North Rim to Campo
We left the North Rim, dropping down off the high Kaibab Plateau with the great colored cliffs ahead of us, and then paralleled them heading west through Fredonia. Colorado City is on this route, where the polygamous breakaway sect of the Mormon Church hides out. An innocent enough town, and perhaps I was imagining it, but the houses did seem a lot larger that one would expect out here with no visible means of support, room for all those wives, I suppose.
Just before Hurricane, we dropped down steeply into the Virgin River Basin. This is pretty much the edge of the great Colorado plateau uplift, and therefore an angry rough place. Not only does the river continue to carve as it did in Zion, but the fault at the edge of the plateau has had upheavals and splits and volcanic action. A wild place geologically, the edges of the fault rear up like the plates on a stegosaurus, the sedimentary sandstone with its bands of color get twisted and tossed, and everywhere the black volcanic rocks lie in boulders, in heaps or in congealed flows.
Hurricane got its name when Erastus Snow, an important early LDS leader, had the top of his buggy blown off, and decided to name the place Hurricane. In 1904, water from the rivers was diverted into irrigation, and the mild climate made this area a fruit-growing center.
Here we pick up I-15, and through St. George UT where volcanoes, and faults and the Virgin River have the land in an uproar, it descends the Virgin River Gorge. The river has cut through the same rocks as seen in the Grand Canyon, and this highway, one of the most expensive ever built, dives and careens through a sort of IMax version of the Grand Canyon. Next time, I would like to stop in the middle, but as it is an Interstate, I have to pay attention to the road and not goggle. I CB to Don that this is much better than a mule ride !
We drop down onto the Mojave Desert. Miles of flat sand and creosote bushes, with the naked brown volcanic mountains popping up, looking huge until we drive close. The Virgin River goes south and ends up in Lake Mead. Little of it is left to join the Colorado River.
We come over a ridge and there, deep in smoke and smog is the skyline of Las Vegas. It looks like something out of Mad Max movies, Sci-Fi wild cities that sprang up after the nuclear holocaust, powered by methane from pig manure, and inhabited by a wild and woolly bunch of survivors. Not a tempting sight, and soon we are crashing along I-15, dodging construction and zoomy traffic. I can only glance at the towering hotels, more being built as older ones are torn down. Mostly they are just very tall and sandy colored with gold windows and faux Palladian windows, temples and palaces plopped on the top. How could there be so many people coming here that they need all that space?
The best building is the enormous black glass pyramid of the Luxor hotel. It squats there among the other hotels with a lot of drama and portent, sparkling in the hot sun, like a huge alien ship.
Our campground is suitably splendid, a vast marble and gold lobby, avenues of palms trees, several pools and miles and miles of roads. Right by I-15, it is pretty noisy, especially in the cheap sites in the back. As I get out I notice one of the Airstream’s tires is flat.
When I replaced the old, mismatched truck wheels with aluminum wheels, I got new lug bolts too. That’s right lug bolts, not lug nuts like everyone has today. The bolts are way deep in the holes, and a regular socket can hardly get enough purchase to grab them. So I knew I was in trouble, and also knew that we had to get them off and not trust some hot head wrench monkey at the local tire store.
All this put a damper on our Vegas fun. We did go out to eat with a friend of Don’s and his wife, driving up and down the strip in the dark with all the wild lights and garish architecture flashing and trying to seduce us. I hope I can come back, it was hardly a taste of one of the strangest places on earth.
Finally, we got a socket and Don filed it down enough to get a grip on the bolts. We could find no hole or nail, so we aired it up. The stupid thing has held air ever since. Hard to understand, I must have hit a bump just right to let the air out and then it resealed itself.
So we boiled out of town, headed down through more high Mojave desert, past Barstow where a Harvey house station languishes, and several rail lines come together, over the Cajon pass, littered with volcanic granite in every possible size, and down into the Moreno Valley. Lots of dairy and market gardens. Our stop over is at the edge of an upscale development, with a huge diary farm next door. A nostalgic odor for me, not so nice for non farmers, I’ll bet.
From there to Campo the next day was a rather rattling reintroduction to California Interstates. We know where we are going, so it’s not too bad, wish there were back roads, but the big mountains all over the place sort of prevent that. We all have to rush along in torrents of cars and trucks in the valleys in between. Finally, we turn off “the 8” as I-8 is known and come down through the bony mountains to our same spot at the RR Museum. Feels sort of like home.
Just before Hurricane, we dropped down steeply into the Virgin River Basin. This is pretty much the edge of the great Colorado plateau uplift, and therefore an angry rough place. Not only does the river continue to carve as it did in Zion, but the fault at the edge of the plateau has had upheavals and splits and volcanic action. A wild place geologically, the edges of the fault rear up like the plates on a stegosaurus, the sedimentary sandstone with its bands of color get twisted and tossed, and everywhere the black volcanic rocks lie in boulders, in heaps or in congealed flows.
Hurricane got its name when Erastus Snow, an important early LDS leader, had the top of his buggy blown off, and decided to name the place Hurricane. In 1904, water from the rivers was diverted into irrigation, and the mild climate made this area a fruit-growing center.
Here we pick up I-15, and through St. George UT where volcanoes, and faults and the Virgin River have the land in an uproar, it descends the Virgin River Gorge. The river has cut through the same rocks as seen in the Grand Canyon, and this highway, one of the most expensive ever built, dives and careens through a sort of IMax version of the Grand Canyon. Next time, I would like to stop in the middle, but as it is an Interstate, I have to pay attention to the road and not goggle. I CB to Don that this is much better than a mule ride !
We drop down onto the Mojave Desert. Miles of flat sand and creosote bushes, with the naked brown volcanic mountains popping up, looking huge until we drive close. The Virgin River goes south and ends up in Lake Mead. Little of it is left to join the Colorado River.
We come over a ridge and there, deep in smoke and smog is the skyline of Las Vegas. It looks like something out of Mad Max movies, Sci-Fi wild cities that sprang up after the nuclear holocaust, powered by methane from pig manure, and inhabited by a wild and woolly bunch of survivors. Not a tempting sight, and soon we are crashing along I-15, dodging construction and zoomy traffic. I can only glance at the towering hotels, more being built as older ones are torn down. Mostly they are just very tall and sandy colored with gold windows and faux Palladian windows, temples and palaces plopped on the top. How could there be so many people coming here that they need all that space?
The best building is the enormous black glass pyramid of the Luxor hotel. It squats there among the other hotels with a lot of drama and portent, sparkling in the hot sun, like a huge alien ship.
Our campground is suitably splendid, a vast marble and gold lobby, avenues of palms trees, several pools and miles and miles of roads. Right by I-15, it is pretty noisy, especially in the cheap sites in the back. As I get out I notice one of the Airstream’s tires is flat.
When I replaced the old, mismatched truck wheels with aluminum wheels, I got new lug bolts too. That’s right lug bolts, not lug nuts like everyone has today. The bolts are way deep in the holes, and a regular socket can hardly get enough purchase to grab them. So I knew I was in trouble, and also knew that we had to get them off and not trust some hot head wrench monkey at the local tire store.
All this put a damper on our Vegas fun. We did go out to eat with a friend of Don’s and his wife, driving up and down the strip in the dark with all the wild lights and garish architecture flashing and trying to seduce us. I hope I can come back, it was hardly a taste of one of the strangest places on earth.
Finally, we got a socket and Don filed it down enough to get a grip on the bolts. We could find no hole or nail, so we aired it up. The stupid thing has held air ever since. Hard to understand, I must have hit a bump just right to let the air out and then it resealed itself.
So we boiled out of town, headed down through more high Mojave desert, past Barstow where a Harvey house station languishes, and several rail lines come together, over the Cajon pass, littered with volcanic granite in every possible size, and down into the Moreno Valley. Lots of dairy and market gardens. Our stop over is at the edge of an upscale development, with a huge diary farm next door. A nostalgic odor for me, not so nice for non farmers, I’ll bet.
From there to Campo the next day was a rather rattling reintroduction to California Interstates. We know where we are going, so it’s not too bad, wish there were back roads, but the big mountains all over the place sort of prevent that. We all have to rush along in torrents of cars and trucks in the valleys in between. Finally, we turn off “the 8” as I-8 is known and come down through the bony mountains to our same spot at the RR Museum. Feels sort of like home.
posted by Thistledown24 at 8:29 AM
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