Part 1 — The West
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The American West. The Old West. The Wild West. Or simply, The West.
This is the region that the National Park Service uses to describe the collective states of California, Nevada and Arizona. This was the first destination for our road trip.
There are many things which could be considered quintessentially American. I’m sure everyone has their personal favorite. Maybe it’s eating a hot dog at Fenway Park, shopping downtown Manhattan or roller blading alongside a Californian beach. For me — it’s driving through the deserts of the West. I’m not entirely sure why. Maybe it’s all those movies I saw as a kid, filmed with these lands as their backdrop. Maybe it’s the reputation that in a country called a “land of opportunity”, there’s a long history of dreamers looking towards where the sun sets.
Today, The West hosts a combined population of nearly 50M people and a GDP that exceeds either the UK or France. These are staggering numbers, especially when you consider that it was only seriously settled in the late 19th century, up to two centuries later than parts of the East coast.
To me, this region feels like a land of contrasts — particularly geographically. At one end it is bordered by the Pacific Ocean, at the other the Colorado Plateau. Here you will find the lowest point in the US, at Badlands in Death Valley National Park (278 feet below sea level). Yet also the highest in the lower 48 at Mount Whitney (14,505 feet). When driving through these States, you encounter seemingly endless flat terrain, yet both Nevada and Arizona each have over 150 mountain ranges. The largest desert, the Great Basin Desert resides here. So does the US’s largest forest outside of Alaska. Here you find cacti, yet also some of the oldest and largest trees on Earth.
The history and culture carries some of these contrasts too. California and Nevada are two of the most diverse states in the US. And while human life has prospered here for so many — it came at the expense of so many others during the region’s early years of conflict.
The West can’t be described with a single word, because it’s not a single thing. It’s a dialectic mix of contrasts. It felt fitting to me that we’d begin our long trip here. We started in Northern California and headed South and East.
Here’s the general path we took:
Highlighted on this map are all the National Parks we visited: Lassen Volcanic, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest and Saguaro.
On the way, we saw the world’s largest tree at Sequoia National Park. “General Sherman”, pictured here has a greater trunk volume than any other tree on Earth. Photos do not come close to doing it justice. To be in the presence of this tree, as with all the great sequoias, is a spiritual experience. This particular tree has an estimated age 2,000 years, meaning it was alive at around the same time as Julius Caesar. Or just as ridiculous, when the Black Death ravaged Europe in the 1300’s, or the Mongols tore through Asia, this particular tree would have been in its adolescence. Even now, General Sherman only qualifies as “middle aged” compared to the oldest Sequoias, which are as old as some of the Pyramids. Simply put, they are the oldest living things on Earth.
Both Sequoia and Kings Canyon are at high altitude and on our visit there we were above the cloud cover. This combination tends to make for spectacular sunsets and this time did not disappoint. At sunset driving back on the first night, we were treated with this view:
After the great forests, we headed over to Death Valley National Park. I’d actually been there once before. Death Valley was the actually the destination of my first road trip in the US 7 years ago. One thanksgiving weekend, I had the overwhelming urge to just drive and we took off on a Thursday morning, drove a thousand miles in two days and then turned around to be back by Sunday. It was my first taste of the long distance road trip and I was hooked. As a result, Death Valley always holds a special memory for me and fortunately this time we had more time to spend there. We started at the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, the first of three sand dunes we’d see on our journey:
That night we slept in the car within the park. We tend to do this infrequently but when we do, there’s always great memories to share afterwards. In this case, the motivation was so I could wake up early, take the short drive over to the Badwater salt flats and photograph them at sunrise. Badwater is one of the most eery and beautiful places I’ve ever been. Like the Alvord Desert in Oregon, walking out onto the flats at any time of day is quite surreal. This is especially so when the sun is just rising. Other than the obvious beauty, the thing that actually struck me was how quiet it is. Sound has the impression of traveling further. At normal speaking volume you can hear each other from over a dozen yards away, and a single car from half a mile.
It’s as if we have no idea what silence sounds like in our every day lives — there’s always ambient, background noise from something. Even as I write this now, sitting quietly at my house, I’m suddenly aware of the noise of the fridge, the heating, the occasional car outside. When it’s truly silent, as it is at Badwater, you can practically hear the nothingness. At first it almost felt like a ringing in my ears, so unfamiliar is the sensation. After a while, I realized this is what silence is supposed to sound like. It’s beautiful.
This is what Badwater looks like in Winter at 7am:
After exploring the park, our next destination was the Grand Canyon. On the way I had planned to make a short stop at Tuba City, AZ. I had read about this small detour previously — a place where one can see dinosaur footprints out in the open. We had to check it out.
Seeing these tracks at Tuba City is a surreal experience — both for the natural and human experience. The natural part of it is easy to explain. You’re looking at footprints that were created 200M years ago. Not everything you see on the walk is real, but a lot of it appears to be. I read that many footprints have been independently verified by the University of Arizona. Seeing my dogs sitting next to a dino print is a strange experience and sending the photo below to friends who had kids while I was traveling was fun. It was always met with a sense of disbelief and awe. We’ve all seen dinosaur bones on display in some museum, and certainly recreated in documentaries or movies. But there is something altogether different about looking at a footprint, out in the open, where it originally occurred.
The human part of the experience is harder to explain. These prints are on Navajo land. As you arrive, you pull over into a dirt track car park on the side of the road. You see a handful of hand written signs and a few stalls selling local goods. Someone comes to greet you, asks if you’d like a tour and states that tips are optional. The woman who was our guide was a wonderful old lady. Kind, enthusiastic and visibly poor.
In another country, even in other parts of the US, this might be a National Monument. With it would be funding, employment and protections. Here’s it felt like a small number of people trying to scrape by. It was both a wonderful experience to connect with someone who had lived here and was connected to the land, yet also sad and tragic. I hope that this place gets a measure of funding and the right kind of tourism — while also maintaining the original Navajo protections.
Then of course there is the Grand Canyon. I have little to offer in either words or pictures that has not already been said or seen. My only advice is to simply go there, if you have not already. If you go, walk beyond the rim and to explore it. I hiked down to the Colorado river when I was a teenager on my first visit here and while intellectually I had understood that this canyon was carved by water, nothing prepares you for the sensory overload of encountering a raging river in the middle of a desert. This time however, our stay was brief. We took a couple of photos, stamped our National Parks passport and left behind the crowds of the Grand Canyon. We were seeking isolation.
One of the great thing about road trips is that you can’t really plan every stop. As a result, you get to see the unexpected. After a couple of hours of driving East from the Grand Canyon, we saw a sign saying that begged further investigation. Within minutes, we were at the visitor center of the aptly named “Meteor Crater”. The crater itself is impressive — it was created 50,000 years ago when a meteorite measuring 10’s of meters crashed into the Earth at over 10km per second. I’d never seen a meteor site before and this was extremely well preserved. When you consider the effect this small rock had on the Earth, it provides a glimpse into what would happen if something larger ever made contact at this speed. The site itself doesn’t photography particularly well — I preferred this “Window with a View” as a memento.
One of my stops in The West was the Petrified Forest National Park. I hadn’t expected too much and as is often the case with lower expectations, they often lead to the best surprises. The park is beautiful and the petrified wood is very accessible. As with many things on my trip, I had understood the concept of petrification — when the organic matter is turned to stone over a very long period of time. However, I hadn’t fully appreciate that petrified trees aren’t just “like stone”, they “are stone”. It’s an amazing feeling — to touch or hold a piece of a tree. I wondered if this is how it might feel if someone ever looked into the eyes of Medusa, the gorgon from Greek mythology who would turn her victims to stone.
We managed to see a few other areas during our visit to the West. Cities like Scottsdale, Saguaro National Park, the old famous cowboy town of Tombstone. And then it was time to say goodbye to The West, land of contrasts. Next up — the Southwest.
