ROAD TRIP USA A Journey through California, Arizona, Utah and Nevada
PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARK MEREDITH
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ROAD TRIP USA WE got our kicks off Route 66 — but we did journey down America’s most famous road for a while, somewhere in Arizona, though much of it’s long been by-passed for new highways better suited to cope with the demands of 21st century traffic. And for the uninitiated driver in America, like me, those highways can be quite terrifying: so many lanes, so little time to exit the on-ramp, no one slowing down to let you in; you just put your foot down to the floor and hope for the best. We decided on a US road trip in May and flew to San Francisco from New Zealand in early July, high summer, hottest temperatures, not especially sensible. I had spent a few weeks planning our 2
route, booking accommodation along the way, not an easy task in peak holiday season when half of America seems to want to visit the same places. The route was to be determined largely by the ability to experience natural wonders and culture, the perfect mix. Daughters Robyn and Ally wanted culture, which meant shopping and Disneyland. I wanted to photograph the great American wilderness and national parks, while Roslyn was just happy to be anywhere but Auckland in winter. We decided on a loop which would encompass the culture of San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas and take in the wilderness of the Grand Canyon,
Bryce Canyon National Park and Yosemite. It would take us almost three weeks in our Chevy Captiva, an SUV I really enjoyed driving, except for its terrible turning circle. We had two GPS systems to help us navigate, sometimes talking to us at the same time: the English lady from Google Maps on my iPhone who we christened Pat, who was very well-spoken; and Margaret from my cousin’s sat-nav, an American lady and, I’m sorry to say, loud and rather brash. The way to properly experience the National Parks is to ensure you find accommodation inside the parks. While you may pay more for doing so location really is everything. In summer long queues of traffic form at the park
Above: The road to Vermillion Cliffs. Opposite, clockwise: the girls at Bryce Canyon; Paris, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon Lodge, North Rim, sunset
entrances — over 5 million people visit both Yosemite and Grand Canyon each year. By staying in the park you avoid frustrating delays and can get to the best spots at sunrise or stay until dusk. It made all the difference to our enjoyment of these incredible places. The highlights? The amazing diversity of the American landscapes and the genuine hospitable nature and friendliness of the Americans we met along the way. What a country! Our USA road trip was the holiday of a lifetime, an unforgettable experience. Here it is in photos for you to enjoy, as it happened. We’ll be back!
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The Testarossa winery cellar built into the hills above Los Gatos
PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY By the time we set out from Los Gatos I had all of one hour’s driving practice on US roads., but the PCH proved to be a gentle, if tiring introduction.The aim was to overnight in Santa Barbara but it took almost the whole day to get there. After Monterey the scenery picked up and the drive turned out to be every bit as dramatic as we had heard it would be. The highlights were the genteel, upmarket community of Carmel where we had pizza, and the bridges that spanned the cliffs along the rocky coastline. No time to explore Big Sur. We loved Santa Barbara, the shopping, the little malls with statues and expensive boutiques, and especially the beautiful Santa Barbara Mission. If I was to live in California, it might be somewhere like that, where the sea is warm. We became accidentally separated from the PCH and only found it in again Malibu which was rather disappointing: you can’t see the sea for houses along the road, not even a peep. Our PCH adventure ended in a horrendous traffic jam in LA and, eventually, at wacky Venice Beach — what a great place.
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Clockwise: Ally cuddles up to a cute sculpture in Carmel; Carmel fire station; PCH hugs
Clockwise: Carmel market; PCH photo stop; elephant seals frolick; the PCH; San Simeon castle with zebras; girls stretch their legs; at Santa Barbara beachfront
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Waxing moon over Santa Barbara pier
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Santa Barbara Mission 9
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Santa Barbara seafront
La Arcada Mall sculptures, Santa Barbara
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Both pages: Venice Beach
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Santa Monica beach and funfair
On Rodeo Drive, Hollywood
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Hollywood & Beverly Hills
The Disneyland experience , very hot, tiring and amazing
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GRAND CANYON South Rim For as long as I can remember I had longed to see this place and it was everything I had hoped for. After a 10-hour drive from our Disneyland hotel, we finally arrived after a very interesting journey, our first introduction to the desert landscape of South West America. The heat was overpowering, but as we climbed upward to the 7,000ft elevation of the canyon’s South Rim, it cooled, a little. On the way we ran into a spectacular thunderstorm which arrived at the canyon that night trapping us in a restaurant, the sky filled with non-stop flashes and bangs. The Grand Canyon’s scale is incredible and the geology unbelievable, that a river could carve such a thing. You need at least two days to see it properly, and more if you have the stamina to hike into the canyon. We found the elevation a problem. It made any exercise difficult especially in the heat, which was in the 90sF. Pick a good spot for the sunset and get there in good time. My advice, get up early before the crowds and experience its magnificence in solitude; when all you can hear are the sounds of birds, clicking of crickets and the hum of the wind washing around the trees high above the silvery river as the canyon wakes up.
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Clockwise top left: Ros at El Tovar overlook; on her own at Mather Point, dawn; at Moran Point; girls at Yavapai Point on our arrival
Lipan Point sunset
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Clockwise: Robyn at Navajo Point; family shot at Navajo Point’Ally at Lipan Point; girls at Grandview Point
Sunise from Mather Point
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Clockwise from top: Moran Point; photographer at work, ypurs truly, Lipan Point; Colombus escapees at Navajo Point; Lipan Point
Clockwise top left: dawn; sunset; sunset; dawn
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Watchtower with Pueblo Indian art, at the western end of the Grand Canyon
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Thunderclouds gather on the approach to the South Rim
VERMILLION CLIFFS On The Road Between The Rims To get from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon to the North Rim you must drive for about four hours, 215 miles. If you were a bird you need only flap 10 miles from one side of the canyon to the other. But then you would miss out on the road between the rims and Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, the most striking feature on a never less than fascinating journey This was the landscape of so many western movies I grew up with, Apache indians in a red landscape under big skies. We passed many indian roadside stalls in the baking desert heat, all competing with each other to scrape a living from passing tourists. Vermillion Cliffs appear through the heat haze, a red wall 3,00ft high running across the flat, arid landscape against an azure sky dotted by white, puffy clouds marching away to infinity. At Navajo Bridge, which straddles the blue/green Colorado River, temperatures were now topping 110F. Â Navajo indians continued a brisk trade in a series of stalls swept by a baking desert wind beneath towering cliff walls, cracked with fissures and crumbling sandstone faces. It seems an unbearably harsh place.
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Clockwise, top left: Flag depicting Apache chief Geronimo; Colorado River from Navajo Bridge; native indian settlement below Vermillion cliffs
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Visitors gaze at the sunset through the windows of Grand Canyon Lodge
We’ve agreed that staying at Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim was the highlight of the trip. For a spectacular setting this really can’t be beaten. Just breathtaking. At 8,000ft the Lodge is closed for much of the year due to snow and is only open from May to October, and it is the only place to stay on the North Rim. As a result it gets only about 10 per cent of all visitors to the Grand Canyon. While some may say, rightly, that the best views of the canyon are on the South
Rim, the ambience and incredible location of the Lodge right on the edge of the canyon walls make it that much more memorable. It is also cooler with greener, thicker vegetation: forests of aspens, ponderosa pine, juniper and spruce with meadows of grazing bison. About 10 years ago part of the canyon’s forests suffered very extensive fire damage, and we drove through huge tracts completely burnt out, but now they are regenerating with young, green aspen trees
GRAND CANYON North Rim North Rim brightening up the charred landscape. We were told that the park will not put out any fires as they were caused by natural causes, lightening strikes. The Lodge itself is a wonderful building with huge floor to ceiling windows in the dining room, and the food was pretty good too. Walk directly out of the doors of the Lodge and you can head down the Bright Angel Point Trail. It was amazing. The path drops away on either side and you find yourself on a finger of granite
affording magnificent views of the canyon far below. You need to drive to get to the other overlooks, which are not as plentiful as the South Rim. The most enjoyable moment was sitting on the veranda at sunset, margarita in hand, watching the sky and canyon walls changing colour, everyone around us excited, awestruck, almost in disbelief at our good fortune to be in such a location.
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Just o the path of the Bright Angel Point trail
Shadows lengthen over the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, viewed from the Bright Angel Point trail
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Top left and above: Angels Window, one of the scariest lookouts we’ve ever been to
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Midday thunderstorm at Roosevelt Point; opposite, at Roosevelt Point
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Vista at Cape Royal
The things people do! Crazy behaviour on the Bright Angel Point trail
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Top: views from Point Imperial
Bottom: At Roosevelt Point
Top: sunset from Grand Canyon Lodge Bottom left: Ros chills out at our cabin
Right: Ally on the Lodge balcony
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Top: Sunset and showers over the Lodge
Left: Grand Canyon Lodge entrance
Right: lounge at the Lodge
One of the balconies at the Lodge, the place to sup a sundowner
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Views from Bright Angel Point trail
The Lodge of Stars
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Bison roam the meadows alongside forest on the approach to the North Rim
BRYCE CANYON Bryce Canyon National Park is named after Ebenezer Bryce, a Mormon settler who came to the area with his wife Mary in 1874, and built a house at the mouth of the canyon where he farmed cattle. He famously said that “it was a helluva a place to lose a cow”. It’s the strangest place I have ever seen, a canyon made up of rock spires and pinnacles called hoodoos. The Paiute Indians, who once inhabited the canyon, have a history that says the hoodoos are the “Legend People” who Coyote turned to stone because they were bad. I was reminded of China’s Terracotta Army: legions of rock sculptures jammed together below ground; lost souls doomed to slowly weather and crumble under the harsh Utah sky. Over the millennia, streams have eaten out crescent-shaped bowls into the Paunsaugunt Plateau, the most spectacular of which is Bryce Amphitheatre. The hoodoos have themselves eroded from surrounding cliff walls. Thin walls of rock, called fins, are eaten away from the cliffs by snow and ice. As the snow and ice melts, water seeps into fractures and, as it refreezes, it expands and cracks, then sculpted by rain and wind to form the free-standing bulbous spires called hoodoos. As the sunrise appears over Aquarius Plateau the hoodoos begin to glow orange and red, sometimes white or salmon pink; shadows shift around and the spark of sunshine ignites their many hues in a glorious kaleidoscope. It’s as though a spell has been lifted. 57
Bryce Amphitheatre looking towards Aquarius Plateau, evening
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Hoodoos lit by the spark of sunrise, Bryce Ampitheatre
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Left: Hoodoos in The Silent City
Right: The hoodoo known as Queen Victoria
Left: A bulbous hoodoo in Bryce Amphitheatre
Right: a tourist posse heads out on the Bryce trail, early morning
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Bryce Amphitheatre, evening, from Sunset Point
A golden-mantled squirrel chews on a thistle
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Bryce Amphitheatre from Bryce Point
Bryce Amphitheatre from Sunrise Point
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From below, the pinnacles and spires seem to take on a life of their own, quite menacing in the way strange shapes lean and crowd over you and walls appear to be closing in
As the sun appears over Aquarius Plateau the hoodoos begin to glow orange and red, sometimes white or salmon pink
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ZION The one major regret of the entire holiday was to only have two hours in Zion National Park, driving through from Bryce to Las Vagas. If ever a place exceeded expectations it was this; if ever I needed to spend days exploring a park it was
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here. At Bryce and Grand Canyon we had looked down from above, in Zion we looked up. And what a view to behold; gargantuan granite peaks towered over us in a kaleidoscope of reds, burnt orange and white, the very definition of
the great American wilderness. We saw a fraction of it, the majority of the park off limits to through traffic and requiring a bus ride into the interior to see more of this wondrous landscape. Zion forms part of the Grand Staircase, the highest point of
which is Bryce Canyon, then Zion, Vermillion Cliffs and, at the bottom, the Grand Canyon. The entire area has the wider name of Grand Escalente Staircase National Monument. We’ll be back!
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VEGAS I suppose that if you fly into Las Vegas from some other metropolis you will still be wowed by its glitz, the over-the-top facade, such is the inevitable impact of this unique city. But when you have spent the previous week or more in the desert wilderness of the American South West where scenery comprises red rocks of varying shapes and sizes, and you have arrived in Vegas by way of the desert road, then the culture shock of seeing this adult Disneyland emerge like a mirage in the heat haze is immense; from log cabins to air-conditioned suites; quaint cafes to monstrous hotels; an empty landscape to a teeming thong of thousands fuelled by one desire — to have a blast!
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DEATH VALLEY & MONO LAKE
It may be a desert, but the scenery in Death Valley is amazing and like nothing else. We thought, if we’re going there it might as well be when it’s hottest!
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Both: pages:Zabreiski Point near Furnace Creek where the temperature read 120F
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It may be a desert, but the scenery in Death Valley is amazing and like nothing else
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Nestled at the edge of the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains in California, Mono Lake is an ancient saline lake that covers over 70 square miles and supports a unique and productive ecosystem. The lake has no fish; instead it is home to trillions of brine shrimp and alkali flies, clouds of which I disturbed as I attempted to reach the waters edge.
YOSEMITE What an astonishing place, America’s first national park lives up to its hyperbole in every way. Like so many things in the USA, Yosemite is enormous, an area over 3 million acres designated by congress for protection. Snow capped mountains of granite, smooth, giant domes, plunging waterfalls, boulder strewn rivers winding through forests and grassy meadows, where bears prowl, deer wander, and humans seem very unimportant. Visiting in summer, however, is not a good idea if it is peace and solitude you crave. Yosemite Valley heaves with humanity and their cars. Get up early before the crowds arrive to experience the magic of this special, favourite American icon. The mountains of El Capitan and Half Dome are as incredible and as huge as you might of imagined. We journeyed to Yosemite from Mono Lake on its eastern border along the Tioga Pass road which, as almost 10,000 ft, is closed in winter. It’s a wonderful introduction to the beauty and purity of Yosemite.
Half Dome from Glacier Point
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Right: among the giant sequoias of Mariposa Grove
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Dawn breaks at Yosemite Valley
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Clockwise, top left: view towards Half Dome from Olmsted Point on the Tioga Pass road; stepping stones in Tuolumne Meadows; park ranger talks about the park at Glacier Point
A man contemplates the beauty of Yosemite in the shadows beneath El Capitan
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Half Dome and high Sierra from the Glacier Point Rd
Morning over Yosemite Valley
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SAN FRANCISCO/SANTA CRUZ Our holiday of a lifetime wouldn't have been possible if we hadn’t been able to base ourselves with my cousin Sally in Los Gatos, near San Francisco. That was
where our road trip started and finished; where I took my first hesitant steps behind the wheel of an American SUV. Los Gatos was such a nice base from
which to explore the city and seaside town of Santa Cruz to the south, and San Jose. We spent several days after our road trip exploring the delights of San
Francisco and surrounding countryside. I would say that the only thing wrong with that part of the world is the sea. It’s just way too cold to be practical.
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Top right & bottom left: the Painted Ladies of Alamo Square
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Chinatown
Above: the ceiling of the Neiman Marcus department store in Union Square
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Seabird feeding frenzy at Santa Cruz, dusk
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Both pages: seaside fun at Santa Cruz
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Both pages: Santa Cruz
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Foggy day at Half Moon Bay
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Left, Half Moon Bay; Right, San Jose University chapel
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End of the day in San Cruz
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