Sorry for the Group Email

(Via Blip. Music is Eli the Barrow Boy by The Decemberists. This video is the bookends of the Las Vegas video here. We went to Utah, then Vegas, then the Grand Canyon. It didn’t make much sense with Vegas in the middle. Hopefully you’ll allow me this tiny fraud.)

Once we’d finished variously fitting new tyres and tinkering with our new reflector, which had mysteriously malfunctioned overnight, we bade Tyson goodbye and drove off.

We did this cautiously, because the day we left was the first day of Colorado’s snow season. Lots of states in the USA have snow seasons, but few of them embark on the season with the kind of gusto as Colorado. The snow was coming down in solid avalanches and the streets were covered with a compacted light brown coating of condensed snow. The highway was as well. Highway seventy, which curls out of Denver and out into the Rocky Mountains is a challenge when it’s dry, at least by American standards. It switches back on itself and curves through stunning valleys and gorges as it winds up and down thousands of feet.

It’s harder when it’s covered in snow. The problem is, of course, that it’s hard to tell which parts of the road are simply wet, and which shiny parts are condensed patches of ice that, should you do something rash, like steer, will send you careening through the central reservation and into the path of an oncoming truck, or something similarly catastrophic.

We inched out of Denver.

After less than an hour we had made barely any headway, but we had started to see signs towards Buffalo Bill’s grave. American highways are great like this. They’re stupendously long, of course, and Americans will drive nearly unthinkable distances on them. Partly this is because they’re easy: well paved and often straight for hundreds of miles you can cover stunning distances in single days. And, in the name of pacifying backseat-ridden children, every so often you’ll find signs to some roadside miracle: a cave, perhaps, or a petting zoo, or the grave of one of America’s greatest entertainers.

It isn’t politically correct to celebrate Buffalo hunters now, largely because there used to be millions of the creatures in the United States, and a single specimen could handsomely feed an entire family, providing days of meals for native American families. Buffalo (or bison, if we wish to be precise) were the most numerous large mammal on Earth. Then the settlers arrived, and the number promptly fell to just a few hundred. From the famed native American method of using the whole buffalo in the name of economy and good hunting practice, settlers would kill a bison for the skin alone, leaving the rest of the creature to rot. Sometimes bison were hunted specifically to starve native Americans out of desirable lands.

So Buffalo Bill’s tally of more than four thousand bison in eighteen months could be taken in two ways, I suppose. In fairness, the man’s prowess when it came to knocking off bison was matched only by his ahead-of-the-time ecology: he was in favour of a buffalo season and was against hide hunting. But what made him famous was his shows: after his career as a hunter had ended (not enough bison left, perhaps), he took his show to Chicago, acting out his exploits for citizens of the big cities. He even took his show on the road, touring the UK and Europe. He met the pope.

Even if you don’t know who he is, the name is famous.

We trudged up the side of a hill to the grave, our footprints the only ones in the fresh snow. Then, we had a coffee in the deserted giftshop, and resigned ourselves to a few more hours sliding cautiously along the highway.

We spent the evening near Grand Rapids, about which I can tell you nothing. It does have a Subway, for instance. It also has a motel, but because I didn’t take notes that night I can’t tell you what kind.

The next day we broke into Utah. We turned left off the highway and headed to Moab.

Moab itself is a pleasant-enough town. It has a few restaurants and a couple of giftshops, which sell stickers of the Give Peace a Chance variety. The reason Moab exists, or at least the reason it exists in its tourist-friendly form, is the Arches national park a few miles from its limits.

The Arches are a series of seriously impressive rock formations out in the middle of the desert. Sand and wind erosion have carved spectacular rock formations from the sandstone.

The entire park – and a lot of national parks are like this – has road running through it, which means you could, if you wanted, see quite a lot of the rock formations without leaving your car. But The Arches national park has the kind of stunning natural sights that it is impossible to go there without wanting to get out of your car and head, running, into the desert.

Such an act would be rather foolhardy, of course. You’re in a desert, after all.

The most famous of The Arches is Delicate Arch, an elongated, upended horseshoe-shaped rock overlooking a canyon. This is the one in all the postcards. It’s possible to drive to a nearby lookout to peer at the arch, but the best way to see it is to walk. Delicate Arch even worked its way into the newspapers in 2001, when a photographer lit a fire beneath the arch to demonstrate night photography techniques to a group of students. The fire damaged the arch, and the photographer in question, Michael Fatali (who now no doubt wishes he’d chosen a different subject to teach), was promptly assessed a ten thousand dollar fine.

We trod carefully. Luckily, even without misguided pyrotechnics (is there any better kind?), the walk is excellent. On the way you take in Petroglyphs, permanent paintings etched into the cliff-face by the Ute Indians for whom Utah is named. You also go by Woolf Cabin, a distinctly remote-looking log cabin built by an early settler.

The Arches landscape is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Deep red rocks lurch out of the ground at every turn; some of them hundreds of feet high, while others, like Delicate Arch, appear to defy the laws of physics, and look like they might topple over at any moment.

At Delicate Arch all we could hear was the wind whistling up from the canyon floor, and the noise of our own feet scuffing along the rock. It was entirely peaceful.

So it only made sense that our next stop was Las Vegas.

Dave is adding Utah to the list of places to go back to. At this rate we’ll need to do another trip just to see them all.

And while we were in Utah we visited a real live ghost town - Grafton - for lunch. We were only there for about an hour, but you can find the pictures here. More Utah and Arches pictures can be found here.