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wild, wild west
Published in the April-June 2010 issue.
Dale R Morris knows a good wilderness when he sees one, and sets off for the national parks of the western USA to traverse some truly inspirational landscapes.
Once a great unknown frontier, the western United States is now populated by tens of millions of people, most of whom are crowded into metropolises such as San Diego, Los Angeles and Phoenix. Roads can be gridlocked, beaches overcrowded and fast-food outlets crammed. But the American west is an immense region with plenty of wilderness, and one can easily find peace and solitude far from the maddening crowds.
If the rugged, untrammelled outdoors is your thing, the west has plenty to offer. It has big, jagged mountains and forests in abundance as well as deserts, white-water rivers and hiking trails galore. Indeed, with more than 338,000 square kilometres of land managed by the US National Park Service, you would need at least a hundred lifetimes to thoroughly know it all.
Sadly, I have just three weeks and, with that in mind, I decide to limit my most recent road-trip to a few select parks in the adjacent states of California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.
My first sojourn – after the recreational vehicle (RV) hire centre in San Francisco – is to head south to coastal California’s Avenue of the Giants, a 50-kilometre stretch of highway that meanders through beautiful redwood forests. It’s a humbling experience to walk in the shadows of such humongous and ancient life-forms, some of which are purported to be more than 2,500 years old – and to realise that the biggest redwoods among them might already have been around when Julius Caesar and Jesus walked the Earth.
Redwoods have a special aura about them: a kind of peaceful serenity that makes you want to whisper as you would in a cathedral. Spectral rays of misty light filter down onto a forest floor that is soft with moss underfoot; the air is thick with fog and tastes of earth. It’s almost beyond comprehension that people thought little, until recently, of cutting these magnificent giants down. But fell them they did – so that where mighty forests once stood, there are now only groves. Thankfully, the majority of these have now been awarded UNESCO World Heritage status.
In typical American style (or lack thereof), the villages and towns along what is known as the Redwood Coast have become sideshow locations, where gaudy signs advertise drive-through trees (yes you can, for a few bucks, drive your car through the middle of a dead-hearted redwood). There are also walk-through trees, tree-houses, and giant fibreglass sculptures of loggers of yesteryear, one of which is over 30 metres tall.
I choose to bypass this tackiness and instead, enjoy the comparative serenity of the out-of-town redwood groves, in which walking trails and mountain bike tracks offer ample opportunity for silent contemplation.
My next port of call is an extraordinary wilderness in California’s High Sierra: Yosemite National Park. Here, immense rock walls rise vertically from picturesque valleys full of pine forests and flowery glens. Angelic waterfalls plummet like wispy veils in the wind for hundreds of metres on all sides and, at night, in the campground, sausages, sizzling one minute on the BBQ, vanish when my back is turned. Black bears are a common sight around Yosemite, and not all of them are well-behaved.
Tens of thousands of years ago, ancient glaciers scored Yosemite’s valley floor, leaving behind deep, vertical-walled gorges of resilient granite. It’s an amazing place, in which at every turn, you’re rewarded with stunning views. This is a climber’s paradise; it’s also probably the most beautiful place I have seen in my life – but because many visitors tend to agree with me on that point, the valley trails and campsites can get a tad overcrowded, particularly in the American summer-time.
That’s a shame because, at 3,081 square kilometres, Yosemite has a lot to offer anyone seeking a true American wilderness experience. What’s more, the infrastructure in the park is so good that much of it is easily accessible, when the snow and ice melts, to anyone with a reliable vehicle and a sturdy pair of boots. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1984 and ranging in elevation from 600 to 4,000 metres, Yosemite has a plethora of different habitats and regions to explore.
There are thousands of lakes, 2,600 kilometres of streams, 1,300 kilometres of hiking trails and 560 kilometres of roads in the park. In winter, you can ski. In summer, you can swim. No matter what time of year you choose to visit, the natural splendour of Yosemite is always awe-inspiring.
On the other side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the great American badlands begin: an overwhelming expanse of parched plateaux and dusty plains dotted with spiky cacti. Badlands National Park was my next destination and, soon after I had made it up and over the great snowy peaks, I found myself reaching for the air-con button.
At nearly 86 metres below sea level, Badwater Basin in Death Valley is the lowest place in the western hemisphere. It’s also, arguably, the hottest, with temperatures routinely exceeding 50 degrees Celsius. The entire region has an annual precipitation of less than two inches, so I am glad that the RV comes equipped with a water cooler and ice dispenser. I am also glad I have polarised sunglasses, as everything I look at glares back at me aggressively. There are dunes and parched lakes, rocky outcrops and vast open spaces where nothing living exists, not even a plant.
Death Valley, despite its desolate nature, is well set up for tourism: 560 kilometres of back-country roads crisscross an immense area measuring more than 5,200 square kilometres. There are nine developed campgrounds, a visitor centre, and many well marked hiking trails that traverse dauntingly named places: Furnace Creek, Desolation Canyon, and Dante’s Ridge. At night in the empty campgrounds, coyotes howl, burrowing owls screech, rattlesnakes rattle and scorpions scuttle – and, for a while, I enjoy fantasising that I am the last man alive in what resembles a post-apocalyptic landscape.
The next leg of my journey takes me through even more stunning desert scenery, all the way to the Yavapai Observation Station viewpoint on the edge of the iconic Grand Canyon. From there, I peer down into an immense maze, carved out over millennia by the turbulent Colorado River. At its deepest, the canyon is 1,800 metres; at its widest, it is 24 kilometres across; a vast rent on the Earth that runs for nearly 450 kilometres through the semi-arid desert zones of northern Arizona. There are more things to occupy your time here than there are in most amusement parks, and I have a great time of it, riding helicopters, trekking with mules, whitewater rafting and, believe it or not, cross-country skiing.
Despite its apparent enormity, the Grand Canyon is just a small part of a much larger contiguous conservation area, which begins at Lake Mead in Arizona and ends more than 1,600 kilometres to the north at Canyonlands and Arches national parks in Utah. Within this region, I explore vast chasms, subterranean caves and seemingly gravity-defying arches that tower over my head like colossal rock rainbows. Blue lakes provide stark relief from the Martian-red landscape in an area measuring some 12,000 square kilometres.
The last port of call on my great western road trek is in the rust-coloured Arches National Park, near the town of Moab in Utah. It’s an amazing geological hodge-podge of outlandish rock formations, sculpted through what could be an artistic collaboration between Mother Earth, Old Father Time and Zeus. Parallel rows of sandstone fins rise from the dusty soil like the sails of a ship; egg-shaped boulders larger than houses balance precariously atop crumbling spires. Plateaux larger than city blocks rise from the undulating desert. But chief among these strange and curious natural monuments are the 2,000-odd stone arches from which the park derives its name. To walk beneath these colossal stony spans, some of which are more than 20 metres tall and 80 wide, is a humbling experience: one cannot help but feel insignificant below their weighty greatness.
With fantastic scenery around every corner, a series of well-marked hiking trails and a very good road network, its little wonder then that Arches National Park receives somewhere in the vicinity of 800,000 visitors every year. But it is as if the desert swallows them up: as I walk beneath the park’s arches and through its blood-red valleys, I see very few people at all.
It may sound like hackneyed desert dogma but its true what the poets say: there is a special feeling of solitary peace out there in the dry and lonely wilderness. The silence is so loud you can hear it. There are no singing birds, no buzzing insects and no leaves for the breezes to rustle. At every compass direction sits a horizon unsullied by the hand of man, and I feel the urge to sing at rock walls, unencumbered by the embarrassment of someone perhaps hearing me.
And that’s how I finish my latest trip to the States: singing its praises at the top of my lungs and vowing that I’ll be back, just as soon as I can. For myself and many fellow outdoor enthusiasts, the allure of the USA is not its bustling cities, theme parks, fast food and frenetic lifestyles. It is about nature, peace and solitude; about connecting with a vast country full of magical places where stars burn brightly, eagles soar on high, and people seem scarcer than chicken’s teeth. •
Photography by Dale R Morris.
TRAVEL FACTS
getting there
getting around
where to stay
- All the national parks mentioned have accommodation facilities and campsites. For further information, visit www.nps.gov
further information
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