Falling Down the Grand Staircase

After leaving Horseshoe Canyon I was at a bit of a loss regarding what to do with myself. The majority of my planning had focused on the Canyonlands portion of the trip, and beyond that I only had a mental checklist of places in the general area that I wanted to check out.
The next day was my personal Y2K, as everything in my charge that had the potential to break broke- all at once. While giving my bike the morning once-over, I snapped the head off of a chintzy plastic bolt on my radiator while attempting to tighten it. I patched the hole with epoxy and was feeling pretty smug about my quick fix until I passed the city limits sign, the radiator got up to pressure, and a scalding stream of antifreeze burst through the patch and out onto my left knee. This time I went by the directions supplied with the glue, cleaned the hole with alcohol and sanded it clean before repatching it and this time, it held. Thanks QuikSteel! (The Quickest Steel in the West, all rights reserved)
And then I noticed that my phone didn't work anymore. Now, I don't want to be labeled a nutcase here ( as if that didn't already happen ten years ago), but the phone's demise started directly after I left the Great Gallery pictographs in Horseshoe Canyon. I took it apart and everything inside seemed to be in " Ship shape and Bristol fashion" as mariners sometimes say- it was just mysteriously fried, even though it had stood up to years of greater abuse, so I have to attribute it to those ghostly gazes staring at me down across time. Its only logical.
Well at least I still had Twitter if I got in a jam. I imagined my final tweet:

Me and the bike are having a relaxed afternoon getting to know
my new broken pelvis. Please, for the love of God, if you are
reading this please send help to the following locatio...
[SORRY, CHARACTER LIMIT EXCEEDED]

So, a bit demoralized, I pulled into a gas station in Torrey, Utah, sat down at a picnic table with a large coffee and hoped that someone would come by and give me further instructions.
And they did!
A middle aged guy pulled up, the back of his truck holding a mean looking earth-saw (my new favorite term for a dirt bike) He ambled over and struck up a conversation about my trip. The winds of time have stolen his name from me, but I do remember his motorcycling pseudonym: "Dakar Dad". I told him I was planning to ride Highway 12 to Boulder but he had better things in mind for me:
"Look, I can't in good conscience tell you not to ride Route 12, because it truly is beautiful. But, everyone and their mother on a Harley rides it and if you want to do something different, put another notch on your pistol, so to speak, you should ride the Notom Road to Boulder."
He told me that the Notom road was a dirt route down the east side of Capitol Reef National Park with beautiful scenery and that I could then catch the Burr Trail road over Capitol Reef and into Boulder. It would take a little longer than Route 12 but would be much cooler.
Agreed. Unfortunately, Dakar Dad had to take off back to his "job" and "commitiments" so he couldn't ride with me, but like a true gentleman, he offered to give me his Utah state atlas, which showed the location of every road, mesa, trail, napping rancher and elk carcass in the state. Thanks again for your help and generosity if you're out there, DD!
Feeling like I had been born again, what with my new marching orders and all, I double backed to Capitol Reef and found the entrance to the Notom Road. Now, for those among you who didn't learn about Capitol Reef in American History 235: More Giant Rocks That blocked Mormon Progress, here's the rundown. Capitol Reef is a really long, to the tune of 150 miles, fault in the earth's crust, just like the San Andreas in California, except much taller, wider and more colorful.
The problem with the park is that it is best viewed from an airplane, where you can see the pattern of alternating and contrasting rock layers marching off to the horizon. On the ground you can't really discern the overall pattern, and it just seems like you're in, well, Utah. But of course by this point in the trip I was a bit jaded, and if I had gone directly to Capitol Reef upon arriving in Utah I probably would have been blown away.
"Quit talking, Tom, you windbag, and show us some damn pictures"

"Certainly":






You can say that again!



I think its coming towards us, Pa!







My favorite pic of the trip, I think









My lens cover got stuck on this one so take it or leave it


Late in the day I finally arrived in Boulder, a burg which the more hyperbole-minded among us call the Paris of the Aquarius Plateau. This tiny place holds the distinction of being the last town in the lower forty eight to be reached by the gallant men and women of the US Postal Service. It is quite the little high-altitude Shargra-La, with several rustic looking restaurants that apparently boast world class chefs. The ten people who live here appeared to be cooler and more with it than the majority of the US population. While enjoying a dinner of salt-and-vinegar chips with a side of coffee (the fifth of the day) in a gas station parking lot, I realized that it would be a shame if I didn't visit Bryce Canyon, as it was only one hundred miles away and in addition to its close proximity it also resided at the tail end of Route 12, considered to be one of the most scenic highways in America. I made a deal with the Devil at this particular crossroads that I would go to Bryce but no further, as I didn't want to find myself in Long Beach on the Sunday night before I was supposed to be back at work.
Anyway, if you've been prodigal enough with your precious time here on earth to have read this entire blog, you know by now what happens when Tom strikes upon a notion; so in typical fashion and again with a totally inappropriate meal for the expected conditions ahead in my stomach, I saddled up and headed off across the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument towards Bryce. In order to best understand the National Monument phenomenon, imagine this conversation occurring in a DC boardroom filled with cigar smoke, c1956:
"Well, Jones, the farmers can't make heads or tails of it?
"No, sir."
"What about minerals? Have we had our people look into oil, aluminium?"
"Nothing there, Senator Johnson."
"Well, surely senators, there's Indians we can relocate."
"With all due respect, sir, we've already relocated them all."
"Gentleman and members of the committee, it looks like we have a National Monument on our hands."

But just because an area is useless to the Intelligent Ape doesn't mean it isn't beautiful, and in most cases the opposite is true, and the Grand Staircase was no exception. Right out of Boulder, route 12 soars out above the pearl-white canyons of the Escalante River, winding along the top of a narrow rock spine with great chasms on either side. The few roadside pullouts were filled with painters at their easels, capturing the canyon country in the late afternoon light. For the next twenty miles or so the road is cut directly into the sandstone canyon walls:





The country in these here' parts was much more inviting than the canyonlands. The pinkish white rock here had a more rounded and soft contour, and looking at it didn't immediately scorch my retinas like the surface-of-Mars stuff at Canyonlands. It felt Fall-like at this higher elevation and I could taste a little moisture in the air. I even detected a slight scent of decaying leaves, though I didn't want to believe it after not having had seen a proper tree in weeks.
As the evening descended on our Rank Stranger, some higher force enticed me to keep pushing on, even though I knew that riding at dusk is pretty unsafe and can quickly devolve into "cartwheeling like a rag doll through the rocks and underbrush at dusk". However, my reservations were quickly forgotten as I hurtled on into a twilight fantasy world, the scenery becoming more and more unbelievable with every passing mile. Deciding to go to Bryce on the spur of the moment, I had no idea what was in this part of Utah or what type of country I was riding through, so everything around me was pouring into my mind label-free. Route 12 wound through a lush valley filled with grazing cows, hemmed in by hillside forests of dark evergreens, reminding me of Western North Carolina, except for the fact that the forests were capped high above by white sandstone mesas. As I flew along at 60, it began to get progressively colder, seeming like it was dropping into the forties, and I began to shiver intermittently. Now that the fading light had hidden the horizon and the equilibrium it provides and only the orb of my headlight beam remained, all my available brain power was diverted to properly leaning the bike around the turns and through the on-rushing ether, and my mind was just dumping everything else, including the surrounding scenery into my awareness without any processing. The first thing I saw were the tops of the mesas: Over in the Alps they have alpenglow, when the mountain tops remain unnaturally illuminated after sunset by conditions in the atmosphere. This was beginning to happen to the white mesas around me, and they were now glowing in the dark almost as if I was looking at them through infrared goggles. Up above the incandescent mesa tops, there was a sunset gradient of almost unnatural colors going from purple to orange, reminding me of Popsicle-box graphics from the 1980's. A minute later I looked over my other shoulder and there was a bloated crescent moon, seeming so nearby that I could have sworn that I saw a mountain behind it. The whole scene seemed completely unreal, like the curtain had just risen on an evening stage set from Oklahoma!. Flying through clouds of sweet alfalfa scent, between fits of shivering, I remember saying to myself (and this is not poetic license here), that "This is too beautiful for a human mind to handle". I began to think that maybe Bryce Canyon wasn't famous for its rocks after all, but more for the magical light that falls on them in this part of the world. Just then, a giant elk, easily the size of a moose, plodded across the road a hundred yards in front of me. As soon as its rear hoofs stepped off the road I roared through the space it had been occupying a second earlier and found myself, white-knuckled, coming into the town of Tropic. By now it was 9:30 at night, my brain was fried, it was about 45 degrees out, and the main drag of town was completely surrounded by a dome of inky darkness filled with jay-walking ungulates. I knew I couldn't go any further and just then, down the strip I saw a lone "Vacancy" light shining among a sea of tour buses, and was forced as a captive audience in freezing Tropic to pay a room rate for the night that still to this day makes me wake up in a cold sweat.

At Canyonlands People Carry Water Jugs and Maps. At Bryce Canyon They Carry Diet Cokes and Fudge

The next morning I realized to my delight that I was only two miles from Bryce Canyon. Upon arriving at the park I quickly sensed that I was not going to be that into it. As beautiful as Bryce is, the entire place is no larger than a baseball stadium, and seems as if it could have been built by any suitably motivated group of people with access to industrial quantities of colored foam. The whole place has a saccharine feel to it, and the short trails down among the rock spires are so well traveled that they reminded me of queues at Disney World. After a short hike I quickly hightailed it out of the park. But here's some pictures I got before my camera greedily consumed batteries #16 through 20 of the trip:






After paying a Summer of 2008 price for a tank of gas at "Bryce Village Delicatessen, Indian Trading Post, Fudge Liquidators and RV Axle Repair Center" I retraced my steps back down Route 12, and upon arriving in the little town of Escalante, I stopped in for a visit to the famous "Desert Doctor", a one-man savior to the motorcycle tribe who runs the "only shop within 200 miles" out of a tiny garage behind a purple-trimmed brick bungalow on an Escalante side street. The shop is surrounded by several eight-foot tall stacks of used tires that the doctor has changed out over the years for riders, and on each tire he has painted the home nation of the tire's owner:

Germany
Canada
Guatemala
The Netherlands
Australia
Maryland

Taking advantage of the temperate climate, the Doctor does most of his work at a sturdy workbench out in the driveway, Venice Beach weight-lifters style. The day I visited he was tinkering around in greasy jeans and a tank top which revealed scores of tattoos from his biker days back in his native Windy City. The Doctor had a great bedside manner, so to speak, and quickly made me feel right at home as he recounted stories of his path to Escalante:

"I was riding through on my Harley with some friends back in the seventies, when Escalante was a pretty unfriendly place and really out in the middle of nowhere. My primary drive broke outside of town, and I couldn't get a new part even for a million dollars..."

So the Doctor did what any free-spirited biker would do: He bought a cheap fixer-upper, had all his tools shipped out, and set up shop. Now, being a former metal worker, I have some appreciation for the tools of the trade, and the Doctor's one-car-garage shop had the most densely packed and bad-ass assemblage of tools that I have ever seen in my life. Every surface was covered with boxes of bolts, parts catalogs, tap-and-die sets for every imaginable fastener, nut or combination thereof; welders, torches, grinders, polishing wheels, metal lathes and various projects-in progress, including a beautiful old Harley that he was in the process of resurrecting for a client. He told me that if he couldn't get a part for someone he could probably fabricate it from scratch. He then showed me his wintertime project: An arsenal of fantastic prop weapons that he had won the contract to build for a remake of Mad Max that was being filmed in the area.
Getting down to brass tacks, I asked him if he could sell me a can of chain lube as my chain was as dry as my mouth and only slightly less dirty, but instead he let me oil my chain with his shop can, free of charge while he gave my bike a quick once-over. I thanked him profusely and he only asked me to spread the word about his shop. Thanks Dr. Desert!

After leaving Escalante I rode back to Boulder, and picked up the Burr Trail again heading south towards Lake Powell.

It took me through a beautiful red rock canyon outside of Boulder...



...then over the spine of Capitol Reef, with views of upthrust layers of red rock and the isolated Henry Mountains beyond:





...then down off the Reef and across thirty miles or so of arid and lunar-like terrain between Capitol Reef and Lake Powell:













...and finally through some more red rock country along the shores of Lake Powell...











It had been a long day, with Bryce now 150 miles away with a Desert Doctor thrown in for good measure, so I settled down at the oasis of Lake Powell and relaxed before the final leg of this comedy of errors...