Tag Archives: canyon

Forgotten canyon

When I think of solitude on the road, I’ll admit the last place I’d associate with it is Zion National Park. In the twenty years that had passed since I first visited the park (when it was a sleepy secret), word had definitely gotten out. Nowadays Zion is a lot like the Grand Canyon: there are so many visitors that you can no longer drive the park road in your own car for most of the year, and forget any hope of a solitary moment. On my most recent visit, it worked out that I was there during spring break week for most of Utah’s colleges and universities—needless to say, I rubbed shoulders (literally! The shuttle bus was packed!) with a whole lotta fresh-faced students that day. But a kind park ranger gave me a great tip: she told me that if I wanted to escape the crowds, I should try Zion’s lesser-known sister site: the Kolob Canyons Unit, just forty miles to the northwest.

Reader, she was right. There was nobody there. Not one soul, save the ranger manning the lonely visitor center. So while the hordes teemed in Zion Canyon, I had this view all to myself. It felt like winning a trophy for braving the crowd earlier.

Twists and turns

Well, it wasn’t the Loneliest Road, but I certainly had a lonely-road solo drive on the day before I crossed Nevada. I was in southeastern Utah, and I wanted to tick another highway off my road-trip bucket list: State Route 12, which cuts through part of the mostly-wilderness, sprawling, painted-desert expanse of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The highway itself, completed in 1940 by CCC road builders, is legendary—but because of its remote location, I had never managed to get there on one of my previous Southwest trips.

I knew the drive would have spectacular scenery,

and the squiggles on the map promised a fun challenge of curving blacktop.

And I’ve done enough winding desert drives in the Southwest to expect surprises along the way—

—but the road pulled a few fast ones on me, all the same.

I rounded a blind curve to find this fella standing calmly on the yellow line. I screeched to a halt (and thus vindicated myself for sticking to the speed limit), stopping just a foot or two from him, and he didn’t even flinch. Didn’t even move—he made me go around to continue on my way, while he stared me down.

Still, once my heart rate returned to normal, I tried to remind myself that maybe he wasn’t interrupting my solo road trip—maybe I was interrupting his.

Painted desert

Of course, with all this talk of national parks, leaving out the crown jewel of the Park Service would be downright criminal. But until last summer, I’d never been to the Grand Canyon.

When I finally go there, I did my best to remedy the heck out of the situation. And the weather did its best to oblige me—in just two short days I feel like I got to see the Canyon in an incredibly broad variety of moods and colors.

Actually, sketching there sort of broke my brain. Not only is it easy to fall into the trap of trying to document every minute detail, but the light also seems to change every few seconds. I’d look for a bit, mix up some paint, and then look again to find the colors and shadows completely different than just a moment ago.

So whenever the grandeur threatened to overwhelm me, I shifted my focus to my fellow tourists (including the four-legged ones).

To tell the truth, I found the tourist trade every bit as fascinating as the canyon itself—especially since it goes back a long, long way. The Grand Canyon might be the most well-known national park, but it was far from the first. And that’s because well over a century ago, commercial interests fought long and hard to keep the canyon private to maximize profits—hard to imagine, considering the number of tourists who flock there today. But those early tourist traps are now preserved right alongside the rocks themselves—and I was just as eager to sketch them as the vistas.

Still, nothing beats nature for a spectacle. I was one of hundreds lined up on the cliff’s edge this night, but as soon as the sky turned pink I forgot all about my fellow tourists. Seeing something that vast, paradoxically, has a way of shrinking the whole world into a pinpoint of a moment—one that’s every bit as personal as it is universal.

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Park rangers of the Mother Road

This post is part of an ongoing series called 66 Fridays, which explores the wonders of old Route 66. Click on the preceding “66 Fridays” link to view all posts in the series, or visit the initial overview post here.

The last post was a big fat tribute to the National Park Service, which celebrated its centennial yesterday. So it’s only fitting to spend today telling you about Petrified Forest National Park, which is the exact center of the Venn Diagram between the national parks and Route 66. In fact, it’s the only national park to contain a section of the original Mother Road.

Of course, even if you didn’t know anything about Route 66, Petrified Forest is still infinitely worth visiting. There is the namesake petrified wood, of course, but it’s the landscapes that touched this artist’s soul.

Around every bend in the road was some new desert vista, each one vastly different than the one before. And with every passing cloud the light changed, essentially remaking the land in a totally new image, all within minutes.

And just when you’ve all but forgotten what brought you here, you crest a hill and see a telltale line of telephone poles, still marching westward to the horizon.

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Our best idea

Mt. Rainier National Park, WA

Tomorrow is the 100th birthday of the National Park Service. All of America seems to be celebrating right now, and rightly so. In my opinion, our wildest pockets are our true national treasures, and our national parks, as Wallace Stegner said, our best idea.

Olympic National Park, WA

So since I’ve spent a good chunk of my sketching life in national parks both close to home…

Arches National Park, UT

…and far afield…

Crater Lake National Park, OR

I figured I’d add my voice to the celebratory din, in the form of a little sketchbook retrospective.

Badlands National Park, SD

Beyond the centennial itself, I’m always up for toasting the parks. Not only do I think park rangers are the best people on earth,

Redwood National Park, CA

but I also sometimes think they’re the only thing standing between wildness and destruction.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park, NM

And anyway, I’m not exaggerating when I say I’m a total park nut myself. It’s my goal to visit every NPS property before I die, including national parks, historic sites, national monuments, everything. (Actually, I’ve crossed a goodly chunk of them off the list already—

Guadalupe Mountains National Park, TX

—and I even have the stamps to prove it.)

Olympic National Park, WA

I know I have a long path ahead of me before I reach that goal,

Grand Canyon National Park, AZ

and getting there won’t be easy.

Big Bend National Park, TX

Yet I can’t tell you how grateful I am that the opportunity exists in the first place—

Rocky Mountain National Park, CO

that so many people have fought to preserve these wild places, and won.

Saguaro National Park, AZ

Best of all is the feeling that no matter how long it might take me to get to each park with my sketchbook,

Glacier National Park, MT

I know it’ll be there waiting for me, as close to unchanged as humanly possible. Thanks to the National Park Service, the window of opportunity remains open.

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