Travels

The wind is howling, and a dust storm is obscuring the view of the mountains. Although I can’t quite see them out the window, I imagine the wind turbines are generating lots of Kilowatt-hours of energy today.

No, we’re not at home in Pincher Creek, but in Palm Springs, California. We’ve been travelling through the southwestern U.S., and timed our arrival in Palm Springs so Cathy could meet up with some old high school friends for a bit of a get-together. I’ll let Cathy tell you about the get-together, but let me tell you just a little about our road trip so far.

We arrived home from Lao at the beginning of August, and spent the next four weeks catching up with family and friends and attending to all the things that had been put off or neglected while we were in Lao. By the end of the month we were ready to head out again.

Our first stop was in New Denver, B.C. to see Dave and Linde and the cabin they’re building. They didn’t even seem to mind that we’d interrupted their construction work during the last long weekend of the summer. It was great to see them, and to have a look at their partially completed cabin. New Denver is in a beautiful location, and the town has a nice feel to it. I’m sure Dave and Linde will enjoy the cabin, and that they’ll have a constant string of visitors landing on their doorstep.

We waved goodbye to Dave and Linde and turned the truck south towards the U.S. border. Once we had crossed into Washington State it didn’t take long for the countryside to get drier and hotter.

As many of you know, the southwestern U.S. has an amazing diversity of landscapes ranging from the high desert of Nevada, to the red rock canyons of Utah and Arizona, to the iconic cowboy country of Monument Valley, to the saguaro-cactus-studded landscape around Tucson and along the Mexican border, and to the sometimes-hellish heat of Death Valley.

Our meandering path took us first to the wine country around Walla Walla, Washington. We then continued on to Great Basin National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Natural Bridges National Monument, Valley of the Gods, and Monument Valley. By then we were well and truly hungry, so we made our way to Santa Fe to eat, and to wander through the museums and art galleries.

Capitol Reef National Park at Sunset.

Capitol Reef National Park detail.

Petroglyphs, Capitol Reef National Park.

Natural Bridges National Monument.

Collared Lizard, Natural Bridges National Monument.

Valley of the Gods, Utah.

After a stop at the Very Large Array (VLA), the world’s largest radio telescope near Socorro, NM, we turned further south and west and headed for Tucson and Saguaro National Park. It was still early in the season, and hot, so we pretty much had the park and the campground in the adjacent county park to ourselves. We camped in the shade of a great big saguaro cactus, and watched as the sun went down over Kitt Peak to the west. We weren’t the only inhabitants of the campground however. Cathy went to put something in the tent and was a bit startled when a tarantula crawled out from under it. She called me over, but I wasn’t fortunate enough to see the great hairy spider “in the wild”. As she pointed to where the spider had been, something else caught our eye—a large pale scorpion whose very primitiveness was both riveting and a little frightening. As we watched the scorpion, we couldn’t help but recall the warning we’d received at the information center earlier in the day. We had been warned to watch closely for rattlesnakes because they were particularly active at this time of year. That night, we did up the tent’s zippers very carefully to make sure we didn’t wake up with any uninvited tent-mates. And I didn’t have to be reminded to shake out my boots in the morning before putting them on.

Cathy and Saguaro Cactus.

Barrel Cactus Flowers.

If Saguaro National Park is almost an urban park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, which sits right on the border with Mexico, feels like the Wild West. The features of the park that appeal to visitors—its size, remoteness, ruggedness, and isolation—also make it a favoured route for illegal migrants and drug smugglers trying to enter the U.S. There is an intense game of cat and mouse going on, but we only saw the cat in the form of the U.S. border patrol. We were continually surprised by how many border patrol officers and vehicles we saw. In addition, helicopters and aircraft flew overhead at irregular intervals. Much of the park is closed for security reasons. As we stood on a piece of high ground and looked over the parched landscape spreading from horizon to horizon we couldn’t help but shudder and think how difficult life must be to make it worth risking so much trying to cross this beautiful but brutal country. Many who set out never make it.

That night, we were the only campers in a tiny campground that sat surrounded by saguaro and organ pipe cactuses and nestled at the foot of a soaring red cliff. We had driven four miles up a dirt road that led to an old farmstead in the mountains to get there. We felt pretty secure, and didn’t expect any surprises during the night, but it was a little surreal to be surrounded by a desert wilderness while only a few miles away in one direction a helicopter, likely with high-tech infrared imagers, patrolled the border, while in the other direction the high-intensity lights from a border patrol checkpoint glowed faintly in the distance. Sandwiched between the blinking lights of the distant helicopter, and the glow of the checkpoint lights, the Milky Way spilled across the night sky. Every few minutes, a meteor would streak to its fiery end.

Saguaros at Sunset, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

When I rolled off my air mattress that night, the ground was hot. In the morning, a skunk notified us of its presence with its unmistakable odour. I told the skunk we were just passing through, and wouldn’t be long. It let us off with just a warning.