The Wild West – part 3

AROUND KANAB
Kanab is a town in southern Utah, whose tagline is “the greatest earth on show”. We had six nights here, not for the town itself but for the nearby attractions, and in particular the very popular walk to see The Wave. To reduce erosion, only 20 people are allowed to see this per day, with ten permits being issued in advance online via a lottery. We applied for this, but were not surprised to be unsuccessful since only 4% of advanced applications are successful. The remaining ten permits are issued one day in advance via another lottery, where applicants must apply in person at the visitor centre in Kanab. Hence we had six nights there to give us a reasonable probability, though we calculated that even with six nights the odds of our success were about 40%.
Our first hike in this area was to the South Coyote Buttes, which was definitely an adventure. Getting there was hard enough, up an access road of soft sand that was a struggle in our car since we couldn’t lower the tyre pressures, so we only made it part-way before chickening out and hiking the last part.

We’d been given a poor map of the area by the park authority, and there was no trail to follow, so we just made up our visit.





The lack of a path, the large size of this area of the park and an annoying barbed wire fence running through the bit of the park we wanted to cross led us to only visit the southern part of the South Coyote Buttes. On the way out we encountered the Painted Desert, named after the very stark and pretty colours on display:

Near to Kanab is an animal rescue centre, which has an awesome $5 all you can eat vegan lunch buffet – quite an oasis in the heavily meat-eating state of Utah. We “volunteered” at their cat sanctuary for an afternoon, where it seemed that our only duty was to play with the cats. As we’re sure you can imagine, this was hard work. We even got to take some cats for a “walk”, but apparently no-one told the cats this as they thought it was nap time.



We took another trip to the South Coyote Buttes, this time on a tour in a hummer – a somewhat better vehicle for driving on all of the soft sand:

This time we were visiting the northern section of the South Coyote Buttes, which was DEFINITELY better than the section we visited before. The colours in the sandstone are out of this world…











The other half of hummer tour was to see White Pocket, another remote area that we did not dare to drive to ourselves. The main attraction here is the bizarre brain-shaped rocks:


There are also lots of lovely colours and shapes in the rock:




The plants made pretty patterns in the sand too:

On the seventh and last possible morning that we could apply for a permit to hike The Wave, we were successful! So the next day we set off along a bare-rock valley with a sheet of instructions for finding the way, along a valley that looked like this:

The Wave is relatively quick to visit (unless you want to explore) since there is one main sight to see and it’s only about an hour’s walk to get there. This probably should be on a list of natural wonders of the world…


Naturally, we did some further exploring around:

GRAND CANYON – NORTH RIM
Only 10% of visitors to the Grand Canyon make it to the North Rim since it is a five hour drive between here and the South Rim, and the views from the South Rim are probably superior. The drive from the entrance station to the rim itself is pretty, past meadows full of bison (when we visited anyway…) and yellow Aspen trees.

There are the usual set of viewpoints that you can stroll to with a cuppa in hand:

And there are also some short hikes of up to a few hours to other viewpoints, where all views are inevitably looking down into the canyon and over to the South Rim some ten miles away.

The scale of this place is epic, and you need to stare at it for a while to really appreciate it. There is also a multi-day hike that you can do from the North Rim to the South Rim, and if this works for you logistically then that sounded like a great adventure!

MONUMENT VALLEY
Home to many famous viewpoints, we decided to swing by Monument Valley on our way to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. There are basically two things to do here: The first is to stay at The View hotel and look at the view outside:

In retrospect, this was very expensive and you can see the same view for free if making a day trip, but it depends what floats your boat. The second thing to do is to drive the dirt road that runs through the valley, which takes a few hours and is definitely worthwhile.


We wouldn’t advise attempting this in a low-clearance car though if you want to enjoy the ride!

ANTELOPE CANYON
This hit the tourist radar big time a few years ago when the USA congress couldn’t agree on a budget bill to extend the national debt and the government went into automatic shutdown – meaning that all of the national parks closed automatically. Tour agencies in the Grand Canyon/Monument Valley area then scrambled around for things to do with their bus-loads of visitors and the native American owners of the Antelope Canyon area came up with the goods, and tours have continued since. This is an epic slot canyon formed when floodwater is forced to travel through a narrow constriction in the sandstone, creating flowing wave shapes up to 30 meters high.


Nearby is the Horseshoe Bend hike near Lake Powell, which is a short stroll to an entrenched river meander and definitely worth it!

GRAND CANYON SOUTH RIM
Plan your visit here. With care it is a great place with wonderful views and walks, but if you just turn up you will have nowhere to stay, the campsites will be booked out and you may hit big traffic jams and have a rubbish time. Arrive early! Two of our three days here were spent hiking down into and back out of the canyon and so we were immune to most of the crowds. We hiked down the Bright Angel trail, camped overnight at Phantom Ranch and then returned via the Kaibab Trail. It’s probably better to hike it in the other direction, since there is nowhere to refill with water when walking uphill along the Kaibab, but timings worked better for us to hike it this way to squeeze in a couple of side trips. The views walking down the Bright Angel Trail are superb, and you just descend layer after layer of canyon in an amazing mile of vertical descent:

We camped at Phantom Ranch, where we ate an awesome dinner of all you can eat beef or veggie stew and we could even purchase wine at a reasonable cost!

Hiking out was similarly scenic, and you hike up in time along a geologic history of the planet, starting at the bottom of the canyon with rocks that are around 2 billion years old!


If such an epic hike isn’t your thing, rest assured that you can see some amazing views easily enough from the canyon rim:

DEATH VALLEY (TATOOINE)
Our last USA national park! It was near 50 degrees Celsius a few weeks before we got there, but luckily for us the temperature dropped to something more reasonable for our visit! The ground here seems to be either mudstone or just loose sand, which gives the place an interesting feel:

For tour bus visitors, your experience may be like this:

But thankfully for us the buses left soon and we had most of the places to ourselves. We were particularly interested in finding some Star Wars (A New Hope) filming sites in Death Valley from the planet Tatooine, including the overview of Mos Eisley:

…the sand dunes where R2D2 and C3P0 part company:

… and the valley where R2D2 drives up before he is captured by the Jawas (the little red-eyed chaps in hooded cloaks):

There were a bunch of other Star Wars sites for the harder-core fan! There is also a seriously cool salt lake to visit, which is made of jagged interlocking plates of salt extending off into the horizon (and if you sat quietly you could hear the salt crystals cracking as they expanded/contacted in the heat):

We also visited Badwater Basin, at 85m below sea level, and had some fun taking photos:


A random coyote at the side of the road:

We didn’t have time for the Joshua Tree National Park, but luckily there were a bunch of these trees on the way south out of Death Valley so that made up for it a bit:

That’s all folks – for the USA anyway! If any of this blog has whetted your appetite to visit the USA national parks, our top tips are to get the inter-agency pass ($80 for one vehicle, giving entry to all national parks for a year), hire a reasonably good car as many of the park roads really need an SUV, use the website “alltrails” as an awesome source of information on hikes all over the USA and make sure you speak to rangers when you arrive as they know which trails are open/closed/good. Enjoy!
From Death Valley we just drove back to LA, returned our car and continued on our merry way south… to Mexico!