Outdoors
Smoky Mountain News
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America, mile by mile Cross-country trip reveals country’s beauty, diversity
A rainbow falls across Yellowstone Lake in Wyoming. Holly Kays photos BY HOLLY KAYS STAFF WRITER ack when the trip was a new idea, I don’t think either of us took it seriously. Three weeks on the road, at a time when most American cars were sitting idle in the driveway? Thousands of miles of driving through sand and snow, mountain and desert, far from home? Surely this was just a pie-inthe-sky dream borne from the hunger pangs of quarantine, nothing more. But the more we thought about it, the more reasonable the idea became. Brilliant, even. Gas was cheaper than it had been in decades, and the world was better adapted to remote work than ever before. If we were ever going to do a trip like this, now was the time to do it, and if we were going to travel at all in this most unconventional of years, this was the way to do it. No airplanes, no cruise boats, no cities — just the two of us in a car, driving through the changing country. The concept was this: load up my husband’s 4Runner with camping supplies and outdoors gear, get a pre-emptive oil change, and hit the road for a three-week blitz of this nation’s greatest natural treasures, relying on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management holdings for free lodging along the way. Two weeks after deciding to take the plunge, we were on Interstate 40, with no plans to leave it until reaching the desert. Rough itinerary? West to the Grand Canyon, north to Idaho, east to the Badlands and then a hard push back home to the Smokies. It was a back-of-the-napkin kind of plan, but we figured we’d fill in the details along the way. That drive to Arizona marked the fifth time I’d traveled across the country in a car. The first and second time I was 16, riding in the middle seat of the family minivan from
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Maryland and through Indiana, Illinois and Iowa to South Dakota and Wyoming, returning via Nebraska. The third time I was 23, taking the Nebraska route once again on my way out to Idaho for an internship that would become my first foray into the newspaper business, and the fourth I was 25, driving solo through Kansas from my then-home of Buffalo, Wyoming, toward a new job in a place I’d never been before called Waynesville, North Carolina. No matter the route, I’ve always found a cross-country drive to be downright aweinspiring, and this was no exception. The green-covered Smokies smoothed into the rolling pasturelands of Tennessee, which, after passing through Memphis and crossing the
My husband and I take a ‘self-portrait’ at the Canyon Overlook in Zion National Park.
Mississippi River, gave way to the lower, wetter, swampier terrain of Arkansas. Oklahoma began with the saturated verdancy of farmland in the golden light of evening but emerged on the other end of the night as a more austere version of itself, the superfluous portion of that former greenery done away with. The trend toward dryness continued as we traveled across the northern tip of Texas, stopping in Amarillo between the windmill-laden horizons and golden-grained-fields for baskets of brisket and Cadillac Ranch, an only-inTexas type spot where 10 old Cadillac frames dive nose-down in the earth, covered with probably thousands of layers of bright-colored spray paint. Soon New Mexico welcomed us, the scrub growing ever sparser as we caught our first glimpses of the geological chaos that was to come — mesas on the horizon, abrupt rocky gorges in the ground. Our Smoky Mountains are amazing, but they are but one stripe in the variegated tapestry that is America. By the time we approached our first camp spot, in the Cibola National Forest near Albuquerque, we’d been driving for two hard days — nearly 1,500 miles — and were eager to get on with doing what we’d come to do: camp and explore. We found ourselves amid a gentle string of mountains rising from the scrubland, complete with trees and a pleasant place to pitch our tent, cook a simple meal and watch as the desert stars popped out above us. But then the wind happened. Our day began at 4 a.m. after ongoing gusts splintered one of the tent’s fiberglass poles, causing us to wake up with the canvas pressed horizontally across our faces. As a result, we made an early exodus from the site and arrived at Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona around 9
a.m., encountering cool morning air and uncongested paths to take in the colorfully eroded landscape, which was studded by a rainbow of mineralized trees left over from a time when these deserts were swamps, dinosaurs walked the earth and human society was unknown. Nothing, however, could have prepared us for the sight that waited just three hours to the northwest — the Grand Canyon. They say that nothing prepares you for the Grand Canyon. That no picture can capture it, no words convey it. That is completely true. At the canyon rim, the world as we know it stops, and another world begins. This world’s genesis rested nearly a mile below our feet where the Colorado River flows blue-gray through arid land, forming a base from which rise cliffs, plateaus, mesas and more cliffs. They are gray, white and red, with a smattering of green. It all depends on where you look, and it’s impossible to tell what’s big, what’s small or how far away anything is. The closest thing you can get to scale is the hikers walking the Bright Angel Trail, which starts at the rim and ends 7.8 miles later at the river. Depending on which section of the trail you’re looking at, they look either like mice, ants or dust. It’s a long drive from Waynesville to the Grand Canyon, and we still had two more weeks of exploring left to do. But after spending an afternoon on the edge, my feeble mind churning to comprehend the chasm before me, I felt that if we’d turned around right then, the drive would still have been worth it. But the Grand Canyon was only the opening act of the geologic drama ahead of us. After a steadying evening beneath the Ponderosa pines of Kaibab National Forest, coyotes howling all around, we found our way out of the woods using gravelly Forest Service roads that eventually led to a dried-out land where red sand drowned out the few hardy grasses that managed to cling to life. From there, an unpaved BLM road took us on a seemingly endless journey through the unrelenting sun of Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, where scrubby shrubs and barely-green grasses teased the idea that an ultimately nonexistent oasis could be right around the corner, and then we finally crossed into Utah, our new camp trading the Ponderosa pines of Arizona for the more slender lodgepole. It was 39 degrees when we awoke the next morning and set out for nearby Zion National Park, a paradise of life and water after that parched journey through the desert. Bare and rock-built slopes rose with severity around the hidden valley, prompting me to wonder what kind of person might ever dare to climb them. When we left at 3 p.m., the thermometer said 95 degrees. It was time to rest, at least until the sun grew low enough for an evening journey through the maze of towers called Bryce Canyon National Park. That canyon of rocky turrets glowed red-pink in the waning sun, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like to come upon this
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