GRRRRR!and Canyon, or “The Honeymoon is Over, The Bloom is Off the Rose, etc”

Have you ever had one of those days where everything falls in place like clockwork, you seem to have the Magic Touch, and all your plans turn out better than you even dared to hope they would? Well, neither have I!

I got up in time to bike to the rim for sunrise, returned to camp feeling pretty good, only to find my loving family… at each other’s throats! The van had been packed with evident malice, no breakfast had been cooked or eaten, and Carroll was just discovering that the rear tire on her bike, just repaired in Flagstaff, was once again flat as a prairie dog on I 70!

We drove in heated silence to the Canyon Café, thinking that treating ourselves to breakfast out might change the mood. OR NOT. Expensive, bland, dry… and in a crowning touch, the lid to Carroll’s way-too-hot-coffee-to-go didn’t fit, so slosh, slosh, fill in the blank!

By 9:00 AM, the heat was already withering, so at every pullout, we tried desperately to squeeze the van into any scrap of available shade to park. I’d like to be able to say it was too hot for the boys to even fight, but that would be a LIE!

Our moods recovered a bit as we got back on the open road, but it was not to last. By the time we reached the Glen Canyon Dam, the temp was in the high 90’s, so Carroll was in no mood to trifle with the hidebound homeland security detail, dutifully protecting the nation from tourists intent on destroying the 350 foot-thick concrete structure with a pocket knife. I think they were ready to draw their weapons and initiate a lockdown of the facility at one point in the confrontation.

Between the bad taste of that exchange, and the depressing thought of how many miles of beautiful canyon had been drowned in order to generate electricity, (something akin to burning your great-great-grandmother’s china cabinet to heat your house), it was a pretty low point for all of us. We desperately needed something to lift our spirits, and in a stroke of good fortune, we found it, in the person of one very friendly, helpful BLM employee in the Grand Staircase of the Escalante visitors center in Bigwater, Utah. We learned a lot in a short time, about the geology of the area, the dinosaur fossils they’ve found there, and good places to camp and hike. Mostly though, we just appreciated that his cheerful nature was so infectious that by the time we left, we were able to laugh when we saw that the temperature was now 103 degrees.

We took his advice and camped in a little-known, little-used state park, Ponderosa Grove, rather than Coral Pink Sand Dunes, as we had planned. We had the whole place to ourselves until 8:30 or so, when one other party pulled in. The weather cooled off nicely, there was a strong breeze, and the day ended on a good note.