Chapter Eleven

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’”

Lewis Carrol (Through the Looking Glass)

I love the words ‘Recreational Vehicle’, they’re so splendidly meaningless, rather like the American use of the word ‘camping’. When I say ‘camping’ I know what it means. It involves tents, sleeping bags and hammering spikes into rock solid ground in a howling gale that is trying very hard to tear the canvas from my freezing hands. In short it may be fun but it’s quite uncomfortable fun. When an American says ‘camping’ there’s a good chance that it involves none of these things and it certainly won’t be uncomfortable. What it usually involves is a Recreational Vehicle, an RV as the Americans habitually abbreviate it. The first time I ever camped in the United States I had just finished erecting my seven foot by five foot canvas home when a dozen yards away one of these monsters arrived and parked in a clearly signposted ‘full hook-up’ site. By American standards it was a rather modest vehicle being scarcely larger than the back garden of my semi back in England. The exact meaning of ‘full hook-up’ became clear as the family rapidly connected not just the electricity and water supplies but a large rubber hose to an underground septic tank. They hadn’t finished there though. They proceeded to unfold an awning that doubled the floor space and bring out a table, two arm chairs, a television set and a portable satellite dish, set it all up, and sit down in front of it with beer and popcorn. They must have been a poor family, they hadn’t even got a vehicle with an integrated dish. I wanted to go over and take a look through the window of this monster but they never budged from the harsh inhospitable environment of the Home Shopping Channel so I had no chance.

Now, in Canada’s Waterton National Park, things were different. The vacationing Americans, let’s call them Norm and Vera for want of better names, who were my temporary neighbours, had state of the art equipment and were only too eager to show it off. I accepted their invitation to look around their home. Norm and Vera were as proud of their home as any English Lord of his castle. Their RV had as much floor space as most English houses and was divided into two bedrooms, a kitchen, a lounge and a luxury bathroom. The kitchen had a dishwasher, a fridge, a cooker and a microwave and the lounge came equipped with a television (satellite of course) and a music centre. It wasn’t clear if the two Pekinese lounging on the leather sofa were part of the standard fittings or an optional extra and I didn’t check out the bathroom - though I’m willing to bet that it had a Jacuzzi - but all in all it would have made a good home for almost any family of six.

It’s a common enough sight on the highway to see one of these mobile fortresses towing a car - usually an enormous four wheel drive - in a reversal of the English taking the caravan to the seaside scenario. This extra mobility is because the RVs themselves are often too large to be practical in the parks and something on a slightly more modest scale is called for.

Most of the National Parks, be they in Canada or the U.S. have hundreds of miles of paths and tracks and vast tracts of land with an awesome natural beauty. The way I like to see it is by hiking around these trails, nothing too strenuous - I’m not a masochist - but on foot and away from the tarmacced roads. I’m not the only person on these trails, and by the standards of most of the others doing them I’m not even especially adventurous but in all the people I have spoken with on the trails I have rarely heard an American voice. The other way of visiting the parks is by car, the same one that they gets towed around. In addition to the trails the parks thoughtfully provide networks of proper roads and conveniently sited viewpoints. At the gate, so that a minimum of planning is required, a map is usually available setting out the best route from viewpoint to viewpoint so that you could, if you chose, see all of the recommended sights without ever having to do more than wind down the window. Anyone who does, and there are plenty, misses some of the most spectacular scenery on Earth. There are more dramatic places than the North West National Parks and more visually impressive but in the US there is just so much of it all. I was only spending the night in Waterton as a convenient location to break my journey but in the few weeks after leaving Canada I was en route through quite a selection, Moab, Bryce Canyon and Canyonlands among others but first I had a reprise of my visit a month ago to Yellowstone. Unlike on that first visit the weather was now gorgeous.

We started this time at the Minerva Terrace, where I had finished before. In the new weather conditions it was almost incandescently bright. The stepped layers of white rock with their network of walkways reflects the light so fiercely that it is difficult to look at and when you climb to the top the views out across the park barely hint at the wonders that it contains. It’s a much better place to start than the mud volcano had been with its stench of sulphur - an experience which we would not be repeating today. On we went to the Upper and Lower Geyser basins which had now taken on a new colouring and iridescence that had been entirely absent on my previous visit. Then it was over to Old Faithful which was of course still going through its precise routine. I decided that here once actually was enough and went off to explore the circular walk that takes you first up the hill behind the visitors centre and then out around one of the best sections of the park. There were quite a few people on it but nowhere near the numbers that had been sitting on the benches waiting for Old Faithful. It really is a pity that so many people come for that one sight and never venture around these paths. From the hill I was just in time to look back and watch it go off and strangely from a distance it looked even more impressive than it had up close, but not as impressive as the Castle Geyser which is rather less predictable than its more famous relation but makes up for it in the sheer random violence of it’s eruption. I was fortunate to see it go as I passed. Also here is the Morning Pool where the aquamarine waters disappear down a deep dark funnel which at the edges shades out into chromatic patterns of orange and green, or the Grotto Geyser which is a mass of distorted rock, pierced through with a Swiss cheese pattern of holes from which random plumes of steam and water hiss and spurt. It looks like the castle of some malevolent Gnome. There are dozens of geysers and pools along the walkway and if no walk is going to be timed to see them all it’s a good bet that every walk will see some of them doing their tricks. Only the accident of its regularity makes Old Faithful the centre of attention, with its attendant circle of onlookers sitting on their metal benches. In many ways, spectacular though it is, it is one of the less interesting features of the park.

A good base for exploring some of the relatively less famous National Parks is Moab. We drove there via Salt Lake City and the stop at the Mormon Temple which reminded me of my previous brief visit to the city and prompted the musings of a few chapters ago.

The first of the National Parks we were visiting was Arches. This is fascinating and bizarre place where the geophysical forces have created a startlingly alien landscape of giant stone arches, precariously and improbably balanced rocks and mile long narrow fins of sandstone which sit within and overlook the vast open plains of the Colorado Plateau. The whole area sits on top of subterranean deposits of salt which can be thousands of feet thick and it is the shifting and compacting of this salt that has led to the collapses that have formed the arches. While it is possible to see some of it from the road, Arches really is a park where the only way to experience the true scale and timeless wonder of it is on foot. Even a relatively modest walk of a few hundred yards will bring a glimpse of the Landscape Arch which is a thin narrow bridge of rock that looks as if it is impossible that it should support its own weight. Further out along one of the side trails are the smaller, sturdier looking Partition and Navajo Arches but the real gems are to be found half an hour or so along the main trail. A walk along the ridge of one of the mighty sandstone fins eventually leads out to the arch within an arch of Double-O. The trail was remarkably busy, at times almost crowded, but the destination rewards it.

A second drive-through viewpoint - to see the Delicate Arch - is from the road especially unimpressive. The arch in question is far enough away to require binoculars and even then is not one of the better ones and the view from the road is extraordinarily uninteresting. Five minutes along the trail following the signs for the North and South Windows it’s a different matter. Here geology and erosion have produced two enormous arches, more like tunnels in the rock which sit on the landscape like a giant pair of goggles half buried in the sand. The walk around them is flat, easy and fascinating but still there are people who see it all from the wound down windows of their cars.

Less than twenty miles from Arches, still on the Colorado Plateau is Canyonlands but it might as well be on another planet. Here instead of towering bridges of stone the forces of nature have formed a fractured and fragmented world where sweeping canyons run for miles in every direction and divide the world into a labyrinth of monolithic buttes and spires as if some inconceivable hammer blow has shattered the world. In reality no sudden cataclysm is responsible. The canyons were made by millennia of rivers gradually cutting down through the rock to form the crazy paving world that is there today.

It seemed that the further we travelled the deeper we got into the kind of country you see in westerns. A landscape where you expect to see circled wagon trains and whooping Indians loosing flaming arrows onto the canvas, or perhaps a lone rider, covered in trail dust picking his way slowly along a trail under the unforgiving heat of the noon sun. The place where many of these images come from is Monument Valley which is a tribal park at the heart of the Navajo Nation extending into Arizona, Utah And New Mexico. The Navajo Nation is a strange enclave within the United States. It has its own laws and its own police and its own way of doing things. It even has its time zone, choosing to ignore the switch in the surrounding states to Daylight Saving Time.

Time constraints meant that in spite of everything I’ve said we had to drive around it rather than hiking but I’ve been hiking there before and, although it obviously isn’t the same, it is at least an area of such vast splendour that it is possible to see it from the viewpoints. The landscape is eerily familiar - films from Stagecoach to Back to the Future III have been filmed here. John Ford made so many westerns here that there is even a feature, John Ford Point, named after him. Other features have less prosaic names, usually for some imagined resemblance, Elephant Butte, the Praying Hands, the Sun’s Eye, the King on His Throne - names which say more about the hallucinogenic effects of peyote than they do about the rock formations.

There is a campsite and visitors centre on the very edge looking out into the desert and from there the most spectacular things of all can be seen, the sunset and the sunrise. Of the two, from this point I prefer the sunset. As the shadows lengthen and the desert disappears beneath them the sky at first takes on a slight orange glow which soon deepens into a blood red. When at last the sun dips below the horizon, the land becomes a maze of black silhouettes while the sky shades through black and dark inky blue on the horizon to a lighter blue at the highest point of nights dome. Any clouds drifting by are painted in red and gold and the whole scene is simply glorious.

I love sunset in the desert.

Sadly we were running out of time. I would have liked to spend time exploring properly in two more parks. Bryce Canyon and Zion are two of my favourite National Parks in America. Bryce is small but has the strangest of any of the landscapes to be found in this part of the world. Any film maker wanting to set a science fiction epic on Mars could do no better than film here for that is exactly what it looks like. The rocks are all a vivid orange-red and twisted into a set of weird phantasmagorical pillars called Hoodoos. They rise by the thousand, ranging from only a few feet tall to hundreds of feet, twisted and distorted like stretched toffee. Normally, for example in Monument Valley, when I hear that a rock is named for some imagined resemblance to an elephant or an eagle or a teapot or some similar nonsense I am extremely sceptical. On the other hand there is in Bryce a canyon a rock which I swear looks just like Queen Victoria, as much like her as any civic statue in England and the closest I come to the kind of drugs that make you see pretty patterns in the clouds is a pint of bitter now and then. In Bryce Canyon I hadn’t even had that but it’s the kind of place where nature has chosen to play games with your mind anyway.

From the rim of the canyon the Hoodoos stretch away from you in a confusing jumble of ridges and valleys and jagged spikes but down on the canyon floor they are even stranger. The paths that wind and twist throughout them sometimes end unexpectedly in dead ends or else twist back around on themselves in an Escher-like confusion of direction to bring you back onto a path you thought you had passed half a mile ago. Every yard of every path brings a new wonder whether it is a set of standing stones that look like a frozen orchestra (well a bit like one ) or a barren blasted rock overlaid with multicoloured striations of minerals. Our few hours there reminded me of why I like the National Parks and why of all of them I like Bryce best, but all to soon we were off again, travelling fast to stay on schedule. We blitzed through Zion in a couple of hours with just time to take probably the easiest walk in the park, a gentle amble a couple of miles along the river and back. That was a pity because Zion has some very challenging walks which are all the more rewarding for the effort they require. I’d done a couple of them last time I was there but this time there was no time and the reason there was no time was Las Vegas