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San Francisco held a special bonus for me. My two daughters had flown in from Dublin and London, for a week’s holiday. Joyful reunion in the city by the bay. 

   
 You don’t need any special fitness regime, when you live in San Francisco. Just go out and walk to the corner. You’ll have done the equivalent of four flights of stairs and, if still alive, will be aerobically excercised for the week. But it’s a lovely city. 

   
 So out we went. Up the mountain. Over the top. Down the other side.  Then, if that wasn’t enough, we hired bikes. Bikes, if you don’t mind. Tandems actually. Yes, we hired bikes and went for a cycle tour of the city. For this, we wisely (in my opinion), stuck to the habour front and along the pier area, where it is flat and cycle friendly. Until !!  Until the challenge of crossing the Golden Gate bridge arose. There is a steep climb to get onto the bridge. The cycle path across is just about wide enough for two bikes to pass. That’s if we weren’t flopping about and stopping to take pictures, at all the narrowest points. This did not, in any way, ingratiate us to the very proffessional looking bikers, (i.e. Those severe and unhappy looking individuals, dressed in velcro).  They wore a permanent scowl, and stared at us, with looks of total contempt, as they shot by at a rate of knots. Never mind. We made it across and then down a steep decline to Sausalito for some gorgeous mussels and beer. We took the ferry back. It seemed the wiser option.

  
Next day, and off to Alcatraz. A military fortress, then a prison, now a tourist venue. This is a very interesting spot. The self guided audio tour, is narrated by ex prison staff and inmates and is really well put together. They say that no-one ever escaped from the prison and survived the cold, strong currented water, though there are a few unaccounted for and thus a mythology is born. There is a natural sense of pity for those convicts, who could look across the bay to the city full of life and know they couldn’t touch it. On the other hand, you have to remember that the prisoners here were the worst of the worst. They said that, “If you break the rules, you go to prison. If you break the prison rules, you go to Alcatraz”. I was glad to get on the ferry and back to noise, action and good food, in San Fran. 

Next stop, Los Angeles, city of the angels.

The contrast between the desert areas of Lone Pine and the National Park at Yosemite could not have been more extreme. Once we crossd over the Sierra Nevada mountains to the Pacific ocean side, the whole climate changed. Desert to vineyard. Emptiness to intense farming. Lonely, winding desert roads to busy highways. And when we got to Yosemite, dry heat to rain and snow. 

   
 Fist we had to find a place to stay. We resisted the tempting “Bates Motel”, and opted for the “Miner’s Inn”. Yosemite is up in the mountains, so it is a lot colder than we had gotten used to. It is also on the ocean side, so it is a lot damper. The area has been inhabited for thousands of years and local Indian peoples lived, hunted and farmed here, up to very recent times. It is now a national park, entered by a natural rock-arched road, and with many wonderful waterfalls and stoney riverbanks, and lots of wildlife. 

   
   
We strolled and drove around, wrapped up as warmly as we could get, before stopping for hot coffee and the museum tour in the visitor centre. By afternoon, the snow was falling heavy and we decided that here in the mountains, discretion was the better part of valour. We bade farewell to Yosemite and hit the road.  We are San Francisco bound.

    

 

If, like me, you grew up in Ireland in the 1950s/60s, you wanted to be a cowboy. It was a boy thing. Of course I don’t mean to discriminate or exclude, so any ladies who are of a similar age, and who wanted to be cowgirls back then, are welcome along. Anyway, you know who you are. If you ever ran down the road in a half skip/ half hop, slapping your thigh with your open hand and saying “whoa”, whenever you wanted to stop, then yes. You know who you are. You wanted to be a cowboy. Just like me. 

   
 So the drive to Lone Pine was like a childhood returned. We drove across the desert on those roads that you see on film, that lead on in a straight line for miles, before winding up into the distant, stoney hills. All sides are stone and scrub and sand, across which, many a thievin’ rustlin’ no-good varmit was chased by an eager posse. Through two-bit towns, where you could throw a dice for a free room, (no indication of the penalty if you lost …. hangin’, I expect). Over the pass and down into Death Valley. The ground is scorched and dry. The cowboy is crawling. His water canteen long ago gave up its last drops. His horse, sadly put down, in the last reel. The desert fox comes and looks, before casually walking away. This place is great. The rocks, the meagre brush, the sand dunes. The blazing sun. This is Death Valley. 

   
 Sundown comes sudden, in these here parts. It’s dark as we ride into town.  That’s Lone Pine. A cold beer in Jake’s saloon helps wash the dust from dry throats. Alas, there is no waistcoated piano player, with bands on his sleeves and an out-of-tune piano. There is no smoke reeked, whiskey sodden, gun bearin’ poker table, peopled by dirty cowpokes or suited dandies, with one fist full of aces and the other full of colt 45. There isn’t much of anything actually. Four guys playing pool. Two at the bar watching football, (American football – it has nothing to do with the foot, by the way). And us. We keep us a quiet town here in Lone Pine.

   
 However, there is the museum. The Film Museum. The museum of the cowboys. Here is where they made all those great TV programmes and films. The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers. Most of those John Wayne’s.  Gene Autry. They’re all here. This is cowboy town. Then there’s Humphrey Bogart, Star Wars and even some monstrous worm, that came from beneath the ground. Lone Pine is the spot. 

  
Ooops!  I forgot to mention, that an hour or so out of Las Vegas, we came upon one of the great secrets of the modern world. Area 51. Yep. There it was. Large as life.  It consists of a cafe, an essential souvenier shop, (for buying aliens and all things extra terrestrial), and a brothel. That’s it all right. Area 51. There it is.  Of course I went in. To the cafe that is. Not the brothel!  They serve ok coffee and play classic films (The Magnificent Seven and Shenandoah), on the television, at full volume. Apparently, the aliens like them.

Ah, Las Vegas. The entertainment capital of the world, if you believe the advertising. I don’t know if the people of LA, New York, London, Paris and many other places agree, but certainly entertainment there is aplenty!  All the main hotels, (and these there are aplenty too), have flashy, razzle dazzle shows running. The bars have live bands, djs or karaoke. The streets are filled with street performers. Even the architechture is entertaining. There are replicas of major structures from around the world, with coloured light shows that sweep across them, roller coasters that fly between them and even a dancing fountain that performs every half hour, to the oohs and aahs of the gathered masses, me included.

   
 Our hotel, we stayed at the Luxor, is the shape of a pyramid. I’m told that it has over 4,000 rooms, (or was that beds?), and rises, tapering, (as I suppose most pyramids do), from a base the size of Croke Park, to a point above the 26th floor, from which it sends up a beam of light into space to attract aliens. This explains many of the guests who wander among the gambling tables or food court, with distant, dreamy looks on their faces.

   
 The streets are packed with people, going and coming, selling and buying, performing and watching. At the north end of town, around Fremont street, there are three large stages with three free, outdoor concerts in progress. Each band has its own fans and over the heads of the masses, dozens of brave souls zip-line the full length of the street. If they scream for help, who’s going to hear them?  The music is pretty loud. 

   
 We toured the city. We visited Camelot and went to the Tournament of the Kings, an extravaganza (I’m never quite sure what that word means), of song, dance, brave knights and kings charging on horseback, jousting, fencing, dancing girls and jesters and wizards. Good guys and bad. The good guys won in the end. I think!  The theatre was in the Excalibur hotel and they threw in a good dinner and jugs of beer. Sure where would you get it? 

   
We walked through New York City and Ceaser’s palace and even Venice, where the canals flow for hundreds of yards and gonderlieri take star-crossed lovers for romantic trips and sing to them in italian. For a hefty fee, I’m sure. 

OK. So I was curious about Vegas. It’s done!  I think I’m up a couple of hundred dollars on the casinos – by not betting. The place was certainly worth seeing. Once. Time to move on.

Las Vegas is a place I wanted to see. Why? Good question! I have little or no interest in gambling, i don’t like slot machines and I don’t understand dice games. But Las Vegas is an image. A fictional image, certainly. A playground. A expensively designed display of lights and razzmatazz, sprinkled onto the Nevada desert. But, through television and cinema, it has flashed a thousand times into my experience and subliminally raised my curiosity. I wanted to see it.

So we set off west from Winslow, along route 66. This brought us, as Joyce would say, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, (in other words, back and forth, up and down, over and under, along narrow and steep, windy mountain roads), to the town of Oatman. If there is a town in America that is the absolute, diametric opposite to Las Vegas, it is Oatman, Arizona. The entire town would fit in one Vegas hotel lobby. There is no neon. There are no fancy (or even plain), street lights. Wild donkeys walk in the street. Wooden buildings are fronted with old wooden walkways, presumably to keep pedestrians from walking in the mud and the blood and the beer. If there was any mud. If they ever get rain here again. And if there was any blood. The gunfights are long gone, though a couple of cowboys stood around outside the Oatman Hotel and occasionally did reenactments.

We, being fearless, hungry and dry, stepped into the hotel in search of beer and victuals. We found a table, (don’t sit with your back to the door – I learned that from the old Wild Bill Hickok stories), and ate and drank heartily. Every inch of the counter, walls and bannisters, were covered in dollar bills. Real ones. Someone said that there was up to a hundred thousand dollars stuck to those walls. The owner probably keeps a loaded shotgun behind the bar. In the corner, an old cowboy with a guitar, sat and sang through the afternoon. Songs about lost love and the history of his hat and other great legends of the west. We chatted with him for a while before we left. No shots were fired.

There is no mining in Oatman anymore, though the old pit entrance is still there. It’s mostly occupied by artists and shops and stalls for fancy goods and souvenirs.

We saddled up, (i.e. got back in the car), and headed outta town. We rode off, (drove), into the sunset. Still heading for Las Vegas.

So today we started out in Flagstaff, Arizona. Now as you know, Arizona is a hot, dry, desert region. Yeah! Right! We woke to a Flagstaff covered on snow. Wet, cold and windy. We had planned to go to the site of the great meteor crater not far from here. Should we drive in this weather? It’s about forty miles. Let’s chance it!

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Before we go, we have to visit the giant lumberjack, (Do we really? Well so the lumberjack fan said, and she’s driving). So off to the Flagstaff University campus for a brief, snowy encounter. Quickly back into the car and get moving. As we drive along, the snow gets ever lighter, until suddenly, half an hour out of Flagstaff ….. Presto! The clouds clear, the sun comes out, the road is dry.

We pass Bedrock and sure enough, there’s Fred Flintstone waving to all the passers by.

The crater is fascinating. 50,000 years old. The museum is interactive, engaging and informative. The guided crater tour is cancelled because of the weather, (oh, oh. It’s on the way). But we can go out on the rim by ourselves. We do. The snowstorm comes. We nearly get blown halfway across Arizona. Who’d have thought that Arizona gets weather like this. But already, they are on their third reception building at this site. The previous two were blown away by storms!!

Not only is it a wonderful look back at meteor activity, but this is also a site used by NASA, for training astronauts for moon landings and the likes.

We leave and move on to Winslow. Just have to. It’s a Route 66 must do stop. We even stand on the corner. Yep. Here’s tonight’s stop.

The Grand Canyon is not as I expected it to be. I don’t know how to explain that, but it is different. I suppose, that any location as famous as this, generates a certain concept, a picture, a visual expectation. I pictured a wide open tourist space. A strip of hotels. A commercial centre, buzzing with tourist traffic. It is not like that at all. Yes, there are hotels, or at least lodges, accomodation centres. Yes, there are tourists, and plenty of them, just like ourselves, hikers, cyclists, day-trippers, individuals, couples, groups and families. The whole village centre, (and I’m not sure that that correctly describes the oddly assorted gathering of buildings), is well hidden in low forestry. Even the railway, appears unexpectedly from around a bend and vanishes into the trees.

We hike the rim. Seven to eight miles along the canyon edge, gazing from varying angles, into the 5,000 foot chasm below. It is not straight, it turns and twists. It is not a single canyon, it has many branches. It is not a single depth, it sweeps down in some places and in others, it drops sheer. Every view is varied. Every view is interesting.

The track along the ridge occasionally moves out to the shuttle bus road, but mostly, it hugs the cliff edge. There is not much room for error, so it is quite amazing, the number of tourists who walk along. All ages, from elderly to small children. All happily strolling along. None seem too concerned about the gaping invitation to eternity, that sits inches from their feet.

Day two, and we hike downwards, into the canyon. It is not possible, (that’s not true, it is possible, but it goes against all warnings and advice), to hike down to the river and back in one day. Accommodation at the bottom has been booked out for months, so we content ourselves with a plan for a half way down return trip. A cool morning but once we get started, we get into the lee of the cliff and warm up nicely. The path is busy. Many people going down and many more returning, some from an overnight stay at the bottom.

A team of horses pass us, bring ten days supplies to the lodges below. We have lunch and chat with groups from all over the US, as well as from Germany, Poland and Australia. The return trip, though a constant climb, is lovely, until the last ten minutes, when sleet, rain and wind come driving in. We arrive at the lodge cold and wet. Nothing a hot coffee and warm blueberry muffin can’t fix. Done!

We’ve seen many canyons in the last week. The Grand is certainly the biggest. It is certainly impressive. But for me, the best by far, for it’s beauty, for it’s variety, for the best hiking, was Zion.

The town of Page, Arizona, did not exist before the Glen Canyon dam was built. It grew from the work camp that was set up for the construction of the dam. It was (is) in the middle of the desert and many miles from any major settlement. It is now a town of 10,000 people.

We stayed there last night and had a tour of the dam this morning. Interesting place! This enormous lake is surrounded by desert on all sides, as far as the eye can see. And yet, it provides water for up to 300 million people, throughout the south west of the US and large areas of Mexico. It also supplies electricity, through the associated hydro-electric plant. Good tour. Great guide.

We drove a few miles along the lake shore, to a large marina. Here, about 500 boats sit, tied up for the winter. For “boats”, read “very large lake cruisers”. All tied up. Almost no one around. On a day that in Ireland, would be considered the best day of summer, not a boat was heading out on the water. They demand high standards in their weather in these parts.

A couple of hours drive took us through one of those areas, where you can see the road for miles ahead, with flat desert all around and red cliffed mountains in the distance. Then, about 5.30pm, we arrived at the Grand Canyon. It was about to get dark, as we pulled over for our first look. First impressions are pretty good. We’ll stay here for a few days.

The elements are in alignment. The weather, the location, the time. We are in Zion National Park, Utah. We woke this morning, to clear skies and sunshine. A frosty feel lingered from the night, but by the time we had finished a very satisfying breakfast in Wild Willies (!), any coolness was gone and the morning was warm and bright.

A couple of German hikers, that we met in Bryce Canyon, had recommended a hike to Observation Point, so we took a shuttle bus to the start. The route is steep. We found ourselves climbing, right from the beginning. Ever upwards, it zig zagged back and forth, steadily gaining height. On one side, the mountain rose sharply, a red rock wall, that gave way occasionally to slightly less steep openings of trees and shrubs, where deer scampered about, then stopped and stared. On the other side, the ground fell away as sharply as the mountain rose, to the canyon floor.

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After about an hour, we came to a narrow gorge, where the river bed had dried up, though locals warned of flash floods if the weather changed. At it’s narrowest, the walls were about fifteen feet apart and almost closed in overhead. We moved on out of that, and climbed another mile of zig zag track. The path was stone surface, sometimes bound with mortar of some sort and cracked, broken and stoney. It was three to four feet wide. One one side there was sheer cliff upwards, as far as I could see. On the other side, it was sheer cliff downwards. This eventually rose to over two thousand feet.

The last half mile was fairly level, along a sandy path through shrubs and bushes. It came to Observation Point. This was the prize. The views were amazing, right down the whole canyon, across the tops of nearby mountains and way into the distance, beyond Zion. Beyond Utah, for all I know. Half an hour’s break, then turn around and go down.

A wonderful days hiking. Beautiful weather, beautiful place. To my dear friend and long time hiking companion, Denis, (if you are reading this), let me say. “You would have appreciated the beauty and wonder of this hike. You would have recognised here, what sends us out on trails with packs on our backs. You would have understood the tired, hot bodies, pushing up, up, up. But you would have hated it. Every minute. You know what I mean”.  But to me, it was just a glorious day.

The plains stretched westward. On and on, for a thousand miles or more. They cleared any obstacles and filled the land with light. They filled it with a sense of space. They filled it with corn. Onward they pushed until they could push no further. Their load had become too great. And so they stacked before them, as a great line of demarcation, the Rocky mountains. Tall, magnificent with snow covered peaks and green valleys.

In front of the mountains, to mark the end of their domain, they placed Denver. They filled it with friendly people. People who will take the time to stop and talk. Most cities have a central area of interest and so does Denver. Its centre is a mile and a half long and is serviced, continuously, back and forth, by a free bus. There is one passing, at least every five minutes. The state capital building sits at one end. We had a guided tour around it, with a volunteer guide, who was welcoming, knowledgeable and passionate about his subject. Thank you sir. That was as enjoyable as it was interesting. The steps in front mark the mile-high level of the city.

The Colorado history museum was fascinating but, as with many of these places, one day is not enough to see it all.  The railway station has been beautifully restored. It is still a functioning station, but the old ticket office, while maintaining it’s look and charm, is now a bar. You can sit and have a beer and pretend you are selling train tickets, through the hatches onto the main concourse. We did!

Back on the road today to tackle the mountains. These mountain passes must have been daunting to the early pioneers, who trekked and wagoned across them, on rough, broken, narrow trails, with steep ascents and descents and river crossings, cliffs and marshes. I have to confess that it is a little easier on Interstate 70, but that doesn’t mean that we did not need to be tough and fearless adventurers. Indeed we did. At times, there wasn’t a coffee stop for almost an hour.

What a gorgeous route. Red rock cliffed passes. Meandering river corses. Snow on the peaks and sunshine on the valleys. Holiday towns. Residential towns. Ski resorts. Camping grounds. And all the time watching out for the deer, the eagles and the articulated lorries that swing a little too close. Especially them!

We approached Moab by the stunningly beautiful Route 128. A red cliffed valley along the Colorado river. As the sun went down, the silhouetted mountains struck wonderful shapes across the skyline. They guide us to a nights refuge. Good times!