Grand Circle Adventure

BY: Maggie Wilson

A GRAND CIRCLE ADVENTURE

Early boosters nicknamed it the Golden Circle, the Four-Cornered-Circle, and the Canyonlands Loop. More often today, it is called the Grand Circle, a term which works as well as any. But whatever it is called, ours is the first generation blessed with an all-paved access to the scenic glories surrounding the unique point in America where the boundaries of four Western states merge. Four Corners, this is unanimously named. And roughly with Four Corners as the center, the sectors of the Grand Circle reach out into Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, to a geographical merry-go-round. Of the world's grandest canyons. Of strange rock formations. Of inland oceans, frozen lava, skyscraping peaks, vast vistas, and relatively few, little, hospitable huddles of human habitation. You may jump on the grand merry-go-round wherever you wish, but here is one visitor's own diary of two weeks of vacation around the Grand Circle...

BRYCE CANYON NATIONAL PARK UTAH

Castles, spires, temples, battlements - whatever you may imagine-it's probably at Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, a gigantic wonderland of eroded rock. The famous three-milelong amphitheater was carved from the Wasatch formation's "pink cliffs." Possibly the first explorers to see this region from a distance were the Fathers Escalante and Dominguez in 1776, who searched vainly for a route between Roman Catholic missions in New Mexico and central California. Bryce Canyon became a national park in 1928. Dave Davis photo

CUMBERLAND BASIN COLORADO

Cumberland Basin in the La Plata Mountains. This high country reminiscent of Switzerland backgrounds such Colorado settings as Durango and Mesa Verde National Park. Durango, founded in 1880, is a classic Western town, rich in folklore and grand scenery. It's also home of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gage Railroad, which operates year-round. Thirtyeight miles west is Mesa Verde, featuring some of the larger cliff dwellings in the United States, remnants of a civilization that inhabited the area 1400 years ago. David Muench photo

LAKE POWELL ARIZONA

Flying Eagle Arch soars seventy-feet high and spans ninety-six feet, forming a perfect viewing window for some of Lake Powell's 1900 rugged miles of shoreline. So rugged, in fact, that the land surrounding the lake was the last major area of the first forty-eight United States to be mapped. David Muench photo

For a more detailed map of each state write: ARIZONA: Arizona Highways Magazine, 2039 West Lewis Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85009/COLORADO: Highway Department, 4201 East Arkansas, Denver, CO 80222/NEW MEXICO: New Mexico Tourism Division, Bataan Memorial Building, Sante Fe, NM 87503/UTAH: Utah Travel Council, Council Hall, Capitol Hill, Salt Lake City, UT 84114.

GRAND CIRCLE TOUR DAY 1 THE GRAND CANYON'S NORTH RIM

En route to the North Rim-lush green meadows sparked with wildflowers, its forests of Engelmann and blue spruce, alder, fir, piñon, and cliff rose-anticipation grows, and we recall author J. B. Priestly's comment on the Great Gorge, "Even to remember that the Grand Canyon is still there lifts up the hearts."

Suddenly, the dizzying views through Angel's Window and Cape Royal are spread before us: the opal-like toprock. The underlying strata of pearl, rose quartz, coral, topaz, tiger's eye. The emerald shades of the talus slopes. The carnelian and garnet of the deepest layers. In the canyon depths, the river itself is a strand of molten silver.

At day's end, shadows deepen and colors wend from lavender to ruby. And, finally, to jet.

At sunrise, from the patio at Grand Canyon Lodge, I watch it all again in reverse with poet Carl Sandburg whispering in my ear, "There goes God with an army of banners."

DAY 2 PIPE SPRING NATIONAL MONUMENT

Cattleman A. P. Winsor in the nineteenth century built the fort of native sandstone with slit windows for gunports. Indian attacks feared never came. Shots were never exchanged at what would come to be called Winsor Castle.

Handmade furniture, blacksmithing tools, cooking utensils, carpentry apparatus, and implements for farming speak of a time of self-reliant toil, of washboard and home remedy survival.

Then it's north into Kanab, Utah. Dinner at the Territorial Inn climaxes a ramble through the town's recent past as a "Little Hollywood" location for scores of cinema dramas, which featured such stars as Hedy Lamarr, Walter Brennan, Joseph Cotten, and Victor Mature.

North of the Colorado River is the Arizona Strip Country, the loneliest, most isolated real estate in mainland America. Our journey's goal this day is Pipe Spring, the National Park System's least visited site (only 32,000 annually, most of them Californians en route to Lake Powell, the final stop on our Grand Circle Tour).

In the midst of this greatest of open spaces, Pipe Spring is an oasis of ponds, silverleaf cottonwoods, alianthus, and Lombardy poplars. Deer leap and bound. Bushy-tailed Kaibab squirrels chatter and skitter. Prairie dogs pose, then bob back into their holes like automated jacks-inthe-box.

Pipe Spring, proclaimed a national monument in 1923 "as a memorial to Western pioneer life," is, in truth, a memorial to Mormon pioneers who colonized the remote areas of Utah and Arizona.

GRAND CIRCLE TOUR DAY 3 ZION NATIONAL PARK

A mile-long tunnel drilled through the heart of red sandstone, punctuated now and then with huge windows through which I glimpse bold, sun-drenched gorges, cliffs, and monumental mountains, is the dramatic entrance to Zion, named after the holy city of God.

Once out of the black tunnel, more dramatics as the switchbacks descending to the canyon floor provide theater-inthe-round spectaculars in all directions, massive stone mountains, cliff walls soaring three thousand feet above the canyon floor, promontories in reds, pinks, and whites. Its wonders are called temples, tabernacles, guardians, patriarchs. It is so cathedral-like it urges people to quiet contemplation.

I find my place on Weeping Rock Trail: a forest glen with a gurgling stream, soughing breezes, a canopy of cottonwoods and box elders entwined with wild grape, a backdrop of massive redrock. At the top of the trail, hanging gardens of green shrub and yellow wildflowers, draperies of travertine deposits, and a playful waterfall.

Zion's formations, created by the Virgin River, are sculpted of stone strata that begin where Grand Canyon's end. Those at Bryce begin where Zion's end. A geological grand staircase.

Night falls quickly in deep canyons, and as it envelops Zion Lodge, I can almost hear the voice of an imagined stage director entoning, "Lights, camera, action!"

DAY 4 CEDAR BREAKS NATIONAL MONUMENT

Bright rock sculptured into a vast natural amphitheater and green juniper and aspen sprouting out of broken black lava beds at Cedar Breaks National Monument rivet the eye, but the more subtle wood sculptures of the bristlecone pine fire the imagination.

Writhing exposed roots, gnarled and twisted branches, sparse needle clusters like the wispy beards of old men, these Methuselahs, almost unknown and unclassified until the 1950s, are tree-ring dated as nearly 5000 years old. The bristlecones in Utah, however, are comparative teenagers. Only about 1600 years old.

Survival of the bristlecone is linked to an ability to selectively kill off portions of itself, sealing off life-giving nutrients and water, so that viable portions can live on.

Cedar Breaks' most prominent feature is a psychedelic-colored amphitheater, a vast natural bowl ornately decorated with iron-tinted limestone formations and seasonal set changes: carpets of summer wildflowers on the rim; autumnal gold aspen groves in the ravines, layered in winter by deep snow.

In morning sun, the opposite rim of the bowl is white caprock, beneath it, colors of salmon, pink, apricot, and rust. Black lava beds lace the panorama harboring evergreens and aspen.

Beyond the rim, blue mountains, row on row, meet the paler blue of a cloudless sky.

On the trail between Point Supreme and Spectra Point, Don Savard, a tour

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operator from Phoenix, falls into step beside me.

"A shame," he says. "A shame so few tour operators know about places like this. Eastern operators think Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon's South Rim. They seem never to have heard of the North Rim, Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands.... They don't know there's a complete change of scenery every fifty miles, and blacktop all the way."

DAY 5 BRYCE NATIONAL PARK

Zion is mass; Bryce is lace.

Its amphitheater presents images of delicate, intricately eroded, multicolored spires, minarets, and pinnacles by the thousands. From rim viewpoints, they comprise lacy golden-hued fretwork.

But take the mile-long Navajo Trail to the floor of the bowl and get a totally different perspective. The spire bases are big old pedestals, not at all the fragile things they seem to be.

On the rim, Mrs. Hilda Gardner, tour guide for the park concessionaire, T W Services, leads me on a world tour.

"Sunset Point is the most heavily visited in the park," she begins, "but I like this one, Inspiration Point, the best because I can take a world tour from right here.

"There's the Masada, the Great Wall of China, the Pyramid of Giza, the Acropolis of Greece, castles on the Rhine." Then she shifts to Bryce's geo-history.

"Bryce began sixty million years ago as a series of freshwater lakes in Mexico," continues Mrs. G, and forty million years ago the continental plates shifted northward with "a terrible violence in the Earth," creating upheavals and the formation of nine plateaus, six of which can be viewed from here with Kaiparowits and Kaibab in the forefront. Twenty million years ago, erosion began its tearing down action on the bulging Earth.

"I'm a retired teacher with a minor in science," she confides. "That's why I know all this. Besides, I taught first grade, so I make it simple."

At Agua Point, she ignores such formations as The Hunter and The Rabbit, focussing instead on what she sees as "the Congress of the United States, deliberating, and a lot of women's libbers without bras, protesting."

In Swamp Canyon, she sees a platoon of Turkish soldiers in purple pantaloons and fezes. And along the way, "A whole Rose Bowl Parade...a float with a Buddha on it...a lazy camel...the Queen's float. Can you see her standing there in her robe and tiara?"

But for the rest of the trip, whenever I saw rock sculptures, I wondered what Mrs. G would "see" if she were with me.

DAY 6 CAPITOL REEF NATIONAL PARK

To Ebenezer Bryce, his canyon was "a tough place to find a stray cow." To the Paiute Indians, it was "Red Rocks Stand-ing Like Men in a Bowl-shaped Canyon."

Those same early inhabitants said of Capitol Reef that it was "The Land of the Sleeping Rainbow," an acknowledge-ment of the long rock escarpment of multicolored Chinle sandstone. A sprawling ground-level rainbow.

White prospectors called the escarpment a reef, meaning barrier. The "Capitol" derives from the many 1000foot-high domes of eroded white Navajo sandstone resembling the dome in Washington, D.C.

The park's visitors center is Fruita, once a small Mormon farming community. Fruita also is where car-weary travelers can pick fruit at Utah's you-pick prices: bing cherries in June; apricots in July; pears in August; apples in September.

There being no scenic loop drives in this park, we backtrack a sixteen-mile drive to Capitol Gorge-with backseat camera buffs hollering, "Stop, stop," every half-mile.

Eastward, to Butch Cassidy Country. In Hanksville, we're told: "Butch made an unauthorized withdrawal from the bank over to Telluride, all right. But he never killed nobody. He was a Mormon bishop's son; so you know he certainly never shot nobody."

At Green River, we stop to sample the much-touted watermelon. It is rightly touted. The farmers say it's the Green River water that makes it sweet.

And then on to Moab where a pair of intrepid river runners, Tex and Millie McClatchey, host us with a Navajo taco and fresh fruit dinner in their rambling digs by the Colorado River.

"We don't call it the Colorado in these parts," Tex says. "We call it by its

ARIZO TOURIST TRIVIA

According to the latest figures from the Arizona Office of Tourism, the estimated 16.2 million visitors to Arizona each year spend $4.3 billion during their vacations. Of each dollar spent, thirty cents goes for food and beverage, and twenty-five cents for lodging. Most motoring tourists visit Flagstaff, and airline visitors, Phoenix.

DIGGING FOR KNOWLEDGE

The University of Arizona is the only university in the country that owns its own mine shaft-complete with mineral rights. The San Xavier Shaft Number Six, donated by the Anamax Mining Co., plunges a hundred feet into the desert a few miles southwest of Tucson. There, mining and geologic engineering students get experience in mining techniques such as replacing timbers and roof supports, the safe use of mining equip ment and explosives, and how to react in mine emergencies. At most mining schools, students leam only from books, but at the UofA the students also do the work.

JULY WEEKEND ADVENTURING

July 4 through 7: Prescott Frontier Days Rodeo. Hard-riding cowboys, pretty cowgirls, and a weekend-long party celebrate the world's oldest rodeo. Telephone, 445-2000. Also don't miss the Phippen Western Art Museum showcasing rodeo oriented painting and sculptures by top Western artists. Telephone, 778-1385. July 13 and 14: Flagstaff Fiddle Festival Funtime and Bluegrass Soirree. A weekend of mountain music and dancing in the shadow of the San Francisco Peaks. Telephone, 774-4505. July 20 and 21: Snowflake Pioneer Days. A rodeo, footraces, ten-kilometer run, parade, barbecue, and dances celebrate the founding of this charming White Mountain hamlet. Telephone, 536-7832. July 27 and 28: Payson Tenth Annual Championship Loggers Sawdust Festival. Logging, sawing, pole climbing, ax throwing, and other competition in logging skills draws a crowd for this weekend under the Mogollon Rim. Telephone, 474-4515.

MILLION-DOLLAR CARS

Is your private railway car in need of some refinishing? Maybe the gold bath. room fixtures could use some buffing up? The observation deck needs some attention? Just hitch it to the back of an Amtrak train to Tucson. Rail Passenger Service Inc. will do the rest. This unique business, which specializes in rebuilding these expensive antiques, rebuilt the Philadelphia Star (owned in 1912 by the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad) and has nearly completed the two year refurbishing of Henry Ford's original railway car. Owners have an investment of nearly a million dollars after the vehicle is restored.

APACHE ARTIFACTS NEEDED

A disastrous fire raced through the Apache Culture Center Museum and Library at Fort Apache last January destroying its entire contents. The staff of this fine museum and library is currently seeking donations of printed materials, historic photos, and artifacts to restore the museum and library. Nearly anything concerning Apache history and culture is needed. For more information, contact Ms. Ann Quay-Skidmore, Secretary, Apache Culture Center Museum, Fort Apache, AZ 85926; telephone, 338-4625.

COLOSSAL KITCHEN

The new Phoenix Civic Plaza in downtown Phoenix has a 9750-square-foot kitchen that can prepare food for banquets of over 12,000 people. Cost for the new kitchen ran $1.2 million including equip ment.

SOLAR TOURS

Before you start any kind of solar building project, you owe it to yourself to invest eleven dollars and a little driving time in Arizona Solar Tours. This eightand-a-half by eleven-inch softcover book will guide you through 101 solar projects. Compiled by members of the Arizona Solar Energy Commission's staff, the book classifies the projects into climatic zones (high plateau and mountains, basin and range, and Sonoran Desert) and includes maps, system descriptions, and evaluations by owners, architects, and designers. The tours encourage you to see actual projects and talk to owners and builders. To order, send $10.00 plus $1.00 for postage to: Arizona Solar Energy Commission, 1700 West Washington, Room 502, Phoenix, AZ 85007.

TLC FOR SAGUAROS

Before construction could begin on La Paloma, a planned resort community in the Catalina Mountain foothills north of Tucson, the Pima County Board of Supervisors required the developers to preserve at least eighty percent of the saguaro cacti on the 790-acre development site. Rogers, Gladwin, and Harmony, a landscape planning and architecture firm, answered the call and cataloged every one of the 8056 saguaros to determine their health and movability. Well over eighty percent of the plants have been saved mostly by building around them wherever possible, but some of the cacti were transplanted. This is the largest inventory of saguaros ever made. Even at Saguaro National Monument the cacti have not been cataloged. For their work, Rogers, Gladwin, and Harmony received a merit award from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

ARIZONA ODDMENTS

Where's the driest place in Arizona? The wettest? Which Arizona city has the world's largest municipal park? Which town really has an Easy Street? You can find out the answers to these questions plus a host of other curious facts about Arizona in the delightful sixty-four page booklet Arizona Facts and Artifacts (With Hysterical Footnotes), by Richard L. Thomas and Ruth St. Johns Thomas. It's $2.95 plus $.50 postage from Coles Cumberland Press International, Inc., P.O. Box 9925, Phoenix, AZ 85068.

On these pages are only a few of the fascinating events scheduled in Arizona. For a more complete calendar, free of charge, please write the Arizona Office of Tourism, Department CE, 1480 East Bethany Home Road, Phoenix, AZ 85014. All telephone numbers are within area code 602.

text continued from page 15 old name-the Grand. This is Grand County, named for the river. And in Colorado, the town of Grand Junction, ditto."

McClatchey lives in Moab because he likes variety. "I got the river, the mountains, the valley, and sights like I'm going to show you tomorrow at Arches. I'm a lucky hog. I just slurp up this scenery and holler for more."

That remark prompts fellow-traveler Dave Johnson, president of the recreational properties division of Del Webb Corporation, to tell a little story, as his grandparents told it to him:

"When the Earth was being created, God had a crew of helpers who went around the world putting down mountains, valleys, and other earthforms. A river here, a lake there.

"Nearing the end of the sixth day, with their aprons still full of landforms, the crew foreman said, 'Hurry it up, guys; we've got to finish by midnight.' "So the helpers stood up and shook everything out of their aprons-deep canyons, soaring mountains, mighty rivers, buttes, mesas, sand dunes-just about everything.

GRAND CIRCLE TOUR

"That area where they were standing is known today as the Four Corners Country and includes the states of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico."

I like that little story. It's as good an explanation as any of the gee-whiz geology here.

DAY 7 IN AND AROUND MOAB, UTAH

Moab, Utah, sits in the Moab Valley, both named for the Biblical "far country" beyond the Jordan and Dead seas. Unlike most valleys, this one wasn't cut by river erosion; it's the result of a freaky faultline in the Earth. Consequently, it doesn't straddle the Colorado River; it runs parallel to it.

Moab Valley is hemmed with pink and red sandstone cliffs, colorful backdrops for the bright acid-green splashes of countless trees. East, beyond the river but appearing "right here," rise the 12,000foot peaks of the La Sal mountain range.

Mormon-pioneered communities, Moab exudes come-what-may enthusiasm, perhaps because of the come-what-may cattle rustlers and prospectors in its distant and recent past. To be sure, the Mormon imprint is here in the Lombardy poplars and in the sandstone and brick houses with the dual front doors, one for each wife, remnants of a time when polygamy was practiced as an article of faith, but no more.

Moab is a jumping off place for river rafting in Cataract Canyon and for spectacular sight-seeing in such national parks and monuments as Arches, Canyonlands, and Natural Bridges, as well as the petroglyphs of Newspaper Rock.

Dead Horse Point in Dead Horse State Park here is a visual treat. Place names not withstanding. Named when cowboys roped wild mustangs on the narrow spit of land two thousand feet above the river, Dead Horse Point is 360-degree scenery. Literally five thousand square miles of changing country in fastchanging colors: reds, pinks, purples, gray-greens, amber-yellows; a supersized pas de deux of sunlight and shadow on an undulating ocean of canyons, cliffs, spires, domes, mazes, stratified walls, labyrinths, giant stone stair steps, buttes, bridges, archways, and monoliths.

Unlike the quiet orderliness of most It is a long time before we notice the river, twisting and turning in goosenecks through mazes of enormous stone outcroppings. It is an even longer timeafter dark-before we leave...silently, each reflecting on the majestic beauty and peaceful solitude.

DAY 8 SILVERTON-DURANGO RAILROAD

Red Mountain Pass, en route from Moab to Silverton - a bald redrock moun-

GRAND CIRCLE TOUR

tain above timberline. From its switchbacks, the 1880s village of Ouray looks the part of a quaint illustration in an old book of fairy tales. Gables, cupolas, gingerbread fretwork, arch-topped windows. Silverton still reeks of the silver boom days of the 1880s. And the Grand Impe(OPPOSITE PAGE) Chugging through the soaring San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gage Railroad daily hauls tourists through a mother lode of Wild West history, including mining ruins, ranches, and boomtowns. (BELOW) Silverton, Colorado, 1951, by Ansel Adams, Courtesy of the Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. All rights reserved.

Trial Hotel was "the home of the silver kings, a rough lot who preferred the always-open Hub Saloon to the opulent lobby and dining room."

So do I, ordering, "A shot of red-eye and a beer chaser, podner."

The bartender doesn't even blink. So I sit there beneath the bullet hole in the pressed tin ceiling and drink to yesterday in this once-upon-a-time roaring camp.

Our party splits up for a while this day. Two to drive; two to take the train to Durango. I'm a train rider. The Durango-Silverton is the last remaining privately owned railroad in the United States. One hundred and three years old, it also happens to be the only coal-fired, steam-operated, narrow-gage railroad in the United States. Built to haul ore from Silverton's mines to Durango's smelter, it transported three million dollarsworth before Silverton's silvery days were done. But word of mouth passed on the incredible beauty of the route, so it became a mixed use passenger and freight train, now hauling 150,000 passengers annually.

"And it runs every day except Christmas, and on schedule," says Shawn Curtis, brakeman for old Engine 481.

"Some folks just aren't used to seeing country like this," conductor John Garreffa smiles. "Wonder what they'd have thought the other day out of Durango. A deer stood on its back legs to look into the train."

And so it was that, in nineteenth century railroad splendor, Engine 481 puffed, chugged, and whistled us along the Animas River in the San Juan Mountains to Durango. On schedule.

And Durango? It's Silverton again,

only more so. This time it is the Victorian opulence of the Strater Hotel and the Diamond Belle Saloon that attracts me. Somehow, I feel as foolish drinking a Coke here as I did drinking the red-eye with beer chaser in Silverton. The bartender reckons I'm not going to be doing any "Winchester-style drink-ing" with the soft stuff. Winchester-style? "Fire and repeat," he explains.

DAY 9 AZTEC NATIONAL MONUMENT

South from Durango and into New Mexico, once home of the Anasazi. The ancient ones.

Anasazi ruins dot the Four Corners area, sometimes showing masterful stone-to-stone masonry and master-planned communities; sometimes showing so-so stonework with lots of adobe mortar and helter-skelter sprawls of buildings. This particular 800-year-old ruin was obviously master-planned, then built three stories up and one story under-ground. Underground is the Great Kiva, a ceremonial chamber, built in the plaza area, without benefit of wheels, metals, or beasts of burden. (Those items arrived from the Old World with the Spanish in the 1600s.) Nonetheless, the stone masonry here is as finely spalled as if created with a laser beam. Both the quarried stone and the roof logs are believed to have been dragged here from forty miles away.

Imagine excavating the Great Kiva with digging sticks, hauling the dirt away in back-slung burden baskets. Some burden it must have been, since it is fifty feet in diameter and ten-feet deep. Burdensome, too, was the roof which would have weighed ninety tons. It takes strong support beams to carry that weight. Here at Aztec, the reconstructed rooms are lessons in Anasazi life-style. The re-built kiva offers vivid impressions of religious ceremonialism in its fullest expression. The living quarters, some with their tiny doorways sealed with stone and mortar, add the prescribed intrigue. Perhaps those sealed doorways were the ancient equivalent of the modern homeowner locking his door during brief absences. For the ancient ones, the time away from home became eternity. An extra fillip for the traveler at Aztec Ruins is excavation is on-going, offering a once in a lifetime opportunity to be on hand when a find is made. After lunch in Farmington and a ramble through the Indian arts stores (this is Navajo Reservation Country and a good place to find "the real thing"), we make the loop to the only spot in America where four states conjoin. A large tiled plaque in the ground indicates the corners of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. And we do the tourist thing: pose for a photograph "in four states at once."

On the road again, we travel back into Colorado, through Cortez, and on to Far View Lodge in Mesa Verde National Park. At dinner, one of my companions is introduced to Rocky Mountain Oysters. "They're calves' testicles," she is told. "When you cut them off the calf, you've got yourself a steer." With a spirit of adventure and a show of bravado, she samples one. Then another and another. "Good," she proclaims, "but I can't believe I'm doing this." Out thisaway they're considered a very special delicacy.

DAY 10 MESA VERDE NATIONAL PARK

With more than 600,000 visitors annually, this "Disneyland of ruins," is the most popular and accessible archeolog-ical park in America. The "green table-land" is set in surrounding forest scenery spectacular in its own right. Cities of stone set into huge weather-sculpted caverns on the cliff faces, their

window eyes stare sightless down into the canyons. Flat roofs and straight walls nestle side by side and perch atop each other-a geometric pattern randomly broken by round and square towers jutting like stone exclamation points toward cavern ceilings.

Here, in these twelfth century cities occupied less than 100 years, Anasazi civilization peaked, a strong socioreligious culture savvy in art, architecture, and farming.

The exodus began as a trickle in A.D. 1050 and built to a steady flow during the Great Drought of 1276 to 1299. By 1300, the Mesa Verdeans had all gone away, never to return. They became a part of the mass migration occuring throughout the Southwest, as tribe after tribe, people after people, sought greener, safer places.

As we drive the loop roads to get across-the-canyon views and walk the trails to Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House, we find ourselves fortunate in having visited Aztec Ruins first. There, we had close-up and hands-on intimacy with Anasazi life; at Mesa Verde sweeping views fail to provide a feeling of intimacy with the ruins themselves.

DAY 11 MONUMENT VALLEY

This is the place. For stump-sitting, soul-searching contemplation. The place to put oneself into perspective.

The Grand Canyon boggles the mind. Monument Valley, while its proportions sing drama, doesn't-not even when the mind knows those monuments are throwing sunset shadows thirty-five miles long across the rolling red and coral pink sand dunes.

Maybe those long shadows are why Monument Valley is comprehensible. The monoliths aren't all massed together like skyscrapers; they're spread out across a 2000-square-mile skyline.

The eye doesn't get lost tracking through fifteen layers of stratified rock and a like number of side canyons. All it has to do is pick out a monolithic landmark-Stagecoach Rock, say, or Totem Pole and watch the colors change. From metallic gold to boiled-shrimp orange to bishop's-miter red to purplechocolate (thinking up your own color definitions is part of the fun), and finally to a black construction paper cutout against the afterglow of a blazing, all encompassing sunset.

It's like prayer and meditation to watch those changes while your own psyche and self, id and ego, are changing, too.

That's really all you need do in Monument Valley, but if your traveling companions are like mine, you'll be compelled to take a tour guided by a Navajo Indian in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Our guide is Wayne Holiday of the Salt Clan.

Later, back at Goulding's Lodge, we are served Navajo tacos. Fry bread. Refried frijoles. Guacamole. Sour cream. And salsa picante.

Life is for living, and this is living.

DAY 12 AIRBORNE REFLECTIONS

When tour guide Gerald La Font and I take off from Monument Valley's dirt strip, I think of Harry Goulding's reaction to seeing the valley from the air: "So beautiful, I bawled," he had said.

I swallowed hard and blinked several times myself. Mostly because Harry's gone. He was synonymous with Monument Valley for so many years; it's hard to think of one without the other.

Harry had been deeded his land in Monument Valley by the Navajos and Paiutes. The "Navvies" were his friends and neighbors. When times got hard Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958, by Ansel Adams, a genius in the use of black and white photography. Courtesy of the Trustees of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. All rights reserved.

During the Depression, he took his last fifty dollars, revved up his old Ford truck, and set off for Hollywood, hoping to bring home a movie company in which Navajos could earn money as extras. But the studio receptionist stonewalled him. Until he unrolled his bedroll.

"You can't sleep here," the receptionist predictably protested.

"Sure can. Slept in tighter canyons than this before," was Harry's retort.

To get rid of him, she allowed him to show his snapshots of "up yonder home" to studio executive John Ford. Ford shot the movie Stagecoach, in Monument Valley with John Wayne. The rest is history.

"Nowadays we mostly get crews shooting stock footage, segments of commercials," La Font says, reading my mind. "Maybe it's just too expensive to transport whole companies out here these days."

He talks of beer and car commercials made on the ground and of dog food, candy bar, and computer commercials made on the tiny tops of the monoliths. Come 'n' Get It, complete with passels of pooches, used the top of Left Mitten for hawking dog food; IBM used the top

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of Totem Pole, a space postage-stamp square (see Arizona Highways, February, 1985, issue).

When Disney Productions came in to shoot a 360-degree wraparound film, its helicopter had to be berthed on stilts, to protect the nine belly-slung cameras, mirrors, and assorted gear.

"They spent seven days shooting a ninety-second segment-the final scene of a movie to be shown for the next twenty years at California's Disneyland and Florida's Epcot Center," he says. "I saw it and still don't believe it. You pass by a monument and turn to watch it recede. Meanwhile, all the other monuments are moving by, too. In a complete circle around you."

I do my own 360-degree sight-seeing: the Henry Mountains near Hanksville, the Abajos near Monticello, San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff, Black Mesa's coal mines near Tuba City, Chuska and Lukachukai mountains, sometimes known as the Alps of the Navajo reservation.

Off the right wingtip: copper-colored cliff ruins of Betatakin and Keet Seel in Navajo National Monument, pueblos in dark chocolate cliffs streaked with rust. Fantasyland, Disney would have called it.

Off to the south, barely distinguishable, is the Chinle chasm leading to Canyon de Chelly. La Font grew up there, right on the rim. His parents, Justin and Odessa La Font, owned Justin's Thunderbird Lodge there. The green lawns and the campground in a cottonwood grove were always a welcome sight for eyes glazed with redrock vistas.

"Manure from the Navajos' sheep corrals in the bottom of the canyon. That's what made it all so green," says La Font, apparently reading my mind again.

When Monument Valley's Lodge came on the market in 1981, he bought it, "thinking we'd get the same people at the valley as we'd had at the canyon."

But he found, he says, that adventure-some types go to the canyon to hike or jeep it for the thrill of it all; those deep into Indian culture or movie buffs who want to see if it really looks like that go to the valley.

Suddenly, Lake Powell comes into view. Red rock-and-blue water. Tomorrow our final destination.