…we will be home in about 48 hours. We are having a great time but we have been busy and, here in Yuma, the internet connection is slow.

After a great Thanksgiving holiday with my sister, Paula, and her husband, Jim – not one picture taken, but, if you are interested, here are some shots from 2017 – we are back on the road. Albuquerque was cold, just like Cedar City and Tonopah; we Coastal Californians are such wusses. Besides having a wonderful Thanksgiving Dinner with Jim’s daughter and husband’s, and eating lots of excellent New Mexican food, we saw Pieces of April as our stay-at-home Thanksgiving movie and Knives Out as our go-out movie. Pieces of April really is a Thanksgiving movie and Knives Out is a throwback to Agatha Christie movies and very enjoyable. I would recommend either one or both.

I am driving and Michele is taking pictures. We started this stint by driving south on the Freeway, US 24 – the 24? – listening to the last Formula 1 race of the season. We are not actually listening live, we are listening – I am listening and Michele is sometimes watching on her iPhone – to the recording on our TV at home while we are driving through a wide depression that is the Rio Grande Rift. The North American Plate is being pulled apart here and, as it does, the blocks of crust that are floating on the hot magma below tilt with one side sinking down and the other side lifting up. As the high side is lifted, it is exposed to more weather and it is eroded with the eroded material washing down into the valleys. The valleys, in turn, sink – because of the additional weight – tipping the high side higher. On US 24, we are driving on alluvial deposits that are about four and a half miles deep. We drive south for about 150 miles, then we turn right, into the Gila National Forest which – surprisingly – is the oldest dedicated Wilderness Area in the world. We are now driving across the grain towards Silver City.

As we drive west, into the dormant Mogollon-Datil Volcanic Field, we gain elevation, seeing more snow as we climb, until we run into a road closed – we don’t plow on weekends or at night – sign. We are tired and it is getting late, but we have no choice but to turn around, backtrack, and drive two hours out of our way to get to Silver City in the dark. This is the second time Google has lead us to a pass that was closed, the first time was Tioga Pass which was closed for the season and now, this unnamed pass in the Mogollon-Datil volcanic field.

Well, that was unexpected. The Hyundai is not under warranty because the problem is a cross-threaded oil pan plug. But since all the work has been by our local Hyundai dealer, they have agreed to pay for it. Thirty-six hours later than we planned, we are on our way again (worried about the weather). Bob and Kay gave us a ride down to St. George – literaly “down” we drop amost exactly three thousand feet in about 45 miles – to get the car but, first, we went to a very late lunch with Kay, Robert, and a great view. 

Our first stint was St. George to Page – Arizona – and the second Page to Albuquerque (New Mexico). The first stint sort threaded the needle between Zion National Park, to the north, and Grand Canyon National Park in the south. The route took us past Hildale and Colorado City, on the border between Utah and Arizona, the home of several groups of polygamists, made famous by Jon Krakauer in his book, Under the Banner of Heaven.

As an aside, many, if not all, of the polygamists have developed an ingenious scam. The first couple gets married both in their church and by the State of Utah. Then the guy marries a second wife in the church, but it isn’t recognized by the state. That means, when they have a child, the State of Utah considers the woman a single mother and she is eligible for welfare. So a family of one man, five wives, and twelve children, has four single mothers supported by the state. End aside.

We drove east for a while, under blue skies but with storm clouds building to our west that blocked the sun, then, just as we got to the Hildale Colorado City area, the sun dropped below the cloud cover and lit up the plateau behind the cities. The color was supersaturated as if God were shining a special light on the polygamists (BTW, the pictures are not tweaked, this was the color).

We got to Page in the dark, had a very mediocre Chinese dinner, and woke up the next morning in a new world. Cedar City is a typical Utah – read Morman – town; clean, neat, and orderly with a subtle feeling of solidity. The town of Page is spread out, messy if not dirty, and chaotic with a transitory feeling. The town started as a company town for building the Lake Powell damn and is now supported by tourists and it feels like everybody is only here for the job and would move on if necessary. It is a shock after Utah. The fastest way to Albuquerque is through the Navajo Nation (or if you prefer the Navajo Reservation). The Navajo Nation is bigger than many states and while the land is beautiful, the living is hardscrabble. The first thing we pass is the now-defunct Navajo Generating Station which was the largest coal-fired power plant in the West and one of the worst polluters in the country. But its triple plumes of toxicity are now gone.

Every once in a while, I wonder why an oil company would go to all the trouble to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge when there is so much crude still left in the Permian Basin which is much more accessible. Then I see something like the infrastructure for the Navajo Power Plant which has an 800-mile electric railroad to bring it coal or a 30-mile road near Death Valley built to service a mine that never panned out.

All-day, we’ve had one eye on the road and one eye on the darkening sky, thinking of the massive storm coming our way. When we get to Paula’s in Albuquerque, a few flakes of snow are falling but nothing is sticking. When we turn the engine off and open the doors, it starts to snow. Perfect timing.

We are waiting in Cedar City for our car. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, that’s why I bought a Hyundai. This is not the first time I’ve waited in a small town for work to be done on a car, still, they were fun-but-irritable cars, and it was not an experience I wanted or expected to repeat with a Hyundai. That’s the bad news, the waiting; the good news is the Hyundai is under warranty and the best news is we are guests of an old college friend of Michele’, Kay, and her partner, Robert. In the meanwhile, the Hyundai is at the dealer about 40 miles away, it is three in the afternoon, and it has just started snowing.

Cedar City is at the edge of the Great Basin, behind it – coming from the west – is the Colorado Plateau and within spitting distance are three National Parks, Zion, Brice, and Cedar Breaks, but that is deceptive because there are dozens of places, like Ashdown Gorge, that would be a National Park in any other state. The Colorado Plateau was once was a vast inland sea – known as the Western Interior Seaway – from about 130 to 70 million years ago. When the Farallon Plate dived under the North American Plate, it pushed this seabed up. For about 60 million years, this area had been collecting alluvia that ran down from the proto Rocky Mountain Range to the east and the Nevada Plateau in the west, now it is seven to eight thousand feet higher and eroding. The top of the Colorado Plateau is not much, high dry plains, conventionally beautiful in many areas, but the eroding edges are some of the most spectacular and enchanting places on earth.

Since we drove into Tonopah in the dark, after checking out the Mizpah Hotel – restored by the Cline Family of Sonoma and voted # 1 haunted hotel two years running – we drove down to the local Standard Station that had a view towards the area that we had just driven through in the dark. Tonopah is a mining town, starting in 1901, it produced gold and silver through the depression. Now the big money is in mining Lithium and tourism.

Then we wandered over to the local cemetery where we agreed the saddest identification tag we saw was a grave marker that said; At Rest – Laura Smith – Died September 16, 1906 – A Kind Lady – Life Became A Burden – R. I. P.

On a bluff overlooking the cemetery, are new manufactured houses that don’t have the charm of the old houses but are much, much, easier to live in. Outside of the town, is another cemetery of sorts, a World War II airbase used to train B-24 pilots.

Driving from Tonopah to Cedar City, Utah is all in the Great Basin. It’s called the Great Basin because no rivers in it flow out. Because it is in the Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow, there is not much rain so the rivers never had enough water to cut their way to the sea. But a bigger force is at play in the creation of the Great Basin; the land between Reno, in the west of the Basin, Salt Lake City, in the east of the basin, is pulling apart. 15 million years ago, they were about 250 miles apart and now they are about 400 miles apart. When they were 250 miles apart, Nevada was a high plateau – like the Tibetian Plateau today – but, as the land pulled apart it dropped, breaking into small blocks that tilt as they drop. The high side of a block is a mountain chain running north-south, the low end, a valley (or a graben, if you want to be technical). As we drive east, we drive across a valley on a straight road, then up and through the mountains on a winding road. We repeat this several times and it is great driving. We even pass a small heard of horses with a couple close enough to photograph.