TRAVEL: White Pocket Utah - another version of desert pin striping

The rainy weather left us uncertain as to how to enjoy our last day in Kanab. One of the Travel Advisor write-ups described The Wave as a Bach fugue and White Pocket as Night on Bald Mountain. Programmatic rock formations, yes! -  the perfect end to our trip would be White Pocket.

Luckily, on our way home, a guide returned a morning inquiry and was willing to take us out there, confident that his Tahoe and his alternate path would take us safely upon the deep sandy off-road.

It was windy and cooler than our Wave hike day, and the sky was astonishing, as only Western skies can be, the clouds shouldering  each other and the skyline for display room.

Our guide was a personable Utah born former and still respectful Mormon, Mike. He was charmingly late because his mare's foal arrived early in response to the storm. This event seemed especially beguiling to Jane, still very much the queenly rural spirit representative in our group.  

It's a two hour trip out to White Pocket, entering from south 89A rather than 89, a much simpler trip which we could have made ourselves but for foot-deep sand, possibly wet from yesterday's rain.

We hiked down a sandy path, then gazed on more sandstone and slick rock, but in colors and shapes spectacular and wondrous strange indeed,

as if the rocks had simply stopped swirling only a moment ago, their currents and materials mysterious and drooping,unstable, though frozen lo, these millions of years.

Here the russets, siennas, and red ochre were violent and turbulently worked through with cream, taupe, and gray sandstone. The gray stone that topped off the headed mounds
yet seemed stripped of scalp or skin, bulbous globs of form that looked like exposed brain matter.

 Slick rock tree, planted by cowboys growing their own - shade.

Climbing slip rock is easier than it looks - the natural grit of sandstone offers the lug soles of a hiking boot a satisfying footfall.
Up and down, each view changes dramatically, the features of the rocks so compressed.

Mike explained that iron in the sand forms into small roughly spherical "marbles", which nestle spilled on the sandy surface.

Skull like, frosted top-offs abruptly exposed upon sandstone mounds.

We climbed up and into this "clamshell" hollow facing a gray frosted sentinel. 

Then down and on through...

this marvelous view and fun downhill scramble

The only native plant on the slick rock in this area - a seep gives opportunity to tiny tears, and a miniature hanging garden grows.

Interrupted divided striations, once whole and ongoing, like mini-earthquake faults.

On and on, being among the formations offers me an experience of strange connection, a feeling that my body and mind have unity with  the forms and shapes within space.

Sustaining my wonder at the finely scraped textures of the sandstone.

An expressive sagging scowl

Such evidence of might and power

Looking out 50 miles to the northwest, I think, towards Bryce and the higher mountains, still covered with a recent snow dusting.

In ponds like these breed the unusual and hardy fairy shrimp.  Their eggs lay in casings in the rock's depression, awaiting a rain puddle. Not just any puddle, but one that will become algae-filled and last for 5 days or so.

The eggs hatch and the tiny creatures have a few days to mate and lay new eggs before the puddle finally evaporates.

lupine

claret/scarlet/crimson hedgehog cactus

milkvetch?

As always, I marvel over wildflowers.

A condor sanctuary has been established here in the Vermilion Cliffs area off 89A for years now.  The population has grown to 75, a a better record than California's, I think.

Our guide said that beef carcasses are still put out for them.  On this windy day, we spotted none, but could find a nesting area stained white with their droppings. 

The two hour drive back to Kanab gave us more distant views across the sagebrush and redrock, green with recent spring rains.  

Then  one more night to dine and sleep in Kanab before saying goodbye to Lanny and Jane in Las Vegas.  Their flight left at midnight, and John and I drove home.  Back to Los Angeles, our world so separate from where we were, the discontinuity of the city always disappointing and yet the pleasure of return to a home and our chosen life and place. 

TRAVEL: Johnson Canyon & Lick Wash

The next day the weather was even more problematic.  Rain in the desert makes marginal roads impassable, fills streams with extreme suddenness. Caution led us to drive out to Lick Wash via Johnson Canyon, a less-visited area around Kanab but the only recommendation to be had that day from BLM.

A butte I couldn't resist hiking to and attempting to climb.  This was not feasible but it was still a beautiful cream edifice with Indian paintbrush folded into its drainage lines.

Lick Wash was not water filled in the mid-day, but damp areas revealed that the rainstorms had dipped into the wash and trailed their evidence.

The wash was sunless on that day, and its rocks, though deeply striated, were subdued greyed and taupe.  Spring had not yet released the leaves from their buds on the trees in the wash, and I can only imagine what a lovely place it would be later on in spring.  Nonetheless, it was a remote 
surprise, the wash cut deep into the plateau around it.

This tree root had to have been 30 or 40 feet long,extending well down to the canyon floor, looking like two alligators having a fight in a brown river.  It rained hard on the way back to the motel, and a wrong turn had us driving through muddy stream beds. Lanny and Jane did a marvelous job at the do-it-yourself carwash cleaning the Jeep up, and our boots too.  

TRAVEL: Bryce Canyon Utah

We needed an easy day after the Wave hike, and weather had turned rainy and cold.  A jaunt to Bryce was perfect. It had snowed the night before at higher elevations, and the sky was filled with dramatic clouds and storms, in the manner of a place of big sky vistas.

Bryce Canyon's "hoodoos",the strange anthropomorphic lumpy columns in seeming family and neighborhood gatherings inspired Walt Disney's Fantasia animation.   

I like the idea that they are sentinels, gathered to commune and watch without time off - always there, waiting.

Or perhaps row apartments for spirits, passing in and out through hidden windows, with their swallow friends. 

Jane's favorite view - storm, sun, shadow, a hyper-real weather drama.  Mine, too.

Bundled up and enjoying Bryce together.

TRAVEL: Kanab, Utah, The Wave 4-23-15

Kanab arrival, dinner, Scrabble, and up early the next day to do the famous and unusual "Wave" hike.  Jane, Lanny and I all entered the Bureau of Land Management raffle for hiking permits to the Wave.  With three of us, I reasoned, mostly speculatively, that we would have a better chance at the 3 day window we were required to specify. 20 individuals per day are allowed in to protect the integrity of the unusual site.

And Jane got one!  According to the BLM website, about 5% of applications are selected during this period.  

First, a long drive 2 hours, to the trailhead on House Rock Valley Road, a gravel/sand/dirt road that runs N-S between 89 and 89A. Dire warnings abound, but unless it's raining, the road is passable for most cars.  I was glad we had a 4 wheel drive though.  

Lanny, always the stalwart techie 
scientist, spent his patience account learning to use Garmin GPS so we could hike alone.  The hike itself is poorly marked, and BLM supplies GPS waypoints and photos with landmarks (a generous description) of hiking points to direct one's steps.  Still, people get lost every year, and many hike it during hot summer, with 100+ temperatures.  

Our hiking day was cool, 68 degrees, and we were glad of it.

We hiked 3 miles in and out, mostly uphill on the way in, across slip rock and between rock formations, gazing at the amazing colors and the fitness of stratification - as if the cliffs had been plowed surgically with fine discs, the horizontal cuts interrupted with swaggering diagonals and contouring planes defining cliffs and nodes.

We clamored up the last sandy rock face to enter the Wave area. It's intense, dynamic, immediate, and perfectly named.  

The Wave has a harmony that is undeniable and irresistible - an ultimate testament to water and wind and their unyielding and triumphant power.

There is a discomfiture in being in the Wave's volumes. The upset of balance, the flamboyant and yet harmonious tweaking of the horizonal - the yielding and hardness.  

Yet it still remains a place at peace, in harmony.  Sedona should be envious at the power and beauty of this place.

And it wants you to come in and walk it.  It's easy - sandstone is so gritty, it helps you to climb up cliffs that look difficult at  first, and yet one still feels the flowing power, frozen for a few geological moments, changing constantly, and mostly with a slowness we cannot see but only know by reason.

What an appealing place to sit - its so easy to slow down, sit and watch and wonder, it comes to you with no effort, just a light champagne-like marvel at the privilege of wonder.

Flora 

Tufted Evening Primrose

A lovely pure large flower among the crannies - Wordsworth had it so correct - that turns pink as it fails and dies.

sand star

In the wash on the way into The Wave

The details in the sandstone are marvelous, too.

This raw scarification in one wall of the Wave was distinctive and singular.  It's like a navel, a place where a disconnect occurred, wrenching the flow free of its feed source.

Water evaporation here? Nipples, breasts, topography in miniature.

 Disorienting swirls that seem odd amidst the flowing perfection of the walls - some sandstone jelly roll of time's mixing.

Now I understand flowing water so perfectly.

And so goodbye to the Wave from a high viewpoint above, looking down at a marvel of earthly wonder.

TRAVEL: Back to southern Utah again Vegas and Zion

LAS VEGAS

A next morning meet-up point with Jane and Lanny, my brother and my dear sister-in law Jane. An evening dinner and stroll at Bellagio.  The mood is festive, driven, streaming international family groups all going some place important to them.

An evening is Las Vegas is a premium experience in ambivalence.  Seduction, delight of novelty, twins with high moral dudgeon over the supreme waste of humanity's capital. 

It was particularly acute at dinner. Our Chinese restaurant, Noodles, served the best Asian fusion cuisine we've ever had. No gambling appointments seemed available at our table, not the usual Vegas casino dining experience.

Our sincere Asian waiter conveyed our compliments to the chef and I believed they were really pleased in their achievement.  Why do I have to go to Las Vegas to find such a good pure thing?  Why are they there instead of in a neutral zone in which I won't be compromised by guilt?

The Bellagio, I recall, redefined Vegas class when it opened.  It was quite ghastly, the faux-italianate lobby and garden areas overloaded with mass paper craft Chinese and Asian floral garlands, trees, kites. A wonderful floral fragrance was fresh and pleasurable.  And service so good, amidst the throng, concierges assisted us, and we found a lovely Parisian pastry shop with a chocolate fountain.  Quite fun. The chocolate dipped fried Twinkie John had the next day in 
Springdale was better, though.  

The next morning, on to Zion, one of our favorite places, for two warm sunny days.

Springdale is a lovely non-restuarant franchised  town, plenty of franchise motels, however, nice to stay in to visit the incomparable Zion.  The canyon walls are close and distant at once, making awe an intimate experience.

The formations are named by devout Mormons from Biblical references, and it is so perfect, my head dips and a small silent prayer goes up.  God is still "up there", in my so limited comprehension of Zion and environs.

The river is a quintessential western canyon stream-riverbed.  As the canyon narrows, it draws you in, a celebration of time no museum can endeavor to present. Water, wind, sandstone, minerals.  Geology's art materials, conformed by variables so complex
the mind struggles to follow the progressions and regressions of each, and the scientists prognosticate yet.   

Jane and I are hiking the river now, on a warm day with our feet and legs in 45-degree water, strangely not very cold.  I guess a nature high discards worry about discomfort as an unworthy backstory.  Except for bragging rights.  

Narrowing canyon walls as we hike against an insistent current, and on sandbars that give a change of resistance necessary to apply in one's steps.

How lovely the rivulet waterfalls that slide simply down the canyon sides.  Children trudge across to stand or lie on them, giggling at the tickling water entering the backs of their shirts. An excellent idea.

It's wet, it stays wet, as long as there's flow from above, and moss, ferns and mineral algae stains create yet another vegetation climate contrast.  Maidenhair ferns overhang in such dry chaparral country - would anyone have guessed it was possible?

The Narrows of the Virgin River - rated as one of the world's ten best hikes.  Since I've only done 2 of the ten, I really can't comment, except to say "love the one you're with".

The sturdy hikers, looking like Italian great-grandmothers walking up a street in Cortona.  

Jane is clearly the foolish Auntie Mame figure here, and I am close to the dignity and slyness of Maggie Smith's paternal grandmother of Downton Abbey.  We are perfect together.

The sun works hard to enter the canyons, and mostly can't. One hops from north to south, east to west, looking for lighting that will serve a camera lens.  Good luck.  The contrasts are the reality here - harsh, changing, abrupt.  The sun falls behind the canyon wall, and it's dark, somber, like walking in Venice trying to find...your hotel, restaurant, etc., but instead, find another wonderful square or plaza with another magnificent church to enter and gaze upon.

Flora of the West...a lovely amazing footnote of quizzical encounter - what does this plant tell about its reasons for existing in this place, now?  Why its perfect relation of form to environment? A growing plant is always saying yes.

yellow salsify

A bold thistle-like plant along the Virgin River in a place where the canyon widens and chaparral gives way to higher elevation ecology.

shooting star

Under a trickling waterfall, an anomaly that really is not, merely a function of the reality of variety that all renounce in favor of abstraction, classification, and deductive reasoning, revealing the fallacy of generalizations.

prickly pear cactus in bloom

The marvel of a cactus flower - a rose overstated, the intentions similar.  Protect the seed; injure those who intrude without care.

Jane and I, the intrepid ones, drive out of Zion together and hike the view trail looking back and into the canyon.  A delightful and sad aloha.

What would become a more familiar expressive rock formation - this is the "Checkerboard", an exposed bare sandstone cliff that has been eroded by both water and wind, dividing it into rectangles and squares.

PAINTING: Jim Lee

I am stimulated and excited here.  This painter is doing things with the surfaces, wood, collage and constructions which are so unified and clean and evocative and engaging spatially.

I have ephemeral unfocused urges to paint and use wood materials, scraps of canvas, stuff, maps, but can't figure out what to do with them, now I'm going to try.

I'm going to get an old palette and paint on it just let go and do it.