TRAVEL: Day 3: The Vermilion Cliffs

For sale: $30 to 50m
no museum will ever
own this. I grieve.

What if Van Gogh had seen Utah?  He was a painter whose largesse would never have failed the glory of Utah. The minerals and ores make an intense palette of pale green, burnt orange, salmon, cinnamon, cream. The earth's dynamic belly carries possibility as potent as any fresh seed in springtime. 

In Utah that belly is open, raw; with that raw starkness  comes overwhelming beauty. The implication of past violent upheavals and collision forces a struggle to imagine their magnitude. They seemingly rest now, and an immense calm comes to me as I gaze upon all beauty, all completeness.

The names of my oil paints - they hold earth's makings in pigments for me to make Riot. What color is vermilion? Many places in the west are named "red", but none really are so.  They are dark orange, salmon, coral, cinnamon brown, burnt sienna, due to iron present in the sand. Or pale green, manganese, copper and slate colors wrapped over their eroded mounds.

 John Wesley Powell, the quintessential naturalist-explorer of the Colorado, named the Vermilion Cliffs with a certain knowledge of color and imagination others lacked. 

web photo, not mine

We encountered the Vermilion Cliffs after we left the North Rim, descending into a drier hotter tableland from which rose another marvel of red rock splendor. 

It was hot again.  The North Rim, with its 9000 foot plus elevation, was brisk in the morning, then offering sun-warmed cliffs and nooks to bask.  No wonder species behavior includes basking.  It's right up there with floating. 

Even our modest motel was vermilion.  It hunkered down like an old settler's cabin, with wall intervals stuck with ugly window air conditioners.  But the setting, so unvarnished and functional, a shelter for those who imagine themselves off the grid. To step outdoors in the morning was its own small epiphany, a morning blessing from red druids living in the cliffs above us.