Rock of Ages

The best way to make your getaway from the assorted vulgarities of Vegas is to head east on Interstate 15. The posted speed limit is 75 MPH, which means you draft behind SUVs barreling along at 90+ MPH. And you do it for about a hundred miles. The first stoplight is 133 miles away in Hurricane, Utah, if you’re heading to true escape in the glories of Zion Canyon. God has a vacation home in Zion, the saying goes. Who’s to question His infinite wisdom?

Following a few days of work meetings in Vegas, my family graciously extended to me a five-day yard pass, allowing me dangerous free rein to roam southern Utah. My base would be the Zion Mountain Ranch, a collection of log cabins on 3,000 acres three miles east of Zion. The ranch doubles as a buffalo reserve, home to a herd of about 40 free-grazing buffalo. There’s no cell phone reception on the ranch, no phones in the cabins, no wake up calls, no clocks in the cabins. My family was comfortable with me going off the grid. In 2004 we spent Christmas at the ranch with a scrawny runt of a Christmas tree, no ornaments. Back then my kids tired easily of my all too frequent stops to snap photographs of canyon walls and hoodoos. Today they have absolutely no interest in returning to the rocks. So go ahead dad, disappear for a couple of days.

This is my fourth trip to Zion. Every time its massive red, white and charcoal cliffs have put me in my place. First time was 20 years ago, with two friends from work. Second time was in ‘93 with the family. We stayed at the old Parry Lodge in Kanab, where movie stars drank the idle nights away during the heyday of westerns in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. Third time was Christmas, 1994. The kids agreed with reluctance to return with the promise of a few nights in Vegas.

It was April when I rolled into the ranch this time. I came in with an ugly low-pressure front from California, bringing freezing temperatures and a mix of snow and rain showers. “My girlfriend in Bakersfield says it’s raining cats and dogs there, so we’re in for a couple of nasty days,” said the owner of a unique bookstore/outfitter gear /CD/souvenir shop in Kanab. Kanab calls itself “Little Hollywood” and “The Greatest Earth on Show.” It is the county seat of Kane County, with a population of 3,564. Motels outnumber attorneys 20 to 3. The owner of one of Kanab’s two supermarkets, Glazier’s Foodtown, is a well-known local photographer. The eatery Houston’s Trail End has been family-run for 35 years.

Kanab lives off nostalgia for a west that no longer exists. What happens when the baby boomers raised on Gunsmoke, Rawhide and F Troop can no longer make the trek out here? Above the front doors of the small rooms at the Parry Lodge are the names of the stars who once stayed there: Frank Sinatra, Telly Savalas, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Arlene Dahl, Joel McCrea, Fred McMuarry, Maureen O’Hara, Ty Power, and on and on. When we stayed here over the Fourth of July in 2003 these names meant nothing to my kids. My wife was spooked by the prospects of ghosts.

So there’s something to be said for soloing to savor the rock of ages. A dusting of snow covered my rental Mitsubishi Galant the morning I grabbed two large Styrofoam cups of java from the ranch’s grill and headed east to Monument Valley. Another pleasure going it alone: you play whatever damn music you want.

The Impalas are a now-defunct surf-rock band out of Memphis, recommended to me by a know-it-all clerk at Shangri-La Records, not far from Sun Studios in mid-town Memphis. Healthy morning guitar twang and reverb to get you going.

Between Kanab and Page, Arizona, 70 miles southeast on 89 South, lies nothing save for an abandoned movie set used for “The Outlaw Josie Wales,” starring and directed by Clint Eastwood in 1976. The Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, 1.7 million acres of vermilion cliffs, sandstone sculptures, canyons, mesas and plateaus, runs along to your left. On your right, a vast expanse of flat tumbleweed desert. Utah Off Road Tours asserts it is here you can stop and “feel your place in the universe.” Also “meditate with lizards” — I thought they dart around too much to stop and chill — and “come to know yourself through knowing a landscape.”

Mystical PR. It will take longer than my five-day yard permits to gain fresh insights into the nature of the universe. I’m on a whirlwind tour, listening to loud music, blowing down empty 89 South at speeds my wife would waffle me for. I control the volume, the speedometer, and the choice of liquor. It’s a few shots of Old Grand Dad and some Zion Canyon Virgin Stout beer (“brewed with love and kindness between the walls of the great Zion Canyon”) in the evenings back at the cabin. No TV, newspapers, voice mails or emails. That Virgin Stout refers to the Virgin River that runs through the canyon, by the way. The buxom lass on the label is too politically incorrect for my wife and daughter. Another benefit of leaving the family at home.

89 East runs from Page to Kayenta, Arizona, another empty stretch of sandy, rocky nothing. You have a long and unpredictable wait if you run out of gas out here.

The Impalas’ CD runs through an impressive 30 songs. I continue the surf theme with a new CD by Surf Blood, less classic surf and more a melodic attack of pop guitars. Well-known lone travelers run through my mind as I think of nothing in particular: William Least Hurt Moon, Thoreau, Kerouac, Hunter Thompson, and Edward Abbey, the bearded bard of the West, described on his web site as a desert anarchist “mocking the mindless bureaucrats hell-bent on destroying it.

The wide-open, wild west (despite Abbey’s old school protests, desolation is a few miles down an “unimproved” gravel road) has the effect on stress the same as an Ansel Adams photograph. One night at the Zion Ranch grill I hear the chef tell a dining couple about all the touristos who drive out from Vegas for a “cleansing.”

The road and remoteness is also tonic for your inner outlaw. “Resist much, obey little” advised Walt Whitman. It’s a tradition in the U.S. created by revolutionaries, mythologized by Zane Gray and Hollywood. But as the west was been tamed — Eisenhower’s national interstate infrastructure, Indians shunted off to the rez in America’s version of apartheid, cars now banned from Zion National Park April through October— who really resists anymore? Especially in 2010 after being beaten down by the recession for a couple of years.

What fight is left is channeled through Willie Nelson. Or Ronny Elliott. He’s next up on my CD player. A hillbilly rock and roll guitar twanger-banger out of a Tampa garage originally. In fact played with bands called the “Outsiders” and the “Outlaws.” Now plays with a bunch of self-described misfits called “The Nationals.”

I enter the Navajo nation near Kayenta in northwest Arizona. How “mindless bureaucrats” corralled and forced the Navajo into an estranged nation of misfits (from mainstream America and with numerous exceptions to be sure) is simply a bullshit embarrassment.

Consider these facts: 165,673 Navajo live on the rez in northern Arizona and southern Utah; median age is 24. Sixty percent live without telephones. Median family income is $22,392. Forty percent of families live below the poverty level. About one-third of the housing is without complete plumbing.

Ronny Elliott’s reedy bluesy vocals, long gone and aching, with harp, mandolin and a stinging steel guitar, are appropriate for the rez.

About 30 miles from Kayenta on 163 North is Monument Valley. I arrive on a postcard-perfect afternoon to bounce along the 17-miles gravel loop through what the Navajo call the “Valley of the Rocks.” About 570 million years ago the valley formed the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. The waters subsided as the Pacific and North American plates shifted, and about 65 million years back the mud from the ocean floor became sandstone, giving rise to Monument Valley’s Elephant Butte, Three Sisters, The Hub, The Thumb, Mitchell Mesa, Thunderbird Mesa, Spearhead Mesa, Sentinel Mesa, Gray Whiskers and Camel Butte.

The valley is bathed in red from iron oxide; some canyons and buttes are a darker blue-gray from manganese oxide. The towering rock monuments are icons of American rugged individualism. Maybe that’s what attracts curious tourists from around the globe — the chance to get a sense of America’s still adolescent spirit. I hear as many foreign accents and languages at the Monument Valley visitor center as I do English speakers. Sure, it’s April and American family vacations are months away. But I get the weird sense Europeans and Asians are more interested in our history than we are. Same feeling came to me a few summers back walking the rolling hills of Custer’s Last Stand in eastern Montana, where foreign tourists seemed predominant.

During the evening drive back to the ranch from Monument Valley, damn if I don’t nearly run out of gas. Out of nowhere I see the needle resting on E. A road sign indicates 30 miles to Kanab. This will be close.

The CD plays some more outlaws: Simon Stokes, a biker Willie Nelson with a long white beard, ponytail, tattoos up and down both arms. On the CD cover he’s sitting at a bar with another biker, both dressed in black. What else?

Miles Davis, up next, was an outlaw to his soul. Didn’t give a flying fuck what anyone thought. Played what he wanted, fans, critics be damned. Growled at the audience in something of an old man’s raspy hiss on the concert CD I’m playing. Proved Duke Ellington right — made music beyond category. Miles’ late period space jazz is well-suited for empty desert travel. Music to contemplate your place in the universe? Don’t get that heavy on Miles.

Too bad towns like Tesgi and Kaibeto on the road to Kanab don’t have gas stations. I don’t even see the towns, just the signs.

Outside of Kanab I put $53 dollars of gas in the Galant at a Phillips 66 station. The red canyon cliffs surrounding Kanab are radiant red in the setting sun, and I follow one brilliant sliver of glowing red rock to a place called Tom’s Canyon. From 1880 to 2000 this was Tom Robinson and sons’ ranch, where they raised crops and graze cattle. The Hollywood people loved to film here because it’s so close to town and the Parry Lodge. But now the canyon is paved with curvy boulevards named Donner Circle, Rainmaker Road, Cutter Trail. Empty lots are tagged with markers: Lot # 115 and so on. You can purchase a Tuscan style abode with 2,135 square feet of living space, or The Knolls, done in the southwestern style with 2,563 square feet. “Live everyday where you love to vacation!” says the billboard on Mohawk Drive.

So we’re not at the ends of the earth. Heroic rock outcroppings become development backdrops.

I decide to traverse up to Capitol Reef National Park the next day to say I was there. This evolves into a nine-hour jaunt through bizarre weather (hail, snow, snow showers, windswept rain, sometimes drenching) and fantastic scenery (crystallized white woods of the Dixie Forest, low-lying snow clouds, expansive white and yellow canyons, tight S curves through Rocky Mountain-like high forests, and the white domes of the park that do indeed resemble capitol architecture). Capitol Reef is in what’s called south-central Utah. Coming from Kanab there is but one road in and out, via 89 North to 12 East to 24 East, past Boulder, Escalante, Torrey, Tropic, and appropriately, Box Death Hollow Wilderness.

Damn if a tricked-up black Jeep suddenly flashes dashboard lights in my rear view mirror. I’m ticketed $165 by Officer Dunton for speeding 52 MPH in a 30 MPH zone through the tiny burg of Escalante.

The road to Capitol Reef is not for the vertigo-challenged. S curves time and again scale up and down canyon walls. Past Boulder a summit marker reads 9,600 feet. Outside it feels like February. What travelers, hikers I see wear parkas and gloves. It’s about 40 degrees. Snow clouds render the land white or gray. There is no other color. A sign points to Hell’s Backbone. Indeed.

On my way back I calculate I’ve got to make it to Angels Landing in Zion today. Tomorrow I have a few hours in the morning, then the drive back to Vegas and a 2:40 pm flight home to Philadelphia.

Watermelon Slim is on the CD player. Name about says all you need to know. Then a dude dubbed “The Hillbilly Cat” from 1955. The clouds have cleared, the sun is out bright over Moss Cave, about three to five miles from Bryce Canyon, elevation 7,777 feet (positive encouragement to press on). I get out of the car (you cannot see the west from a damn automobile, said Edward Abbey) to hike across the Tang orange soft gravel hills and a nest of red rock hoodoos. No self-absorbed reflection. Better to follow Thoreau’s dictate: Why am I in the woods if my head is some where else?

By the time I reach Angels Landing it’s what filmmakers call “the magic hour.” That short window of time, less than 60 minutes in the evening, when the low sun produces a fantastic shadow and light show off the rock of ages. I’m running late so I say screw the car ban, ignore the flashing road sign “Red Permits Only Beyond This Point” and park in an empty lot near the Old Grotto. Will the eco-police tow my rental away? Give me a ticket? A warning? What will be my defense: The shuttle goes too slow?

For whatever benevolent reasons, the Galant sits where I left it when I return from Angels Landing, still the only car in the lot. Back home in Philadelphia, no doubt, that car would’ve been long gone and I’d have a long walk to the park police.

There is no obesity epidemic on Angels Landing. What hikers I see are wiry and fit. The trail is what the park service defines as a “strenuous.” A five-mile, supposedly five-hour hike. An incline gain of 1,488 feet to reach the flat, white rocky summit at 5,785 feet. Two middle-aged women in shorts share the summit with me; one breaks out a kite to fly. “Isn’t she crazy?” says her friend. “No. You sure have enough wind up here,” I say. “Well, that makes you both crazy.”

I don’t’ know about crazy. An aging adolescent, as Abbey called himself, yes, that I’ll concede. Call me a guerilla resistor. For three full days, not counting the transit days from Vegas and back, I don’t think about much and it feels good. Appropriately, 1970s British pub rockers Dr. Feelgood are the last band on the CD player, after Jack-O and the Tennessee Tearjerkers. Again, their name says enough

The canyon floor of Zion on the Saturday morning I leave for Vegas is a riot of vibrant green coming alive on aspens, cottonwoods, Ponderosa Pines, and oak trees along the Virgin River. The azure sky is cloudless. The sun is brilliant. My yard pass is set to expire. I exit, turning in whatever road warrior credentials I have, to blend back into the suburbs.