had no traffic delays. Even though we were only a little under half full, we stopped near Visalia, CA for fuel, in case we had to run the generator more than expected to avoid the dreaded hot-Therese-grouchitis syndrome (HTGS).

The Dutch Star engine-driven air conditioner continued to impress us. The temperature was consistently over 100 degrees, and we climbed about 4000 feet in 15 miles in the Route 5 “grapevine” without overheating either the Dutch Star or the wife.

Pulling in about 3:00, the temperature was 107 and the odometer read 6289. We experimented with the 30 Amp power (all of the campgrounds on the way to California had 50 Amps, so we didn’t know exactly how that would work). One air conditioner will usually work, but you have to be careful what else you turn on. We ran the generator for a while so we could cool the unit down with both A/C’s running, but we didn’t want to become known as the “generator jerks” at the campground, so we reverted to shore power and one A/C after a while. Cooking supper required the generator, however, else HTGS would have reared its ugly head for sure. Directing the new fan directly at the kitchen area helped on that front as well.

Apart from having only 30 Amps, Sequoia RV Ranch is pretty nice.

There are trees and a river running next to it. We were surprised that there was still water flowing, given how hot and dry it is here.

They have either a natural or man-made swimming hole where there’s a big rock and a section with eight-foot deep water. Given the heat, it’s pretty popular. The pictures below were taken about 7:15 Saturday evening, and it was still about 92 degrees outside.

As of Friday evening, the Wifi signal was the best we have seen at any campground. We’ll see how it holds up as the campground fills up, as is expected for the last big holiday weekend for the summer (answer: nearly unusable at “peak hours” but still way better than most).

On Saturday, we got up (comparatively) early, and headed to Sequoia National Park at 7:45. The temperature at the campground (elevation: about 900 feet) was already about 85 by then, with a forecast high of 108. We got a bit of a bum steer from our GPS onto a road that was closer to a cart path than a real road (luckily we were in the Jeep, not the Dutch Star), but still arrived at the Ash Mountain entrance just about 8:00.

Sequoia National Park (the second US National Park to be created) is huge, and within its boundaries the altitude ranges from 1300 feet to 14,500 feet. All of the entrances are on the west side. The large mountains block vehicular access to the eastern side of the park, which has no road system at all (in fact the east side of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks is the 2nd largest road-free parcel of land in the continental US).

At 8:00, there was no delay getting into the park, and we set off for the biggest attraction, the General Sherman tree and accompanying grove of Sequoias. Inside the park, the road is in good shape, but slow going as it is a series of sharp curves and switchbacks on the side of the mountains. There is a one section approximately a mile long, however, that is down to one way as they are repairing it. There are signs warning of one hour delays getting through that section. I am sure that at least that much delay materialized later in the day as the park got more and more filled up, but just past 8:00 we just barely missed getting through with no delay at all. As it was, we waited under 10 minutes.

We stopped a few places to take in the scenery, which is spectacular. You climb from about 1300 feet at the park entrance in the valley to about 7000 feet at the General Sherman tree.

A desirable side effect of the altitude increase is a temperature decrease. The rule of thumb is 2 degrees Celsius (a bit less than 4 degrees Fahrenheit) per 1000 feet of altitude change. That was welcome on this hot day, and we saw a low temperature of 68 degrees at 7000 feet. As you climb through about 4000 feet, the scenery changes abruptly from dry, scrubby desert deciduous trees to evergreens – a variety of pine, spruce and, as altitude increases to about 5000 feet, Sequoias.

Since we were reasonably early, we had no trouble parking at the General Sherman Tree trail lot. There’s a half-mile paved trail to the General Sherman, which is the largest tree by volume in the world. There are taller trees (the coastal redwoods), and there are older trees (other Sequoias). They estimate that the General Sherman tree is somewhere around 3000 years old. The top of it is dead (which is not uncommon among Sequoias) so it isn’t getting any taller, but it is still healthy and growing bigger around every year.

It is impossible to capture the size of these Sequoias (there are many that are just as impressive as the General Sherman) in a picture. In fact, they are so much larger than regular trees that I think you stop thinking about them in the same reference frame as other large trees. In Pennsylvania, we have  trees that we consider to be large with a diameter of 6 feet or so, and the scale of those trees compared to human size and “regular” trees is such that you get an immediate impression of how large and impressive they are. The Sequoias are 5 times larger in diameter (25 times the cross-sectional area) and probably three times as tall, so they are simply too large to be compared to large Eastern trees. Although the coastal redwoods are taller, the General Sherman, at 286 feet is immense. The limbs near the top of it, way, way up there, are larger in diameter than the largest Pennsylvania trees!

Almost all Sequoias have fire scars. According to information on the signs, fires occur naturally in the Sierra Nevada approximately every six to eight years (they were suppressed for about 100 years in the early days of the park, which turned out to be a bad idea). Sequoias survive fires (and thrive afterwards because competitive trees are killed off) because their bark and sapwood are cork-like, and thus not very flammable and provide good insulation. Their wood also contains tannin, which makes them insect resistant. Those traits combine to account for their incredible longevity.

The picture below is a closeup of Sequoia bark. This, and all the pictures in this post were taken with a newly acquired Olympus EM-5 camera, which was recommended by Jerry Flynn, a colleague at Bentley Systems and an accomplished photographer. The camera is about the same size as our previous Sony, but has interchangeable lenses and more controls and options than I know what to do with. I don’t know whether our pictures this leg of the trip will be any better, but I am pretty sure the picture below, about six inches from the tree, couldn’t have been taken with the old camera.

The same characteristics that account for Sequoia’s longevity also cause them to resist burning and decay very slowly after they have fallen (or sadly, in some cases been cut down).

They had a picture of the fallen Sequoia below that was taken in 1900, and it looks almost identical today. You can’t tell from this picture, but the army unit that first guarded the Sequoias cut a shelter into the fallen trunk large enough to hold 10 men and their horses.

Near the General Sherman Tree is the two-mile “Congress Trail”. It goes through the Sequoia grove and gives an opportunity to see other large Sequoias and where they grow. It turns out that the only places on earth with the right combination of climate, altitude (between 5000 and 7500 feet), rainfall, and soil type are on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The Congress trail features (among many other impressive Sequoia) a place where there is a single large tree, labelled “The President”, and two groupings of Sequoia, one labeled “The Senate” and one “The House”. They look better and make more sense than their counterparts in Washington.

Along the Congress trail, we spotted (very briefly, not even long enough to get a picture) a black bear. The young couple immediately behind us (who turned out to be visiting from Poland) were excited to see the bear, and the young lady was a little nervous about it. So I helpfully explained that she didn’t need to be able to outrun the bear, she just had to outrun the aging overweight couple walking in front of us. She spoke good English, but I am not sure she quite got the joke.

After our leisurely stroll on the Congress and General Sherman trails (with near perfect weather at the 7000 foot elevation), we arrived back at the parking lot to find that it was now quite crowded. We had driven past the Giant Forest museum on the way up, but didn’t stop there. So when we spotted a shuttle headed that way, we decided to leave the Jeep where it was and shuttle to and from the museum. The museum was pretty small but informative. But by then we were hungry and headed back to our car by shuttle. Unfortunately, we somehow got off at the wrong stop, at the downhill side of the General Sherman trail, so we had to walk up again. We staggered to the car and ate lunch, staving off exhaustion and starvation by the thinnest of margins.

We decided to keep going along the road through the park, which eventually ends up in the western part of the adjoining Kings Canyon National Park. The Grant Grove (which contains the General Grant Sequoia) is in Kings Canyon. In general, the crowds lessened as we made our way to Kings Canyon from Sequoia.

We went on the short path around Grant Grove, and stopped for a while to sit on a bench with a great view of the General Grant tree. It is a comparatively young Sequoia, “only” 1700 years old, but it is quite large due to very good growing conditions where it is located.

A friendly guy from Australia happened by, and offered to take our picture. By our estimate, about half the visitors to the park were from outside the US. Hopefully they return to their home countries with a favorable impression of this great country and its natural wonders.

We continued up the Generals’ Highway until we got to Route 180, which runs roughly east-west through Kings Canyon. We followed it for 10 or 15 miles, stopping to get a view of King’s Canyon and the large mountains to the east of us. It was slightly hazy (I think due to a number of forest fires that are currently burning in California), so a little hard to see the more distant mountains.

At one of the scenic overlooks, there was a forest of cairns – the little rock stacks that are used to mark trails, or sometimes just for entertainment value. I’m not sure what caused this to become a cairn hotspot, but there were several families building new ones or adding to existing cairns. We carefully avoided knocking any over (ask my brother Keith and nephew Will sometime what that can lead to).

About 4:00, we decided to head back to the campground. Rather than go back through the park the way we came and wait out the construction delay, we went out through the Big Stump entrance and headed down to the San Joaquin valley on Route 180, then headed south on Route 63 to Visalia. The temperature increased as we descended to a high of 106 while going through the billiard-table-flat valley. Despite the heat and dry environment, the San Joaquin Valley has lots of groves of healthy-looking fruit and nut trees, which appeared to be drip irrigated. A high percentage of America’s produce ( more than 90 percent of artichokes, plums, walnuts, kiwi, spinach, garlic, cauliflower, and carrots) are grown in California’s Central Valleys – the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys. We stopped at a Target in Visalia (which is a prosperous-looking place) to get a few supplies, and then headed back to the campground.

We got back to the campsite at about 6:15, and were pleasantly surprised to find that the Dutch Star stayed quite cool in the 105 degree heat with only half its cooling capacity – it was about 77 degrees inside. It was a very nice sightseeing day, and despite the heat, we managed to avoid HTGS as well.

Our next stop is Lake Shasta, in northern California.

We are closing in on the end of the westbound leg of our cross-country-and-back journey on the open road. Our last camping stop is to be at Ocean Mesa at El Capitan, on the Pacific Coast in Goleta. It is about 250 miles west of Indio. We were a little apprehensive about traffic, since it was Memorial Day, and we were traversing the legendarily overcrowded and sluggish Southern California freeway system. But we still took our time in the morning and were ready to roll at about 10:00.

Then we hit the only truly annoying Dutch Star malfunction to date. After getting everything ready to go (leveling system retracted, slides in, electric, water, and sewer lines disconnected and stowed, awnings in, all outside compartments closed securely, etc.), whenever the ignition switch was turned to either the accessory or run position, there was a piercing warning beeper sounding – on and off on about a 2 second cycle.

Naturally we assumed we had done something wrong, so we went back through the whole process again – extend and retract jacks; slides out and back in – still beeping. I made a phone call to Newmar – yes, I understand it’s Memorial Day, but thanks guys for letting me leave that message on your supposed “emergency” line, that’s real helpful. Ok, I’ll call John Dyer, the salesman at North Trails RV who sold me the RV, he’s always been as helpful as can be. He answers the phone and gives it his best shot – he thought it probably had something to do with the leveling system, since that is known to give off warning beeps if the jacks aren’t retracted. So I double check the jacks (all up), pull the fuse (no difference), get out my screwdriver and take out the control module and disconnect it (no difference). Then I call Spartan (the chassis builder). The nice lady didn’t have a lot of technical knowledge, but took all my information and promised somebody would call me back. So then I decide to try to locate the stupid beeper and disable it (smash it with a rock if necessary). Both Therese and I try to figure out where the blasted thing is hidden, but the cacophonous beeping seems to come from everywhere. I take the dashboard out (which is easy), but it’s not behind there. Therese looks doubtful of my sanity, and even more doubtful that the Dutch Star will recover from my fiddling.

A guy from “Coachnet” calls me back, apparently they are the fallback when nobody who actually knows anything at Spartan is available. He knows far less than I do about the problem. Says to check the leveling system. Thanks, checked that, any other ideas? No.

I decide to see if the coach will drive correctly, so I take it around the block with the beeper blaring away. It seems perfectly normal, – all gauges normal, no warning messages and no warning lights on the dash so I decide the heck with it, we’re launching, maybe it will fix itself. Therese, convinced that such a horrendous beep can only indicate certain destruction of the entire unit, is shaking her head and saying “why don’t we stay here another night and see if the local RV dealer can fix it”. I, of course, reject such obviously sensible advice, on the theory that if I can’t figure it out, surely those knuckleheads won’t be able to either, and confident that the beeper will eventually melt itself down or turn itself off or something. Besides, I wanted to make sure that we actually made it all the way to the west coast, which Indio isn’t but Goleta is.

So, I overrule her objections, hitch up the Jeep, and we pull out of the lovely Motorcoach Country Club with the &@%& thing beeping away with the most annoying possible frequency, volume, and cadence. Therese is not happy, except she is looking forward to telling me that she told me so when it all turns out to be a colossal mistake.

After all that fiddling around, we hadn’t hit the road until 12:00. I am pretending that I can’t hear the beeping for a while, and traffic isn’t too bad for the first 15 miles. My prediction that it would stop, however, proves horribly wrong (beep-beep-beep-beep-beep in the most annoying possible frequency, volume, and cadence continues). I commandeer Therese’ horrendously uncomfortable earbuds and put Pink Floyd on my iPhone, almost but not quite loud enough to drown it out. Therese goes to the back and gets some cotton for her ears. That has the twin benefits of making it harder to hear the beeping, and stopping some of the steam from coming out.

Then, after being on the open road for about 20 minutes we hit horrendous traffic just short of Palm Springs and suddenly we’re on the horribly congested road instead. We’re down to sub-10 mph (the beep-beep-beep-beep-beep in the most annoying possible frequency, volume, and cadence is even more annoying while crawling along). The slowdown lasts over an hour, during which time we traverse 13 miles. The covered wagon guys probably went faster, and they sure as heck didn’t have that beep-beep-beep-beep-beep in the most annoying possible frequency, volume, and cadence driving them batty. On the other hand, the outside temperature reads 113 degrees, and at least we are in air conditioned comfort. All the while, traffic is moving at speed in the other direction, so I am considering turning back. But of course I am too stubborn to admit the obviously incorrect decision, and, drawing deeply from my vast reserves of patience (and with the help of Pink Floyd mostly drowning out the infernal beeping), stoically keep my cool and pretend not to notice either the traffic or the beeping, or the discomfort of the earbuds (amazingly, that is actually true – ask Therese!)

Finally, we get rolling a little faster – up to all of 40 mph, but it’s a huge improvement! Then the phone rings – good thing I had those earbuds, or I’d have missed it, although I feel a little guilty that Therese is hearing the infernal beep-beep-beep-beep-beep in the most annoying possible frequency, volume, and cadence more than me because she has only cotton to ward it off. A guy from Newmar is (finally) calling, and he can hear the beeping, and knows instantaneously what it is. “Did you have the foot rest of the driver’s seat out when you were last parked?” “Yes.” “Is it possible that it isn’t fully retracted?” “Well, I suppose so.” “Give it a push back with your foot.” Beeping stops, this guy from Newmar is my hero, the idiots from Newmar who thought it necessary to deploy the most annoying beeper on earth because the footrest isn’t all the way retracted have my eternal contempt. There is no way on God’s green earth that that’s a dangerous condition requiring such an irritating warning. If the footrest is out far enough to affect the ability to safely drive the coach, you can’t possibly miss it. Utterly unfathomable. And you think they might think to mention it somewhere in the &*@% manual (which I have actually read)? You can be sure I will permanently disable that “safety feature” when we stop for the day.

So we continue on in blissful silence (except every time we hit a bump it comes back on and I have to give the footrest a little kick again). And not only is the beeping gone, but the traffic gods smile on us and we traverse the Los Angeles freeway system with minimal slowdown all the way to Goleta, arriving at about 5:45 with the odometer reading 5922. About 50 miles short of Goleta on US 101, we get our first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean.

We’re staying at Ocean Mesa at El Capitan, which is a nice RV park less than a mile from the Pacific, directly across Route 101 from El Capitan State Beach. It’s the greenest park we’ve seen since Natchez, Mississippi, with real trees and plentiful green ground cover. We had tried to get reservations for the previous day, but no such luck over the Memorial Day weekend. But with the long weekend over, just about everyone has left, and we are sharing the park with perhaps 5 or 10 other campers, with the other 90 sites vacant.

Although we are only 250 miles from the inland desert, it’s a whole different climate here – about 60 degrees (~50 degrees cooler), damp and misty. While Therese is making supper, I take the 1 minute and 42 seconds it takes to forever disable the “footrest warning device”. After supper (we drove straight through, skipping lunch), we took a walk. We found a nice path that wound out of the RV Park to the State Beach.

After less than a mile walk, we were actually on the beach, walking along the sand with our feet in the Pacific Ocean (well Therese did, I couldn’t risk it), watching the sunset. You can bet I told Therese “I told you so” on the decision to launch that morning.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay another day, since we had to get the Dutch Star to its California home for the next three months at Chatsworth RV Storage. We spend the morning getting the coach ready for its hibernation – removing the food, shutting down the refrigerator and plumbing system, cleaning all the bugs off the front, etc. We finally get everything ready a little after noon and set off for Chatsworth. That’s almost 100 miles back the way we came, but again the fabled southern California traffic fails to appear and we get there about 2:20, with the odometer reading 6020 (for those keeping score, we covered 4230 miles in our month on the open road). However, it is a glacial process to check in there, and we don’t get out of there until just after 4:00, missing lunch again!

Satisfied that the Dutch Star is safely stored away, we drive the Jeep to Ventura (50 miles back towards Goleta) to visit Therese’ sister Patti and her husband Scott. (We also put 1933 miles on the Jeep so far). They have graciously agreed to host the Jeep for the three-month break from our travels.

Just as we are getting within a quarter mile of Patti and Scott’s , we saw a low, brownish cloud cover. We couldn’t quite figure out what it was, until we encountered a sign that said “Prescribed Burn in Progress”. There was a crowd of people along the side of the road, watching the fire and the helicopter that was firebombing to get it started. We spot Patti and Scott among them, so we pulled over and joined them watching the 30 foot flames were shooting up from a 100 acres of hillside scrub. The burn was within a quarter mile of a dense residential area, with the objecting being to burn off the fuel and thus decreasing the fire danger in the dry season.

Once that excitement was over, we went out to dinner at Lure Fish House in downtown Ventura for a very nice dinner.

On Wednesday, May 31, Patti and Scott took us to the Reagan Library, which is about 40 miles from their house, in Simi Valley, California. That turned out to be a very enjoyable stop. The permanent display is (of course) about Ronald Reagan’s life and his career as a General Electric spokesperson, radio announcer, actor, Governor of California, and President of the United States. The “Great Communicator” as he is frequently called, led a more interesting life than I was aware of.

On display is also the Boeing 707 that served as Air Force One from 1972 through 1989, and a Sikorski Helicopter that was Marine One, both of which visitors can tour.

There was an exhibit with the Presidential limousine (this one’s a 1983 Cadillac) and some of the motorcade vehicles that accompanied the limousine during a visit to California in the early ‘80’s.

The Reagan Library also has a large area for visiting exhibits. Last year, Therese visited with her parents, and there was an interesting exhibit about the Vatican. This year’s exhibit, which had opened quite recently, was about the Titanic.  I had not been aware that the discovery of the wreckage by Robert Ballard  in 1985  was actually a secret Navy-financed mission whose true objective was to find two sunken submarines, the USS Scorpion and the USS Thresher. Once both were successfully located, Ballard was given the green light to look for the Titanic, and when that was accomplished, it became the cover story for the mission.

The story of the Titanic has fascinated the public since its sinking on April 15, 1929. I guess that’s because it was (at the time) the largest ship ever built, and despite being billed as “unsinkable”, it went down on its maiden voyage. There have been a number of movies made about the sinking, the best known of which is the 1997 James Cameron epic, “Titanic”, which happens to be one of my favorite movies of all time. There was quite a bit of memorabilia from the movie as well as from the original discovery.

To end the day, we stopped at Patti’s “office” – she works for the University of California at a research farm near Ventura that was established by the Hansen Trust. They’re currently housed in a fascinating old mansion (built 1894) on a 27 acre farm. However, that property (which was never owned by the Hansen that established the trust) isn’t ideal for their needs, so there is some discussion of selling it and moving to a larger tract of land.

The house and grounds were a delightful end to the tourism of the day, and after a good dinner at a local Mexican restaurant, Therese dropped me off at the Los Angeles airport for an overnight flight home. She is going to stay in California for a while longe rto visit family, while I head home to help with our Lions Club’s annual Chester County Blues Barbeque.

Stay tuned, we’ll be back On the Open Road in September!

The Motorcoach Country Club bills itself as “The Crown Jewel of Motor Coach Resorts”. I’m not sure how stiff that competition is, but it is true as far as our experience goes. It is probably even nicer “in season” which apparently ends at the end of April, because the on-premise restaurant (which is supposed to be pretty good) is now closed. On the other hand it is wonderfully uncrowded at this time of year. It’s a good thing we liked it because our stay here was four nights – longer than any other park we’ve been to.

In fact Indio was much nicer than either of us had expected. After what we had seen throughout the desert, we expected a pretty hardscrabble dried-out place, but in fact it is quite nice. We were on the eastern edge, right next to La Quinta, which is also a nice town. It is a big retirement area, and during our stay we ran into several people who had moved from Pennsylvania for that purpose.

On Friday morning, May 26, we intended to get started reasonably early, but we had contacted an RV detailer who has an arrangement with the RV park to wash the Dutch Star and the Jeep. They showed up an hour late, but ended up doing a pretty decent job (not quite as good a job as Sal in Las Cruces, though). They did the Jeep first, and when that was done we headed for the Palm Springs Air Museum, which is at the Palm Springs Airport. We expected to stay a few hours at most, looking at the airplanes and then heading out. However, the museum is a lot more than just airplanes. Three of its four large hangars are dedicated to WWII, one focused on the Pacific Theatre and one on the Atlantic Theatre. Both have many extensive and well-written exhibits. Perhaps the most interesting were those explaining the origin of the respective conflicts, going back to events in the 1800’s. There are many detailed models of the airplanes and ships of both the Allied and Axis combatants, and an impressive discussion of how air power, particularly ship-borne air power, changed the course of WWII and all wars since.

The museum was gearing up to give rides in a few of their warplanes over the Memorial Day weekend, so quite a few were out on the ramp rather than in the hangars. They try to keep as many of their airplanes in flying condition as they can.

After spending a few hours looking at the Pacific exhibits, we ate lunch at the museum’s “cafeteria” which is a little grill at the corner of one of the hangars. It was not crowded, and surprisingly good.

One of their main exhibits was a B-17 Flying Fortress, “Miss Angela”. We took individual guided tours of the aircraft, with one of their cadre of volunteers explaining the role of each of the crewmembers and the function of the airplane hardware. My guide was an Air Force veteran of the Korean conflict, and he was very familiar with the B-17, so with all my questions the tour took almost an hour. The B-17 hasn’t flown in 10 years or so, because that isn’t allowed by the trust that owns it (it was at one time owned by one of the co-founders of the museum, Bob Pond, who has now passed away). But they expect that ownership will pass to the museum at some point, so they keep it in near-flyable condition. Unpressurized,  B-17s were commonly flown at about 29,000 feet, where there isn’t enough oxygen to support life, and it is about -40 degrees or colder. The crewmen were on oxygen, and wore heated flight suits, but there were many cases of frostbite of hands and feet.

In addition to aircraft, there are other exhibits with equipment related to aircraft. For example, there’s a Link Trainer – thousands of WWII airmen learned flying on instruments in such trainers.

There’s also this Norden Bombsight – credited with giving allied bombers very good accuracy, and thus enabling them to destroy enemy targets and shorten the war.

There were several jet engines on display, but this 28-cylinder radial engine was pretty cool, too.

 

And here is the frame of the fuselage of a glider, many of which were used in the D-day invasion.

Another unexpected aspect of the Palm Springs Air Museum is their library. They have many airplane-themed books, but for some reason they also have every issue of Life and Look magazines going back to when they were first published. You can (and we did) find the issue that was current when you were born. In the “more things change the more they stay the same” category, have a look at the editorial from Life magazine on the April 16, 1956 – it is criticizing the income tax system, the politically-motivated deductions and exemptions, and calling for an overhaul and simplification of the system. They could rerun it practically unchanged today.

Their fourth hangar at the museum is dedicated to the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, but that was scheduled to debut just in time for the Memorial Day Weekend, the day after our visit, so we weren’t able to see it. After spending about five hours at the museum, we were “museumed-out” for the day anyway.  You could easily spend several days there, and still not see everything.

For dinner, we treated ourselves to a very nice French restaurant in Palm Springs, Le Vallauris. Therese had been there years ago on a trip to Palm Springs with her two sisters and her cousin. We ate semi-outdoors in a courtyard shaded by large cottonwood trees. Highly recommended if you are in the area.

On Saturday, we avoided Memorial Day weekend crowds by doing just about nothing. We took care of getting some stuff done on the Dutch Star, and hung out by the Motorcoach Country Club Pool. It was about 98 degrees at its hottest, but by 8:30 or so, it cooled down enough to sit outside and snap this picture just after sundown. I also re-washed the Jeep – one day and it was already pretty dusty, and a bird had taken advantage of its (former) cleanliness to “leave its mark”.

On Sunday, we got going comparatively early to beat the heat, with our objective being a two-mile hike to the waterfalls at Tahquist Canyon in Palm Springs. We got there just before 9:00, when it was still in the high seventies, but it felt hotter due to the strong sun. The hike up the canyon was easy and scenic.

The waterfall was quite a treat. There was much more water flowing (its source is snow melt) than I had expected this late in the spring, and it was easily 15 degrees cooler near the falls, both from the shade and the cooling effect of the evaporating mist from the falls. There were lots of other people with the same idea, so the area was pretty crowded, but it was well worthwhile.

In the afternoon, we decided to go to a movie. By that time it was 107 degrees out, and when we got in the car, any surface that was in the sun, especially the seat belt buckles and the steering wheel, was hot enough to burn you.  It seems to me you just about have to have a garage if you have a car out here. Otherwise, it will be continually coated with dust, and your paint and interior will age prematurely from the heat and sun.

The  movie we saw was “Guardians of the Galaxy”. If you get a chance to see it, my advice is to pass it up.

Tomorrow, we head for Goleta, which is about 20 miles west of Santa Barbara. A lot of easterners would think that I mean north of Santa Barbara, since it’s on the coast, but look at a map – the coastline of California is just about due east-west in that area.

For those of you attempting to keep track of our incessant audibles, you may recall that we were at one time planning on going from Bryce National Park to Zion National Park. From Zion, it would have been a reasonable six-hour drive to Indio, California, where we had made reservations to stay through the Memorial Day Weekend (moving around over that weekend would have been very challenging, since all the campgrounds are full).

But, since we diverted to Lake Powell, the drive from there to Indio is over 500 miles. That is a pretty long day of travel, so our trusty tour guide (Therese) had reserved a campsite in Williams, Arizona, at a place called Grand Canyon Railway RV Park. Expecting an easy travel day of 200 miles or so, we unhurriedly left Lake Powell at 9:30. We took Route 89 south to Interstate 40, which is in pretty bad condition for long stretches. That, combined with heavy truck traffic and road construction made for less relaxing driving than hoped, but we still made reasonable time and pulled into the prospective park at about 1:00. However, Grand Canyon Railway RV Park was not very inviting – it looked like a crowded parking lot, and was right next to a railroad track. I’m not sure we would have even had enough room to put our slides out. Thus, we declared this particular audible to be a busted play, and started a quarterback scramble, continuing on to Indio as was our Plan B (or C, or whatever it was).

Our revised route had us continuing on I-40 west, and then turning south on US 95 just over the California border, to Route 62, and then California 177 to I-10. As we drove along, the sandstone canyons that are scenic in Arizona gave way to just plain old desert – miles and miles of desiccated landscape with no sign of human habitation at all, and not particularly scenic, either. In some places on 62 and 177 (both two-lane highways in good condition), we would see only one car or truck coming the other way per mile, with no other vehicles traveling our way in sight. There would be one town, if you could call it that, every 30 miles or so. What do the people who live out there do in the desert? I have no idea.

We had started out at an elevation of 3800 feet, temperature about 75 degrees. We got as high as 7600 feet on the way to Williams, with the temperature falling into the 60’s. But after we had rejected Williams and set out for Indio (elevation 13 feet below seat level), Therese checked the weather on her smart phone, discovering that the high for the day was forecast to be 106. And as we continued toward it through the desert, the outside temperature reading on the Dutch Star reached as high as 113 – that was about 2:45, when we stopped for fuel and lunch. Somewhat surprisingly, the dash air conditioner, which is engine driven, was able to keep the cockpit of the Dutch Star at a comfortable temperature despite the extreme heat.

It was also quite windy, and descending on Route 62 toward Indio, we had a headwind that must have been at least 30 – 40 mph. The closer we got to Indio, the higher the winds. In fact as we arrived to the outskirts of the Indio (which is quite a bit bigger than we expected), sand was blowing across the road, and the air was a dusty brown.

By the time we finally reached our destination, about 7:45, it had cooled down to the high 90’s, and we were in a more sheltered area where the winds were a more reasonable 20 mph or so. The odometer read 5677, so we had covered 520 miles.

Our Indio “campground” is called Motorcoach Country Club, and it is in a different league (and price range) from most RV Parks. It is like Riverbend (see second post) in that most of the “campsites” are owned by private parties, who deck them out with fancy casitas and landscaping. They must come for Indio’s cool season, which is definitely over by May (far less than half of the sites are occupied). A few of the owners rent them out to transient lowlifes such as ourselves. It is an oasis of green in the desert – there’s a small par-3 golf course, 3 pools, 3 tennis courts, and a nice restaurant in the clubhouse (however, that’s “closed for the summer” currently).

Having missed dinner, we headed to the Indio In-n-Out Burger. For those of you who haven’t lived in southern California, In-n-out is the best fast food burgers in the area, possibly in the world. Even Therese, who normally wouldn’t touch a hamburger with a ten-foot pole, let alone a fast food burger, ordered their signature “Double Double”.  The “dubs” were just as delicious as I remembered them from my Caltech days 35 years ago, and their sawdust-tasting French fries were similarly unchanged.

When we got back, we took an extended walk around the 400 site Motorcoach Country Club. The extension was because it was pitch dark and we somehow missed a turn and went around part of it twice.

On Thursday, we got up reasonably early to visit Joshua Tree National Park before the hottest part of the day. Fortunately, the forecast was for a high of a comparatively cool 98 today. It was about an hour drive to the park. To get there, you take I-10 east, and pass through Indian Canyon. There is a huge windmill farm there, and it’s easy to see why – the winds were howling through there, must have been 40 miles per hour.

Shortly thereafter, you turn onto Route 62 north , and climb about 3000 feet to the entrance. Joshua Tree National Park includes two different desert climates, the cooler, higher Mojave desert from 3000-6000 feet in the western part of the park, and the hotter, lower elevation Colorado desert below 3000 feet on the eastern side of the park.

The Joshua Tree, for which the park is named, are not really a tree at all, nor are they a cactus. They are actually members of the lily family. They grow in large numbers in the Mojave desert section of the park, and are nowhere to be seen in the Colorado desert section.

The other major feature of Joshua Tree is the large number of rock piles. These are unlike the sedimentary sandstone rocks that make up the landscape in the Utah and Arizona deserts – they are monzogranite rock, formed by magma below the surface getting pushed near the surface, and then the softer surrounding rock eroding away from the action of water and wind, leaving the distinctive stacks of harder rock.

Not far from the northern entrance is the Hidden Valley trail, a one-mile loop through a valley that was used as a hiding place by cattle rustlers in the late 1800’s to about 1910. The geology of the Mojave desert section of Joshua Tree is well represented.

Other desert fauna are common, too, with yucca plants, scrub oak, juniper and many varieties of cactus.

 

We didn’t see many birds, reptiles or animals, most of which have the good sense to stay in during the day and come out in the relatively cool evenings. But we did see one good-sized lizard sunning itself in Hidden Valley.

One cactus of particular note is the Chollo (pronounce Choy-oh), which requires particular soil and rain conditions to thrive, that occur at only one location in the park, called the “Chollo Garden”. It is located near the transition from the Mojave to the Colorado desert. The Chollo is a beautiful, but particularly nasty cactus (at least to human beings, there are several species of birds and lizards that make their home in and around them) because the thin spines are capable of piercing clothes and even shoes, and have barbed ends that are painful and particularly difficult to remove. There are warning signs to avoid any contact with the plants at the beginning of the nature trail that winds through it, advice which we were careful to observe.

It is a large national park, and we didn’t drive through the whole thing. We exited at the Twenty Nine Palms Visitor Center, where there is the Oasis of Mara. It was at one time natural Oasis, but due to changing water flows caused by one of California’s relatively recent earthquakes, the natural spring dried up, and now they pipe in water to maintain the small pool and vegetation.

Joshua Tree is an interesting desert landscape, and well worth seeing. It is not as dramatic or as visually spectacular as the canyon scenery in the Utah parks we had seen the previous week.

Anyone who is concerned about overcrowding of the planet should make a trip to the western part of the US. If someone can figure out some way of making it fit for human habitation (cooling it down a bit and distributing water to it), there is more than enough room.

Our revised plan had been to visit Zion National Park after Bryce, but we decided that we were a bit overdosed on canyon scenery and called yet another audible to divert to Lake Powell, which is on the border between Utah and Arizona. Since we had a short 145 mile drive ahead of us, we took our time departing from Ruby’s RV Park, leaving at about 10:45, headed for Wahweap RV Park, which is next to Lake Powell, inside the Glen Canyon National Recreational Area. To get there, we backtracked on Route 63 and Route 12, to get to Route 89, where we continued south. There was more traffic headed that way than there had been getting to Bryce, but that might be because it was a weekday with more commercial traffic. It was an easy drive, losing elevation most of the way, and ending up at about 3800 feet.

Pretty much the entire drive was in Utah until the final mile or so, when we crossed into Arizona, where (as I mentioned before) they don’t observe daylight savings time, so it’s an hour earlier there than in Utah. Therefore, we got there at 12:45 local time, with the odometer reading 5157 miles. The campground is privately run, but inside the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, so we went through the park gate. It’s a hefty $30 fee to get into the park if you don’t have an America the Beautiful Pass, and I think we have now used that enough to have gotten our money’s worth (the pass only gets you into the parks, camping is always an extra charge).

The Wahweap RV Park is large, very pleasant, and well-managed. We were in Loop D, where I think they put most of the larger RV’s. They have the only trees for miles around, which look to be about 15 years old and are obviously irrigated to stay alive in this climate. When we left Bryce, it was about 45 degrees, by the time we arrived at Glen Canyon, it was up to about 85, with bright sunshine and not a cloud in the sky. From our campsite, it is about 200 yards to Utah (where it is an hour later).

We took a walk to cross the state line and to check out the Wahweap area, which is where there is a resort as well as the campground. There is a massive boat ramp there, by far the largest I have ever seen, and we happened to see a tractor trailer pulling a houseboat for launching, so we walked down the ramp to watch that.

Lake Powell is a man-made lake, formed by the Glen Canyon Dam. Since we had plenty of time after setting up camp and eating lunch, we headed over to the Glen Canyon Visitors center, which is on Route 89 at the east side of the dam (the Colorado runs pretty much north – south at this location. It is a nice visitor center with a lot of information about the dam and the surrounding territory. In addition, you can take a tour of the dam, which we elected to do. The dam is 710 feet high, and took about 10 years to build, with 5,000,000 tons of concrete continuously poured from 1963 through 1966. It is actually bigger than the more famous Hoover Dam near Las Vegas. Its primary purpose is to store water from the Colorado, which is a primary source of water for all of the southwestern states, but whose flow (without the dam as a buffer) varies widely from season to season and year to year. Lake Powell is the second largest reservoir in the country, holding 29 million acre-feet when it is completely full. It is part of the water system for the upper basin states (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona), and there is a complicated and controversial water usage agreement between the states that requires a certain amount of water flow through to the lower basin states. A secondary purpose is to generate electricity, and it has a capacity of 1900 megawatts, which is sold at cost by the government to the southwestern power grid.

There was quite a controversy over both the need for and the placement of the dam, since its construction flooded a large area with scenic canyons that are typical of the Colorado Plateau. Another site that was also considered would have flooded Dinosaur National Monument, which must have been thought to be more environmentally important, so Glen Canyon lost out.

There is quite a bit of security at the dam. To go on the tour, you leave any bags, pocket knives, etc. behind, and go through an airport-style metal detector. On top of the dam, there were a number of armed guards, and they tell you that they cannot be in any of the photographs that you take. The tour starts at the top of the dam, where one of the buckets that poured concrete was on display, along with one of the water turbines that generates electricity. The turbine on display was one of the ten originally installed in the 1960’s. Having reached the end of their service life, they were replaced in the early 2000’s with more efficient, all stainless steel turbines.

Generally, the tour goes down inside the dam to the bottom where the turbines are located, but unfortunately the elevator was closed for maintenance. There are stairs, but it’s the equivalent of 53 floors to get down there from the top of the dam, so they don’t use them for the tour. It’s a dizzying drop looking over the top of the dam, particularly to the downstream side, where the water level is about 500 feet below that of the upstream side.

The water level in Lake Powell varies greatly. It was first completely full in 1980, but the west has been in a drought since 1999, and it hasn’t been close to full in that time. This past winter was the wettest in 20 years, and the water level is currently rising about 7 inches per day. They are projecting a total rise of 57 feet, but that will still be well short of full. Currently, the dam is impounding approximately half of what it would at full pond.

Having learned that, we now knew why the boat ramp had to be so huge – the water level varies more than 100 feet. It also explained one geological feature that seemed odd – the lower part of all the cliffs was a whitish color rather than the more common reddish-brown. That is calcium carbonate deposited from when the water level is high. You can see the high water mark that was set during floods in 1983.

After the tour, we watched two of the interesting movies that they show in the Visitor’s Center, with more about the local geology and the dam.

On Tuesday, we went on a boat tour on Lake Powell. The tour left at 9:00 (Arizona time) from a dock at the Wahweap Resort and Marina. The weather was perfect – clear blue sky with temperature in the high 70’s (headed for the mid-80’s by afternoon). At a large dock area adjacent to the one the tour boat dock, there were hundreds of houseboats, some privately owned and some for rent. Later in the tour we passed an even larger dock on Navajo land, which appeared to have the larger and even more fancy houseboats. I guess they must manufacture them on the lake somewhere – I can’t see how else they could get them there.

According to the boat tour guide, since Lake Powell is a National Park, if you own a houseboat, you aren’t allowed to live on it, and in fact you can spend a maximum of 30 nights onboard. I wonder how closely that is monitored, and how it applies to multi-owner houseboats.

There were about 40 people on the tour, and most of them seemed to think the canyon scenery that we sailed through was spectacular, practically wearing out their smartphones and cameras clicking away. Maybe we have become jaded, having seen Arches, Canyonland and Bryce, but we were far less impressed. In my opinion, the calcium carbonate white stain that shows the high-water mark (and which the locals aptly refer to as the “bathtub ring”) ruins the view, so we took only a few pictures. Judge for yourself.

Without the water storage capacity of Lake Powell, Los Angeles, Pheonix, Las Vegas, other southwestern cities that rely heavily on the Colorado River for their water supply could not exist in their present state – the water supply would not be reliable enough. So I guess Glen Canyon dam (or a similar dam at another location) was inevitable. It is a shame that it has degraded what was once spectacular scenery, but there is no shortage of that out here in Colorado. The locals (and tourists) appreciate the opportunity to fish and boat on the lake, too.

In the afternoon, we decided to check out Page. To get there, you cross the bridge that is just above the dam. Shortly after the bridge, there’s a scenic viewpoint where you get a great view of the dam, the bridge, and the 600-foot cliff that goes down to the Colorado downstream of the dam.

The bridge was built to facilitate construction of the dam – workers were housed in what they described as the “world’s largest trailer park” in Page. The legacy of that remains, as many of the residences are trailers with more permanent houses grafted onto the side. We didn’t find any charming historic district in Page, but we did find El Tapatio, an excellent Mexican restaurant where we enjoyed a very good dinner.

Lake Powell was a pleasant enough stop, certainly less crowded and hectic than Zion National Park would have been.

With an easy 270 mile drive scheduled for Saturday, we got up at a reasonable hour. Therese made a quick trip to the grocery store while I “broke camp”, and we hit the open road at about 9:30.

We headed north on Route 191 to Interstate 70, where we headed west. The view all around was the incredible desert scenery we have gotten used to. As Therese remarked – you don’t really have to go to the National Parks to see amazing stuff, just drive around out west and there it is. Just after we got onto I-70, we saw a sign near an exit that said “Last services for 110 miles”. They weren’t kidding – there is absolutely nothing on that stretch of road – there were some stretches of 20 miles or more where there wasn’t a dwelling of any kind in sight.

The road is in perfect shape, the speed limit is 80, traffic was extremely light, and there was no sign of law enforcement, so it must be tempting for locals who travel that road regularly to see if they can average 100+. I’d have been tempted if I was driving a regular car instead of the big rig, except of course that it is well known that I am a scrupulous observer of speed limits. Instead we trundled along at the usual 65, except when we got to the prodigious hills. One 5% uphill grade of about 7 miles slowed the Dutch Star to about 45 mph at the steepest parts, but it showed no signs of overheating or other distress – it just downshifted to 4^th (out of 6) and chugged on up to the summit, which was labelled as 7886 feet. The few trucks on the road were travelling about the same speed. The Dutch Star’s Cummins engine is turbocharged, so it is not very sensitive to altitude. A normally aspirated engine starts to lose quite a bit of power at those altitudes. On the corresponding downhills, I was glad we had the engine compression brake so we didn’t have to use the service brakes to keep our speed down.

From I-70, we took Route 89 south towards Bryce Canyon. The first few miles are kind of winding, but then it straightens out. It follows the Sevier River for quite a while, so there is some actual green trees near the river and some green fields that are irrigated. There was little traffic there, also so it was a pleasant drive.

As we got closer, we stopped in Panguich to fuel up – just under 7 mpg from all the hills. From there, it was about a half hour to Ruby’s Inn RV Park and Campground, about a mile from the entrance to Bryce Canyon National Park. Everything along that stretch is “Ruby’s” this, that, or the other thing – hotel, general store, restaurant. Therese read in the campground pamphlet that Ruby was actually Reuben Syrett, and he bought the land in the area in 1916 with the intention of ranching. Shortly thereafter, he heard about Bryce Canyon, went to see it, and decided to promote it and get into the tourist business rather than ranching. When we stopped for the day, it was about 3:00, and the odometer read 5011.

The park is large, and our campsite was the very last one – 242. It’s in a newer section where the trees haven’t really had a chance to grow very much. The older section is actually more pleasant, but our site was nice enough for our purposes. Our elevation is 7650 feet, by far the highest we have stayed at.

Therese, having consulted her TripAdvisor app, discovered a favorably reviewed restaurant, Stone Hearth Grill, just outside a town called Tropic about fifteen miles away. She had made dinner reservations before we left Moab, so we headed over there at 6:00. We had just finished ordering when in walked Harry Vitelli and his wife, Helen! Harry is a friend from work – he’s Senior Vice President of our Project Delivery division. It turns out that they were staying in the inn associated with the restaurant, celebrating their 30^th wedding anniversary. How’s that for “it’s a small world” type of coincidence? The restaurant was able to consolidate us into a table for four, and we had a delightful outdoor dinner with a view of Bryce, talking about our trip and their experiences in the area for the past few days. Harry recommended the “AllTrails” iPhone app, and told us about the Willis Creek trail that we took the next day (more on that later).

Sunday morning, we finally got rolling about 9:00. It was still about 45 degrees, having been down to 30 overnight. We knew Bryce was a popular park, and had read that there was a shuttle bus that they suggested visitors take to ease traffic congestion in the park. Being good citizens, we decided to do that, assuming that it would make it more pleasant dealing with the crowds. There was a convenient “park and ride” parking lot just across the street from the RV park, so off we went.

We stopped first at the visitor center, where we saw a 25-minute movie about the park. In every other park, those have been spectacular, but here they seem to be recycling a movie from the 90’s. The content was interesting, but the resolution was nowhere near what everyone has come to expect with high-def TV. They really need to reshoot it and project it with modern gear.

We walked from there to Sunrise Point, which showcases what we learned in the movie – Bryce Canyon Park has scenery that is unique in the world. There are “hoodoos”, thin spires of eroded rock, everywhere you look. They are red rock, usually capped with a harder white rock. When the white rock dissolves from the top, the much softer red part erodes rapidly (in geologic terms). So the park looks somewhat like I imagine the Arches formations will look like in a few million years.

 

From Sunrise Point, it’s an easy half-mile walk to Sunset Point, with equally bizarre and spectacular vistas. The viewpoint is from the top of the canyon looking down into the dizzying depth.

Unfortunately, most of the other tourists appear to ignore the advice to leave the car behind and take the shuttle bus, and the tour buses, of which there are many, definitely do. So while the experience of the scenery was (as expected) spectacular, there was an enormous crowd of tourists, most of whom seemed more intent on taking pictures of each other (and themselves with selfie sticks) than actually enjoying the scenery. I read (on the internet, of course) that 2.5 quintillion (10 to the 18^th) bytes of data are now being created daily. Let’s estimate how many of those were authored in Bryce today. According to Wikipedia, 2,365,110 tourists visited Bryce in 2016, roughly 6500 per day. But there are very few in the winter, so suppose there were 15,000 today (it seemed like at least that many). Furhter suppose that each takes 50 pictures (we took about 80 between us, and lots of other tourists were far more shutter-happy than we were), and each picture is 5 megabytes. That’s 3,750,000 megabytes (3.75 terabytes). I am sure the shadow of Kodak that still exists longs for the good old real-film days, Bryce must have been a gold mine for them then.

Here’s another random observation, politically correct or not. For some reason, Japanese people are born without fear of heights. The number of Japanese tourists we saw who stood within feet of 400 feet drop-offs (places where there were no rails), obliviously taking pictures or having their pictures taken, was unbelievable. It scared me just watching. Almost every person we saw in foolish positions was Japanese.

While it is well know that I am the world’s most patient man (well, except for about 7,499,999,000 of the other 7.5 billion humans on the planet), the huge crowds, together with the traffic backups, tripped my patience circuit breakers and we jumped on the shuttle bus and (after a wait of about 10 minutes while idiots trying to park, and tour buses loading or unloading finally got out of the way) made our escape at about 11:00. We were the only ones on the shuttle exiting the park.

Having made good our escape, we headed for the scenic hike along Willis Creek that Harry had clued is in to. It was about a 45 minute drive from Bryce, with about 15 miles of it on dirt roads. It is near or in the Grand Escalante National Monument, off Bureau of Land Management road 500. I always wonder when these roads were built and how. This one had some turns around the outside of some pretty steep hills – how did they cut those in there? Did they have to blast? How much dirt did they have to move?

We started the hike about 12:30, after eating lunch in the car (we couldn’t risk the 50 degree weather out there). It follows the Willis Creek as it cut its way through sandstone formations, forming some steep, narrow canyons in several places.

It was an easy walk, distance and elevation-wise, but if you wanted to keep your feet dry, there were lots of places where you used stepping stones to cross the creek. It’s not Therese’ forte, but she did pretty well.

The scenery was great, and we saw only about 10 other people on the trail, so it was also very peaceful, including a small waterfall. We went about 2 ½  miles total, then headed back to the campground.

On the way back, we talked about trying to see Bryce again. We at first thought we’d get up early and see it the next day before we left the area, but that sounded a little too energetic, so we decided to go back after an early supper.

Therese fixed a delicious supper of Tilapia and a Mexican bean and corn salad. We were second guessing our decision to go back to the park after supper because the weather, which had been in the high 50’s all day, changing rapidly and frequently between sunny and threatening to rain, looked like it might turn uncooperative. But, we decided to give it a try, and headed back to Bryce, arriving about 6:30. What a difference seven hours makes! Cars were streaming out of the park, but hardly any were headed in. And, as it turned out we only got a few drops of rain, and the late afternoon sun actually made an appearance.

Having seen Sunrise and Sunset Points, we headed directly to Inspiration Point. It was nearly deserted and absolutely spectacular. We took the short but steep walk to the terrifying (for people with a normal, healthy fear of heights) Upper Inspiration Point lookout.

From there, we went to Bryce Point, the last viewpoint in the popular “Bryce Ampitheater” part of the park, which was also nearly deserted and spectacular.

From there, we continued on to the less-visited southern part of the park, stopping at the viewpoints on the way. The ground was wet from rain shortly before we arrived, and at Natural Bridge, we saw a rainbow and managed to take a pretty decent picture of it.

 

 

From Fairview Point, we were able to spot the town of Topic, and I believe we could make out the restaurant where we were the evening before.

The last viewpoint in the park, Rainbow Point (where we did not see a rainbow) is at an elevation of 9115 feet. That is above the altitude where we would start to monitor our pulse oxygen in the non-pressurized Columbia airplane we used to have. Therese gets hypoxic more than I do, and she started to feel a bit sick as we got up there. So we took a few pictures at Rainbow Point so we could prove that we were there, and headed back to comparatively lower ground, happy that we had made the decision to go back.

We got to the campground at about 8:45, just as the sun was starting to set.

So, if you plan to visit Bryce National Park in May, my strong recommendation is to wait until late afternoon/early evening and drive your own vehicle, unless you are tolerant of crowds and delays. You won’t have a lot of time for the many hikes in the park, but you will find it peaceful and inspiring.

With about 340 miles ahead of us, we got off to a reasonably early start at 8:20. It was about 49 degrees when we got going, and it stayed cold, with a few clouds but not much wind. To get to Moab, Utah from Holbrook, Arizona (at least in an unwieldy big rig, there are probably more direct car routes), you first backtrack east on I-40 to Gallup, New Mexico, and then take Route 491 north through New Mexico, through Colorado for a while, then into Utah, and then you turn on Route 191 to Moab. You pass within 20 miles of “four corners” the only place in the country where four states meet – Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. We didn’t feel the need to take the side trip to the actual four corners monument, since the drive went through each of those states.

Most of the drive is in New Mexico, through desert landscape broken up by some huge rock mesas and peaks (you are never very far from sights that would knock your socks off if you saw them in isolation; you just get used to them as part of the background in the high desert).

As we went north, we crossed into the Navajo Nation, which is a large reservation. Things looked pretty bleak there – most of the sparse residences we saw were trailers, many of them boarded up and abandoned-looking. It looked even drier there than the other parts of New Mexico we had previously seen.

For some reason, once you cross into Colorado, things seem to get wetter, greener and more prosperous looking. There are even some wheat fields and other farming going on. High mountains (12,000’ plus) are visible in the background, complete with snow. It got progressively colder, and there was rain visible both to the east and west of our route. We started the day at about 5000’ feet at Holbrook, climbed as high as 7200’ in Monticello, Utah, and then ended up at about 4500’ at our destination. In Monticello, we hit some kind of cold spot where the temperature was briefly down to 32 degrees, and we even drove through some snow for about 5 minutes (we took a picture, but unfortunately it didn’t come out). There was snow on the ground for about 40 miles in that vicinity, so it must have snowed for real the previous night.

For the first time, we fueled up (out of necessity) at a regular gas station rather than a truck stop. In hindsight, we should have filled up while we were on I-40, but we still had a half tank there, so we didn’t. Route 491 was four lanes for a while (but with so little traffic, I don’t see how that was justified), but then went down to two lanes. We thought we’d find a real truck stop in Cortez, Colorado, but no such luck. Since we were down below ¼ tank, we decided “any port in a storm” and spotted a gas station that had diesel that looked like we could get through. The drawbacks were that it was a potholed muddy mess, and that unlike truck stops, the pump delivery was car speed rather than truck speed, and it capped a credit card purchase at $95. So it took about 10 minutes to fill up, I had to feed it my credit card twice, the rig and the Jeep got muddy, and it was about 40 degrees. But it beat running out of fuel. After we got there, I bought a new app for my iPad – AllStays/Truck & Travel that’s a truck stop guide.

When we finally pulled into the campground (odometer reading 4734, making it a 337 mile day) , it was 3:45 or so. Moab is in Mountain Time Zone, and it looks like they do recognize Daylight Savings Time, so we lost an hour coming from Arizona, and our elapsed time was a little more than 6 hours. One advantage of travelling in relative cold weather was obvious from the windshield of the DutchStar – almost zero bugs. I’m not sure what temperature they operate at, but they definitely aren’t out there when it’s below 50 degrees.

Since we hadn’t found a decent place to stop for lunch, Therese made an early dinner as soon as we got set up.

We are staying at Spanish Trails RV Park. It has some grass and some trees, and the sites aren’t overly squashed together. But 2/3 of the other campers seem to have come to the area to tear up Mother Nature with four wheelers (aka UTVs), so there is the constant sound of those things scooting around. The RV of choice here seems to be a “toy hauler” fifth wheeler, which is towed by a hitch in the bed of a pickup truck, and has a combination ramp/door in the back into which you load your UTV for transport.

After dinner, we took a ride to the town of Moab, which is about 3 miles further on Route 191. To our surprise, it’s quite a happening place. It’s in a valley between a high plateau on one side and mountains on the other, right on the Colorado River. They must use water from the river to irrigate, because it is a green oasis in this arid area. There were all kinds of restaurants and shops, and many adventure tour places (river tours, jeep tours, UTV tours, etc.) Further on, the Arches National Park was on the right, and the high plateau continued on the left. Everywhere you look there was spectacular scenery.

About 15 miles north of the town is the Canyonlands Field Airport. We pulled in to see what we could see. There was nobody there, but the FBO / terminal for air tours, etc. was wide open. I guessed the gate security code (the CTAF, for you pilots out there), so we were able to walk out on the ramp and take a quick look at the parked airplanes. There is a company that operates helicopter tours out of the airport, and I was briefly interested until I discovered that their helicopter is a Robinson 400, and there’s no way you’re getting me up in a piston helicopter in that terrain.

Therese, upon reading the National Park book that we brought with us, discovered that Arches is one of the most popular National Parks. So, we resolved to get going earlier, and we headed out at 7:30. It was a bit nippy when we stared out, about 43 degrees, with a few clouds, remarkable visibility and a light breeze. The park opens at 7:00, and there was already a continuous stream of vehicles headed in. There was no line at that time, but that was probably due to the fact that nobody was manning the gate, so everyone just rolled in for free. Our America the Beautiful pass would have gotten us in free anyway, so we didn’t feel bad.

First stop was “Park Avenue” so named because it is a fairly narrow canyon with impressive, building-like sandstone edifices on either side. We took a 1.5 mile hike down into it and back, accompanied by about 50 cheerful French tourists from a tour bus that arrived just minutes after us. We encountered them (or other French tourists from other tour buses) pretty much all day. The steep, high cliffs rising above the relative flat floor of the “avenue” is really impressive.

We continued on to Balanced Rock, careful to walk softly to avoid having it fall on our watch.

Then, we went on to our first view of actual arches – Double Arches, in the Windows section of the park. Here, a half-mile hike gets you to both North and South Arch. By this time, it was getting more difficult to find a parking space at the points of interest, but we managed.

Next stop was the Delicate Arch. We again managed to get a parking space, but it was one of very few open in a lot that has more than 100 spaces. Here we took our most strenuous hike of the day – 1.5 mile each way, with substantial elevation change and some scary (for height pansies, anyway) sections along a cliff – brought us to within a few hundred yards of the arch. This must be the one of the most popular sites in the park, because there were literally hundreds of people making this hike. The scenery all along the trail is spectacular, including the 12,000 foot mountains in the distance. In the morning when we were at Arches, the clouds obscured the peaks, but later in the day they were visible.

Along the path, there was an exciting opportunity to take a side trail to see yet more Petroglyphs!

The crowds were detracting from the experience, and we knew that we weren’t far from the end of the currently-accessible part of the park (road work has closed the northernmost part of it), so about 11:30 Therese called one of her famous audibles to leave Arches and head for Canyonland National Park. On our way out of Arches, we passed a line of about 100 cars waiting to get in – glad we missed that!

There are two separately-accessible portions of Canyonland NP – the Needles area to the south, and the Island in the Sky area about 25 miles north of Arches. We headed to the Island in the Sky area, which was closer for us, and more automobile accessible anyway.

Canyonlands is a more remote park, and has more areas for real hikers, mountain bikers, and campers to enjoy the real western nature that surrounds you there. But for us wimps, the car-accessible part of it is absolutely spectacular. You cannot begin to capture the grandiosity of the landscape in a photograph, although we did try. (I am only including a few of the pictures we took since the WiFi at Spanish Trails RV Park is, as far as I can tell, totally nonfunctional so I am having to use my iPad Wifi hotspot, giving Verizon a shot at ripping me off for bandwidth usage.)

Canyonlands was busy, but not the three-ring circus of Arches. We had no problems finding a place to park in any of the much smaller overlook parking areas. I would estimate that there were no more than 5% as many visitors as Arches.

Our first stop, just inside the park, was Shafer Canyon Overlook. You don’t get much of a look at the canyons driving up to the park, or on the road before Shafer Canyon, so taking the short walk to the overlook point is a real “wow!” moment. You’re up on a cliff that must be 500 feet high, looking down at a huge canyon. Unexpectedly spectacular.

From there, we went to the Green River Overlook, where you can see one of the rivers responsible for the canyons – the Green River (the other is the Colorado). I think the “Green” name must have come from the trees (real trees, not the pygmy junipers that grow in the rest of the park) along its banks. It is similarly awe-inspiring.

Next stop was Upheaval Dome, a large rock thrust up out of the ground. A walk of about a mile reveals a large crater that is either meteoric or volcanic in origin (it seems the origin is still in debate).

Then, the Buck Canyon Overlook (more of the unbelievable vistas), and finally Grand View Overlook, where the French tour bus caught up with us to provide them and us a panoramic view of buttes, mesas, plateaus, canyons, and mountains. By the time we finished taking in that sight, it was nearly 4:00, so we called it a day and took the scenic drive back “home”.

Most of the day was in the low 50’s, but when we got back to Spanish Trails RV Park, it warmed up to the low 60’s, so we ate outdoors for only the second time on the trip. Still no bugs!

If you want my recommendation when visiting Moab, Utah, do not miss Canyonland. Arches is a nice stop, too (get there as early as you can), but Canyonland is a must-see bucket list item.

Since we had planned only a relatively short 240 miles to our next stop (OK RV Park in Holbrook, Arizona), we got off to a leisurely start on Tuesday morning and departed Albuquerque at about 10:15. Our route required two turns – one to get on Interstate 40, and a second at the Holbrook exit. Traffic was reasonably light, but there was a 25-30 mph gusty quartering headwind, which required continual steering inputs to deal with. The landscape became less interesting as we headed west, and by the time we got into Arizona, it was pretty much just reddish brown dirt with scrubby little plants (sagebrush?). The highest elevation we encountered was about 7200’; Holbrook is just a bit over 5000’, and Albuquerque is at 5300’, so we climbed quite a bit (and the temperature was down to 45 degrees at one point) and then descended. At some parts, there were some mountains in the distance to make it a little less boring. We also hit a few minutes of rain, just enough to undo some of Sal’s good work getting the rig nice and clean (while we were in Las Cruces), but more than enough to coat the Jeep with a layer of crud over the off-road dust. At a steady 64 mph, we made the trip in just over 3 ½ hours, ending with the odometer reading 4397. Since we crossed over to Pacific time at the Arizona border, we arrived at about 12:45 (correction, Arizona is permanently on Mountain Standard Time, so when Daylight Savings Time is in effect in all the other states, it has the same time as the Pacific Time zone, but when Standard time is in effect, it’s the same as Mountain time zone. The west is full of weird stuff like that).

OK RV park is aptly named, it is Ok, but certainly nothing to write home about. There are some trees on the grounds, but none particularly close to our campsite. The park is right next to a mobile home park, and in fact we are at the campsite that borders that neighborhood. Since this is the first such park we have been at, I’m not sure whether that’s good, bad or indifferent; we might have an opinion on that by the time we leave Thursday morning. One positive comment is that they have the best WiFi of any campground we’ve stayed at (update Wednesday – when it works, it’s fast. Sometimes it just gives up).

It was about 60 degrees and very windy, so we changed to jeans and broke out the jackets.

Our main destination in the area is the Petrified Forest/Painted Desert National Park, which we plan to visit tomorrow. So with time on Tuesday afternoon (and no reason to hang around the OK RV Park), Therese explored the area on her smart phone and discovered that the Meteor Impact Crater was only about 60 miles away, further down I-40. We had seen the crater from the air on a previous flight from Pennsylvania to California, so we decided to check it out from ground level. With the high speed limits in the west, it took less than an hour to get there. It is privately owned, and they clearly have the profit motive in mind, but it wasn’t a terrible gouge at $18 each (we could have gotten in for $16 each, except Therese pretended not to notice the senior discount that applies when the first letter in your age is an ‘s’).

We first went out to see the crater from the catwalks and platforms that they built coming out of the visitor’s center, and it is really quite spectacular.

It’s about 600 feet deep, and ¾ of a mile across. The 600 foot depth is probably 450 feet down, and a rim of 150 feet above the surrounding (flat) desert. It looks (from the air, as I recall, and from the ground) just about perfectly round. It is believed to have been formed about 50,000 years ago by a meteor approximately 150 ft. in diameter, weighing several hundred thousand tons, striking the ground from the east at about 40,000 mph.

The was an ongoing debate in the late 1800’s through about 1920 as to whether it was a meteor impact crater or volcanic in origin. The earlier researchers, when they could not find large meteor chunks in the crater, concluded that it was volcanic despite the lack of lava rock in the area. Later researchers came to realize that the meteor itself shattered and largely vaporized from the energy dissipated in the impact, explaining the lack of large fragments in the crater.

We watched a 10-minute movie about the meteor and the crater, and looked through the museum at the visitor’s center. We would have liked to take the guided walking tour around the rim, but they suspended those because the winds (now 30-40 mph) were too strong to safely walk on the rim. Since we had gotten a pretty good view of it from the platforms, I don’t think that was too much of a loss, so we headed back to the OK corral. The temperature is forecast to be about 40 degrees overnight, so we will be using the Dutch Star’s heat pump and floor heating to stay warm. Roughing it is tough, but somebody’s got to do it.

Wednesday morning, I decided I couldn’t stand a car as dirty as the Jeep, so I dry-washed it using Optimum No Rinse (few things in life work as well as that). Afterwards, Therese took it to the grocery store (with strict instructions not to hit any dust, rain or bugs on the way). By the time all that was done, it was about 10:00 before we started the 25-mile drive to Petrified Forest Painted Desert National Park.

We had perfectly clear skies (with the low humidity here, visibility must be 100 miles or so), but the temperature was a little chilly at about 58 degrees (it later warmed to about 68), and the winds were still pretty stiff – at times up to 40 mph or more.

We stopped at the visitor center, got the map for the park, and then went through the entrance gate – free with our America the Beautiful pass! There is a 28-mile drive (one way) through the park, with some scenic overlooks and side drives out to points of interest. The north part of the park, which is where the entrance is located, is the Painted Desert part. The scenery from the very first overlook was pretty spectacular, you’re on the basalt volcanic high ground that didn’t erode, looking out over 200+ million years of sediment that has eroded in various patterns. The sign said that the variations in colors were mostly due to the varying concentration and oxidation levels of the iron in the different sediment layers.

After snapping some pictures at the first three scenic overlooks, Therese decided to scan through the pictures to make sure they were coming out. Uh-oh, it seems she (or someone who was uploading pictures to the computer for the web site) left the SD memory card in my computer. So those pictures weren’t saving, and we had to go to Plan B, so all the pictures from Petrified Wood Painted Desert are from my iPhone. BTW, that’s a big pain, because when you upload iPhone pictures, they all come out upside down, so you have to edit each one. They may still come out upside down on your browser. Try Microsoft Edge if you have it, they look right there. Chrome and Safari seem like a crapshoot whether they’re right side up or updside down. How hard can it be to get that right, Apple? Maybe its WordPress’s fault, who knows, but I can tell you that it is beyond irritating.

Pretty soon, we came to where historic Route 66 at one time bisected the park. It’s all gone now, but there’s a nice little memorial where it once stood.

As you head further south you get to the “Blue Mesa” formations, which have a much different color (you guessed it, more bluish). The rock and sediment formations are amazing, but nearly as striking is the total desolation beyond the park. As far as you can see, the only evidence of humans is the other visitors on the park road, and occasionally Interstate 40. The other thing you notice is that it isn’t really possible to capture the grand desolation of these vistas with a camera – you can only get the true feel  of it in person. Nobody lives out here. No vegetation larger than a bush can survive in the wild here.  I think we saw maybe two trees all day, and even the large bushes that were common in New Mexico are absent in this area.

Further down the road is the Puerc0 Pueblo site, which has the ruins of an old Pueblo Indian community. For those of you who haven’t had enough, there were also some fascinating petroglyphs. The next stop was called “Newspaper rock” where the park’s largest collection of petroglyphs is found. Fortunately for me (and for you, lest you be subject to another diatribe concerning same), even Therese had seen enough rock scrawls to skip it.

Which brings us to the Petrified Forest part of the park. When I heard “Petrified Forest” before we left home, I was thinking of a nice thick green forest with trees growing and some that had fallen getting petrified somehow. Obviously that isn’t happening in Arizona, so how, you may ask, is it possible that they have huge petrified trees when the climate apparently can’t support even tiny live ones? The answer is that the ground upon which we were standing wasn’t always at its current ~35 north, 110 west coordinates. 220 million years ago, it was a tropical forest at 2 degrees north latitude, part of the large “Pangea” land mass that eventually broke apart and moved slowly to its current position through continental drift. The trees that fell into the streams and swamps and became submerged gradually swapped the organic matter for quartz and other minerals until they became the petrified remnants you see today.

The Crystal Forest area has the largest concentration of petrified wood, and there’s a mile-long trail through it, so we walked that (at some risk of being blown back to Texas, because that was about the time that the winds were the strongest). Petrified wood is cool, but to tell the truth, you can look at about five pieces of it and you’ve seen all the variety you’re going to see.

One thing I noticed was that there were lots of petrified logs that looked like someone had cut them up to firewood length with a chainsaw. The cuts in them were nice and straight and reasonably evenly spaced.

However, that is definitely a natural phenomena – inside the Rainbow Forest Museum at the south end of the park they had an 18-inch diameter petrified log, and the exhibit said that it had taken two days with a diamond saw to make the cut, and then two weeks to polish the surface.

After the museum, it was about 4:30 (Mountain Standard Time), so we called it a day and headed back to the beautiful OK RV Park in Holbrook.

Today’s selfie:

It’s a good thing there isn’t a scale in the rig. While driving down the road, I snack pretty much continuously  – trail mix, apples, grapes, cookies, cashews, whatever is handy – driving is hungry work, I keep telling Therese. Then she keeps overfeeding me. Tonight was no exception, we had a delicious shish kabob she bought at Whole Foods in Albuquerque.

Stay tuned for our next stop in Moab Utah to see Arches National Park.