Today's goal: Angel's Landing. Although it means scrapping Bryce National Park, Angel's Landing is my favorite hike, and I'm determined that we should do it before we go. I've been up 5 times already, with Tasha, Laszlo, Sarah, Nacole, and Jeffrey. It's always worth it. If you haven't been, you should go, before too many people fall and kill themselves (approx 1-2 people per year) and they either close it or neuter it.
This from Ed: "So we're up before 8 a.m., out, and we start the hike up Angel's Landing just before 9 a.m. This was a tough hike- 2.5 miles up extremely steep switchbacks climbing almost 2,000 ft. by the end. While the beginning and middle are very steep and stenuous, the last 1/2 mile is, well, treacherous. You're walking along this sliprock that is not just smooth but also slanted.... and you're on a cliff. If you slip and fall, you plummet a couple thousand feet to your death. They have these chains you can hold onto to help you out, but it's still pretty scary. And there is also a stretch that is flat but only a few feet wide with cliffs on either side of you; it's a great feeling to walk that. When we reach the top the views were indescribable. It's difficult to describe things of such physical beauty with words- you just have to go and see it to really understand."
The views are indescribable, and even pictures have a hard time capturing the grandness and sheer scale of the place. But here's a few pics anyway...
The view from our hotel
Looking back at where we've hiked from...
Standing on Angel's Landing. Sadly, no actual angels in sight...
...but at least there are a couple of handsome devils.
Time to head back down. The tree in this picture...
...is the tree on the top just to the left of Ed's finger. The little ledge just above his finger is Angel's Landing.
We get down around noon, and jump in the car to head out to Capitol Reef State Park. We need a place we can spend half a day, and Bryce is too big/awesome for that, and Canyonlands is too far out of the way. But Capitol Reef is at least sort of on the way (to Salt Lake City, where we fly out tomorrow morning), and neither of us has ever been there, so off we go.
Since we're on the road again, it's time to catch us up on mixes. First I pop in yesterday's mix:
8/24/07: Wide Open Spaces
1) Morning Has Broken - Cat Stevens
2) February Morning Drive - David Francey
3) Into the Great Wide Open - Tom Petty
4) Don't Fence Me In - Bing Crosby
5) Ramblin' Man - The Allman Brothers
6) Blowin' in the Wind - Bob Dylan
7) Desperado - The Eagles
8) Dust in the Wind - Kansas
9) The Wind - Cat Stevens
10) Gun Sale at the Church - The Beatfarmers
11) Cowtown - They Might Be Giants
12) Back in the Saddle Again - Gene Autry
13) American Girl - Tom Petty
14) Jingle Jangle Jingle - Kay Kyser
15) Theme from Rawhide - Blues Brothers Soundtrack
16) Me Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys - Willie Nelson
17) I Wanna Be a Cowboy - Boys Don't Cry
18) Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? - Paula Cole
19) A Cowboy Needs a Horse - Gonzo & Plaid
20) Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) - Big & Rich
21) A Horse with No Name - America
22) Wanted Dead or Alive - Bon Jovi
This from Ed: "The drive from Zion to Capitol Reef, most of it along Utah State Road 12, is easily the most beautiful drive I've ever done... and again, I can't tell you about nearly well enough, but everyone should do it- it's gorgeous. At one point, we were coming over a ridge and just as we get to the top and start heading down, with all this gorgeous, wide-open desert in front of us, 'Into the Great Wide Open' by Tom Petty gets to the chorus, and it was just one of those truly great moments... okay, enough of the gay shit."
A few pics from that leg:
Lunchtime! Fortunately, we've found the best home cookin' in the West.
More beautiful canyon country.
More beautiful country. And more Gus looking retarded.
Today's mix- 8/25/07: Reflections on life
1) Hello (Turn Your Radio on) - Shakespeare's Sister
2) Galileo - Indigo Girls
3) Little Conversations - Concrete Blonde
4) Slip Slidin' Away - Paul Simon
5) Only Time - Enya
6) The Long and Winding Road - The Beatles
7) Landslide - Fleetwood Mac
8) Carry on Wayward Son - Kansas
9) Gus the Theatre Cat - Cats Soundtrack
10) Superman (It's Not Easy) - Five for Fighting
11) Mrs. Potter's Lullaby - Counting Crows
12) Let's Get Together - The Youngbloods
13) People Get Ready - Eva Cassidy
14) Where Have All the Flowers Gone? - Kingston Trio
15) Sundown - Gordon Lightfoot
16) Marching Song of the Covert Battalions - Billy Bragg
17) King of Spain - Moxy Fruvous
18) Dallas - TV Themes
19) Rainbow Connection - Kermit
More from Ed: "I should say a bit about the driving- on the entire trip in general. We're having a pretty good time in the car, jamming to some sweet music, and making friends with other drivers s we go. There is a lot of shit-talking, me acting crazy (as usual) and Gus wondering if I've completely lost it. And for some reason, a ton of farting by both parties (must be those roadside diners). Those food places, by the way, are also awesome. Yes, we're getting pretty fat, but we've met some interesting people. Gus insists that people like me better because I'm friendlier, but I think he has a complex."
OK, I do not have a complex. But Ed, perhaps because of his inherently Cuban joie de vivre (or however you say that in Spanish), radiates a certain genial approachability that makes strangers want to talk to him. I've seen it at work in Manhattan bars, where more often than not we would be having a drink and chatting, and random women would come up and start talking to him. This almost never happens to me.
Now, I'm willing to grant that he has a certain Latin handsomeness that I don't have, but the staggering difference between how often that happens to him versus me cannot, I think, be explained solely by a handsomeness differential between us. At least some of it is due, I think, to what Laszlo calls an "attitude of openness" that Ed unconsciously projects. I think I have more of an "attitude of suspicion/hostility" toward strangers, which is why I perform so dismally in bars and at cocktail parties. On the second of our road trips back and forth between New Haven and St. Louis, at one point Laura said to me, almost totally out of the blue "you know, you're really kind of a snob. I mean, snob isn't exactly the right word, you're just ... extremely choosy ... about who you let in."
I suppose so. But it has been instructive on this trip, to see how stark the difference is, as we encounter waitresses, drivers, people in ballparks, etc. And it's the sort of thing I think about when driving in the wide open spaces of the West. That's why the themes of the road trip mixes for yesterday, today, and tomorrow are things like introspection, reflection, and nostalgia. If you ever need some time to think, take a drive through the big empty spaces in the West. You'll be surprised what bubbles up from the hidden places in your mind.
Anyway, we reach Capitol Reef at 615pm, 15 minutes after the visitor center closed. Fortunately, there's a little stack of maps accessible, so we grab one and find a hike we can do in the limited time before dark. We decide to walk the Grand Wash, which is a 1.5 hour hike through a totally dry river canyon. Then, when we reach the end of the Grand Wash, if it looks like there's time before dark, we'll hike up a 1.5 mile, 600 ft vertical rise trail to Cassidy's Arch.
This from Ed: "We get to the end around 730pm, and even though the sun is setting -rapidly- we thought 'Fuck it, we can get up to Cassidy's Arch and back down before it gets completely dark.' So we go... fast. It's steep at first and then levels out, so it's not too bad, but it keeps going and going all the way around the mountain until the trail ends and you have to keep walking out onto these huge rocks/boulders; it feels like you're walking on the surface of another planet."
The trickiest part is that with the trail ended, the only way to know if you're going in the right direction is that every so often there's a little stack of rocks, obviously not natural. And the tricky part about that is that it's rapidly getting dark, and we're climbing along the ridge of a mountain. And we have no flashlight.
Cassidy's Arch. It looks so small, and so close. Except that it's huge, and, it turns out, really far away.
The freaks come out at night...
Daylight fading- the landscape becomes otherworldly...
Cassidy's Arch. Let's play with perspective- two pictures taken from the same spot. This one...
...and this one. The sheer size of things around here can mess with your head.
For the record, Cassidy's Arch is very sturdy. I jumped up and down on it several times to test it. I figured if it started to collapse I would have enough time to make it to one side before plunging to my death. Of course, now the thing is probably going to collapse a couple hundred years sooner, but hopefully by then humans will have all become cyborgs and moved offplanet.
More from Ed: "We make it right at sunset (the moon is already up), and the arch is huge and awesome and we're really high up and the hike was definitely worth it. We soak it all in for a few minutes, and then we decide that we have to haul ass all the way back down. So we get started. We're moving fast, but not fast enough, and by the time we find the trail again, it is dark... completely dark. The only positive was that the moon was full, so we had the moonlight, but that was it. We couldn't really see where we were walking, but Gus led us down with his mountain man sense.
It took us 30-40 minutes to get back down to the canyon safely, and although we were happy to reach the bottom, now we had to walk 45 min back to the car through the canyon. That was a long, dark walk- darker than the hike down from the arch because the hgh canyon walls blocked a lot of the moonlight. I have to say, night hiking is pretty cool but pretty spooky. You can barely see anything, and the only way we knew where we going was that the canyon walls forced you to walk only in one direction."
Yeah, so it turns out that a flashlight is a good idea for evening/night hiking. On the other hand, it was fun telling scary stories in the dark, surrounded by long dark shadows and areas of pitch black, while walking through a deep canyon affording no clear escape route from anything. It gives you a new perspective on life.
We did make it back to the car around 945pm, and headed out for Salt Lake City, though not before stopping for some water (oh yeah, taking water with you is also a good idea on a hike, even if you think it's going to be short). By that time, all the stores in the area were closed, but at the second one we tried, Ed's natural geniality prompted the girl closing up shop to let us fill two giant cups with ice water. From there, we drove like mad for Salt Lake, and got to the outskirts a few hours later, where we promptly passed out.
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