Staying just one night

Driving across Southern Utah was an incredible experience. From Grand Canyon, I came through Red Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Grand Staircase (Escalante), Dixie National Forest, Arches National Park, Colorado National Monument, Rocky National Park, and of course all the land in between. Google image search for any of those names to get a feeling for what it's been like: my photos are probably rubbish, and won't get developed or scanned for months anyway.

Grand Canyon's chief virtue is its size, almost to the exclusion of anything else. I managed to find a rock to perch on, and read my book, occasionally looking up and going, "Wow, that sure is a long way away." The other Canyons are more comprehensible, and therefore to some degree more attractive. I did a few hours' hiking in Arches which is just like walking in a petrified shipyard -- or spaceshipyard. These enormous red rocks, lined up in rows and rows.

At a certain height, pines are replaced and joined by "aspens", a gorgeous tree with delicate silver-white branches, and translucent leaves which are yellow-to-red now, in their fall colouring. With the sun shining through them, and the leaves trembling in the wind, almost every turn in the road presents new photogenia. I got a great view of the full moon rising above mountains, while the last of the evening sun lit them up fiery red. I couldn't stop to photograph it, but I didn't need to.

In the Rockies I reached 11,000 feet at a pass at the Continental Divide, as it's called, and it was snowy all around! From there I descended into Boulder, where I've spent a couple of days hanging out because all the continuous onward movement had started to become unsettling. It is a wonderful town to have stopped in, too -- its main features are lots of trees (in autumn colour), a pedestrianised Main Street chock full of independant coffee places and used book stores, and a huge and gorgeous campus (the University of Colorado) and its attendant 30,000 students. A girl posting posters told me that it has the highest concentration of PhDs of any town in the US, and that it has 300 days of sunshine a year. An odd man from Georgia reading David Icke in Moab Hostel had commented on the beauty of Boulder's girls: he was right. Last night, I went to see open mic poetry at a co-operatively run food store and cafe. And it has a great Public Library with free internet access! But today I leave, for Denver, and then to start the long lonely crossing of the Great Plains, leaving the South-West for the South-East.

Before I go though, I wanted to say something about this whole National Park deal. I picked up a book in here by Henry David Thoreau, about walking, wherein he made the distinction between Nature as primary actor, with Man hosted in it, as against Nature contained and managed merely as a pleasant diversion among Man's many available pleasant diversions. He was writing in the 1800s: he was a part of only the sixth party of white men to climb Mt Kerridge in Maine, and soon the whole of the Eastern seaboard was to be logged for arable farming. Now, whenever I visit these great beautiful wild places of America, I can never wholly shake the feeling of being package-touristed, with "marked trail" this, "entrance fee" that, and "visitor centre" the other. It's a shame: it spoils the trip. In an odd way I look forward to entering the wholly unremarked Great Plains region, where the beauty is hard to define, package up and name -- and for that reason goes generally unrecognized. Finally perhaps there I will be able to feel more like Man within Nature, than experiencing Nature as a construct of Man.

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NB: Dom, you may be interested to know that I went through Dolores, Colorado. Those who haven't read Lolita will be uninterested to hear this. On a side note, in Oregon I actually saw a town called "Loleta" in Humboldt County, which seemed a large coincidence.