A Grand Adventure

NOTE:  This entry was written on Sunday, July 21 but I didn't have good internet access to post it.

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To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.

― Mark Twain

I still have a few more days left on my journey, but my days of being a solo adventurer have come to an end:  Jobie flew out to Arizona to join me on the last few days of my trek. 

That's a big hole in the ground!

After surviving Arches National Park with both of my arms still in tact, I drove to Meteor Crater in Winslow, Arizona.  I spent the morning checking out a large hole that was left in the ground when a meteor impacted with the Earth about 50,000 years ago.  It was really quite interesting.  The crater itself is immense: about ¾ mile across and 570 feet deep.  I tried taking some pictures of it but the feeble lens on my camera could not capture its immense size.  There was a small platform that extended over the edge of the crater, and it had telescopes on it that allowed guests to get a close up look at the distant features of it.   In addition to the crater, there was a small museum where they detail the story of how it was determined that the hole was indeed caused by a meteor as opposed to a volcano (hint: in 1960 a guy named Eugene Shoemaker found similarities between minerals found in meteor crater and those found in craters created by nuclear explosions, and he realized that volcanoes could not produce the heat and pressure required to make those minerals).  It also had a lot of displays about other objects found in space, a movie that told what likely happened when the meteor hit Earth, and information about other craters around the world.   I spent about an hour and a half at the museum before heading to the Phoenix airport to pick Jobie up.

For some reason, Jobie preferred the Omni over the KOA

I arrived at the airport about 45 minutes early and found a parking spot large enough for my van.  Fortunately there was a Starbucks inside the terminal, so I earned myself a couple more points on my Starbucks card and enjoyed the air conditioning inside the building while I waited (outside it had hit 115°).  Jobie made her way off the plane and we headed to nearby Scottsdale.  I didn’t want to immediately shock her with life in a van, so we spent the first night in Arizona at the Omni Scottsdale Resort and Spa.  We pulled up to the valet stand at the resort.  It was quite comical driving up in my dust-covered, bug-splattered oversized van.  I pulled in behind a shiny Mercedes convertible and a young guy in a valet uniform came and opened the door for me.  He did his best to remain professional and asked if we were checking in.  I told him yes, handed him the keys, and asked him to be sure not to park it next to next to any of those crappy cars. 

Meteor Crater really didn't seem that big after seeing this

On Saturday we hung around Scottsdale and checked out Taliesin West, which was Frank Lloyd Wright’s residence for several years.  I really wasn’t that impressed with it.  I mean, the architecture was interesting and all, but when the tour guide told the group that Frank Lloyd Wright considered the appropriate height of a person to be 5’8” and that people over 6’ tall were a “waste of space and materials,” I just figured that Wright was a worthless, bitter little man.   So perhaps my opinion was a little bit biased. 

After the day in Scottsdale, we made our way towards the Grand Canyon.  We spent the night at a KOA just outside of the park, as the campground inside the park was full for Saturday night.  On Sunday, we hiked the South Kaibab Trail to a point 3 miles into the canyon.  The first half of the trip was easy—it was all down hill.  We got some incredible views.  The canyon really is one of the great wonders of the country.  Everyone knows about it even if they’ve never visited it, but it really cannot be truly appreciated from just knowledge of its existence.  It starts near the rim with unbelievably sheer cliffs.  The walls of the cliffs are deep red, striped with tan and orange where the different layers of sedimentary rock come together.  At the bottom of the cliffs, the canyon flattens out briefly into expansive flat meadows of low shrubs and green plants and small flowers.  The meadows then drop off again into a steep, narrow gorge that extends down to the turbid Colorado River.  The canyon is a symphony of colors and textures and life and each angle offers a unique viewpoint. It’s impossible to take in everything at one time.  At various points during our hike, we’d both pause to take in everything that was in front of us, and we both saw things that the other didn’t even though we’d be looking in the same direction.  Beyond just the views, the canyon is impressive in its age.  As we descended down into its depths, I kept considering that as we got lower and lower, the rocks got older and older.  At times I feel old with my mere 44 years, but being among those cliffs and valleys that were carved millions of years ago made me feel silly in thinking myself aged.  

Those cliffs seem a lot higher when you
know you have to climb back up them.

The hike down into the canyon was not bad at all--it went pretty quickly being as it was all downhill.  Jobie was even jogging almost the whole way down.  When we got to Skeleton Point, which was the suggested endpoint for a day hike, we turned around and looked back up at the cliffs we had come down.  Somehow, they seemed much larger when looking back up.  And we weren't even all the way down at the bottom which made the scale of the Grand Canyon even more impressive.  We were perhaps only 15% of the way across, and not even half of the way down.  But, again, we didn't want to have to chew off any arms so we made our way back up the trail.  On the way up, we passed a couple who were making their way down.  The man was perhaps in his fifties and the sweat stains on his shirt and forehead gave away his level of exhaustion.  "How much farther is it?" he asked me as he wiped at his brow.

"It's not far," I told him.  "We started at the other rim about an hour ago so you're pretty close. Keep it up!" I told him.  He stared at me blankly for a minute.

"He's not serious!" Jobie blurted out, ruining my fun.  

"No, seriously, you're only about 10 minutes away from Skeleton Point," I told him.  He seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.  "After that, you get to go back up hill!" I encouraged him.

He laughed, but seemed a bit relieved that he didn't have much farther to go, and then the two of them  continued on their way down as Jobie and I made our way back up.

Almost back up to the top!

But the best part of the trip to the Grand Canyon was having someone to share it with.  There is a lot of joy in going on solitary adventures:  you can go at your own pace, you can go in whatever direction you want, you can spend as much or as little time at each different point along the way as you like.  But the joy of the adventure gets augmented when you have someone else along. You can “ooooh” and “aaah” at the different vistas and point them out, talk about them, and share the experience.  Plus, you have someone else to point out the things that they see, which you might have missed. 

At the end of our hike, we headed back to the campground.  We were able to get a campsite in the park for Sunday night.  It wasn’t quite the Omni Resort, but it worked out just fine.  It wasn’t until after dinner that I came across the only drawback of having to share this journey with someone else:  there was now competition for all that chocolate that I had stashed away in my little refrigerator.  But in the grand scheme of things, I suppose that even chocolate is a joy that is better when shared.

These were the rules posted on the Grad Canyon shuttle bus.
I almost violated #4.