Willow Beach again

Lake Mead National Recreation Area - Willow Beach Marina - 13 August

A chill day out on the river with the folks

Again, bobcat

Wow, what are the chances of seeing a second bobcat in the exact same place as the first one I saw? This one even had a friend.

I guess they're rebuilding the river bank at River Island State Park. Hope the local wildlife is not too inconvenienced!

House of mirrors (Mary Colter and La Posada Hotel, Winslow AZ)

Arriving

When you walk into a place that is really loved, it's often evident from the very first moment. La Posada at Winslow is such a place.

Walnut Canyon National Monument

Walnut Canyon National Monument 2 January

Christmas lights by trains (Flagstaff AZ)

red sky at morning ...

We drove into Flagstaff on December 23 with a big snowstorm hard on our heels - a foot of snow due, starting at 5 a.m. the next day.

red sky at night ... well, orange. 

Christmas Eve morning the sky was grey and threatening but the ground still bare. We went to the Museum of Northern Arizona and spent a happy couple of hours wandering through fossils, pottery, textiles, paintings, and jewellery. 

As we came out, little flurries were starting. A few hours later, snow plows were patrolling the streets and parking lots. The scrape and hum of them reminded me of winters in Ottawa back in the day ... weirdly soothing ... 

Christmas tree flowers

It's December, and I am missing pohutukawa ... (link for my non Kiwi readers if such there be)

But - look what I found in Arizona. This will do til the real thing comes along.

I think it's a calliandra

Christmas lights by sea (Lake Havasu light parade)

As I said, strange and lovely are the Christmas lights of the desert. Especially if you watch them on a lake that is spanned by London Bridge (that's the actual London Bridge, not some cheap local knock-off.)

On snowbirds (Quartzsite, Arizona and surrounds)

Hand painted stone marker
at the entrance to Quartzsite cemetery

Quartzsite makes me twitch every time I see it written down. I suppose it is a quartz site, but my brain keeps wanting it to be quartzite. Anyhow this town is southeastern Arizona has a few thousand people for 2/3 of the year, then round early January suddenly swells to tens of thousands as the annual snowbird migration kicks in. So for my money, November/December is not at all a bad time to visit - the temperature is already very pleasant, but the winter season hasn't yet really started.

Snowbirds - aww. 'Snowbird migration' sounds fluttery and adorbs. Cue Anne Murray, amirite? What this actually is, though, is a massive influx of retired folks who come south for winter in their RVs. If Vegas has from time to time seemed to me like a city inexplicably spread out over a desert valley, then this is like a cross between an RV park and a - huh. Retirement home? Skin growth? I can't come up with nice similes for this. (Better stop then, because a) being kind, b) it behooves me to show some sympathy, given how easily I could imagine us hooking into this peregrinatory lifestyle and c) I saw this early snowbird in Quartzsite last week, he was driving 25 in the left-hand lane of a 35 mile road, sporting a 'Gun owners for Trump 2016' bumper sticker on the back window of his around-town vehicle.) All up, I feel that buffalo migration would be closer. Land behemoth migration gives a better idea but doesn't quite have the ring. And after all, they are white (the RVs, that is, overwhelmingly so. Demographics? IDK) and they are coming south for winter.

ohai, im in ur desert campin in my rv

So, the empty desert flats around Quartzsite come alive for a few months a year when the weather is
cool enough for enjoyment. I can't help wondering how the local infrastructure copes - water supply, sewerage, health care, etc. There are more RV parks in and around than you can shake a stick at, and the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that manages otherwise unallocated federal land throughout the country, has even set aside some 'long-term visitor areas' where you can pay a season fee to pick a site and stay. That's at one end of the accommodation spectrum. At the other are parks with low stone walls and wrought-iron arched gates for each site so you can get the full illusion of suburbia: parks with cafes, gift shops, and other services on site.

Ohai, I'll be ur rv suburb today

We stopped at one of the cafes. It was not a cafe as urbanite would know it, but 'recognisable through cross-cultural gear meshings' as Stephenson has it (Cryptonomicon, page ref gah who am I kidding.) The decor was country diner/restaurant, and so was the menu. The pink fundraiser baseball caps on sale were an ... authentic cultural touch? Lucky find? Future heirloom? (Motto picked out in rhinestones: 'Make Quartzsite Great Again!')

The main street as I saw it seemed to alternate between fast food, gas stations, and either Wilderness Gems or Geoff's Emporium, for those of you from that Auckland ambit: dusty stores full of amazingly varied discount stock lines (USB 0.9 cable, anyone? Mini slot head screwdriver? Not-quite-vintage old-new-stock postcards of other places in Arizona?)

There's a huge gem and mineral show here at the end of January. (Also plenty of good rockhounding around the area, of which more another time.) The number of rock/gem/mineral/bead/jewellery shops seems in proportion rather to the winter population than the summer, and includes what is without exception the best jewellery supply shop I've ever seen. (It has a camel out front, just in case. Camels are part of local history as the 'ships of the desert' were trialled for desert travel and freight service in the late 19th century).

Camel sculpture outside the big gem and jewellery supply

Tomb and monument of Hi Jolly, camel wrangler supreme

There's an enormous open air flea market too ...

sunset light from just north of Quartzsite

The surrounding land is brown and flat, with hills rising on all sides at various distances - closer to
east and west, which makes sense as we're still in the Basin and Range geological province here. However it's Sonoran desert, which means saguaro cactus, a novelty I didn't get tired of yet. It can be quite beautiful (in parts - in its own austere way - on a blue clear day) and we saw a couple of really lovely sunsets.

I say brown and flat, but it is already dotted with white even at Thanksgiving as early arrivals pick out their spots and hang up their hats. Come mid January, and they'll be cheek by jowl.

Small rooms of Yuma

It was mild enough when we went there last month, but Yuma gets as hot in the summer as you'd expect for a town within spitting distance of the Mexican border. It's an interesting little place in its own quiet way, just south of the confluence of two mighty southwestern rivers: the Gila and the Colorado.

Bobcat

Yes! Please tell me more about your bobcat encounter!
(Image by ucumari)

Okay, so I was very lucky the other day: I saw a bobcat. Only for a few seconds as it made its way up the river bank, and of course I had no camera in hand. It was heading away from me and I first recognised it by the absurd stumpy tail. Then when I called to Simon to come out of the tent and see, it turned and showed me its round tigery face. (And its teeth, actually.) Then it loped off into the trees.

This here is exactly the look it gave me.

So much fun bobcat fact! Very learn!

• http://www.defenders.org/bobcat/bobcats 
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobcat

Also, since it was an Arizona bobcat ... this is so, so NSFW, you been warned ...
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/bobcats_cactus

Best shipwreck ever (Sandbar Resort, Parker AZ)

Looking for somewhere to eat, we were attracted by the riverside location and all the pretty Christmas lights. When we went in, everyone was outside on the deck - and when we went outside on the deck, it looked like a private party. I asked.

"Yes it is," said the man behind the bar, "but you're invited."

All that wide blue sky (Kanab and Paria)

"But for me, oh it was the acting" (31s)
Only not in this case.

We saw the new Magnificent Seven a few weeks ago. (That was my allowance of murders for the month, can't watch any more for a while.) The story was interesting enough - it's a remake, and one of the classic plots, so no real surprises. The film likewise, especially in its context as one of a series (Seven Samurai, the original Magnificent Seven, and even The Avengers is not stretching the point too far.) The costuming was not bad, though the female pseudo-protagonist showed way too much bosom for a respectable woman of the period who wasn't at an evening party. (And not enough actual, y'know, character development. Ugh! Say it with me, boobs are not characters ... unless you're a comic strip.) Several of the characters were very striking - such a villain! - but for me, oh it was the scenery.

Image by Geraint Smith via jerrygarrett.wordpress.com

'Bonanza' set near Kanab, UT
On private property and unmaintained,
it is slowly succumbing to weather

I am enchanted with the cliffs and mesas of the region they call 'Indian Country' (which is gah, idk, hopeless understatement, much of the continent was Indian Country. However.) The ground in such shades of orange and brown among the green, it is no wonder the sky looks so blue. M7 was shot in New Mexico (and Louisiana, but that can't possibly be the landscape shots) but it could just as well take its place with dozens of earlier westerns filmed at Paria, Utah, or other locations not far from Kanab.

It is hard to convey in words how satisfying to the eye is the sweep of a long sagebrush flat, or a mesa rippling with golden-headed grasses, with the unpredictable shapes of the hills rising beside - the weird angles where different layers have been pushed, pulled, folded, or have eroded at different rates, the effect of patient wind and furious water, or long-dead volcanic eruption. In this case, too rivers and streams - though in our further west country, it is much drier.

from a prominence above old Paria town, GSENM, UT

Abruptly I want to learn how to ride a horse. (Up til now been afraid of horses for decades.) And oh, so looking forward to our trip to New Mexico later in the year.

Two books of Western stories: 'Arizona Nights' and 'Riding for the Brand'

Part of the fun of moving here has been immersing myself in a whole culture that I'd pretty much actively avoided before. Yeah, this is cowboy-a-go-go-land (hat tip to Louise Rennison), it's the Wild West. Nevada still fancies itself as a frontier state, and it shows all over the place. Bless.

If I need to learn a thing, I'm all 'is there a book about that'? So, I wanted to read the stories to try and connect with this place and understand it. Here, therefore, are two books of Western stories.

Riding For The Brand by Louis L'Amour

The thread that pulls all these stories together is the gunfight. The author takes us lovingly through the whole showdown - the buildup, the endless split second and the thunder of shots, the fall into dust. He unpacks the fights with forensic care - a wound on the back of the hand tells all participants this guy was roundly beaten - his opponent reached, drew and shot while the other guy was still flailing round with his holster. (Most stories have fist fights too. I have to admit I find detailed descriptions of fist fights both tedious and distressing, and the details rarely turn out to matter, so I usually skim those. Hope I'm not missing any delicate gradations there.)

So that's - awesome? Who reached first, who drew first, I guess when I get round to watching who shot first (er, Star Wars or whatever) it will be so much more richly nuanced?

In fact, the whole book is shaped like a series of gunfights, rapidfire, an ever-drifting, ever-changing cast of characters who mosey into Main Street, draw, shoot, and either fall or walk away into the endless dust. Having said that, I did enjoy it. The good guy generally wins, often getting the girl into the bargain. But the characters are not all the same, the situations likewise, and anyway the real star is the Southwest itself.

The peculiar affordances of desert and chapparal constrain the characters' actions in ways both plausible and interesting. The proverbial harshness of the arid lands becomes a plot element where self-indulgence or self-restraint play out in larger consequences, as in the desperately dried out man who has been walking through the desert, and shows his character almost from the moment we meet him by closing the gate behind himself, but even more, by having the discipline not to take more than a sip of water at first. This foreshadows blah blah ... Okay, it's a bit formulaic, but it's pretty well done. It was not surprising to learn that the author did work and travel widely in the southwest.

(An interesting note to this specific edition, too. Just as water rights are everything for farming in the SW, in the twentieth century, copyright has been everything to authors. The introduction has an extraordinary more-in-sorrow-than-in-my-justifiable-outrage compliment to the reader on purchasing the authorised edition, and not some other publisher's edition that was perfectly legal but not profitable for the author - I think these stories are reprints that originally appeared in magazines. There's an exhortation to only buy the authorised editions, and a carrot in the form of special author selections, introductions, and extra stories. There's also a sales spread, not unlike Reader's Digest, in the middle of the paperback edition, inviting the discerning reader to purchase a fancy hardback set. Guessing our grandkids will find print copyright as much of a historical footnote as Pa Ingalls proving a homestead.)

Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White

Compared with this, 'Riding for the Brand' is "as moonlight unto sunlight, and as water unto wine." In fairness to Mr L'Amour, I have to admit a personal fondness for White's rich vocabulary and the rolling gait of his paragraphs. Here, too, stories are strung onto a broader narrative of cattle-raising in turn-of-the-century Arizona. This is a less uninteresting topic to me than gunfighting per se.

Told from the point of view of one of the cow-hands (a man as nearly invisible in his own tale as Bella Swan in hers), the stories are more varied, both in kind and in structure. There are tall tales, comic tales (some tales both tall and comic), tales of love, revenge, greed - just about everything except religion. And just as 'Riding for the Brand' is shaped like a gunfight, 'Arizona Nights' is shaped like a round-up; a loose line far out on the plain, little bands of cattle going every which way, gradually drawn into one tight herd by careful craft and a lot of effort. The book increasingly focuses on the ranch owner, and the later chapters tell a strange and moving love story. (No spoilers, because if you're going to read either of these books, I'd say read this one, and it's an unusual tale that deserves to be encountered fresh.)

The lovely and varied scenery of Arizona is a setting here, not a plot device. The narrator and the author seem equally charmed by the wide land, the clear light, the astounding expansions and contractions of distance. The story takes us through deserts, mountains, and chapparal, in all seasons. The descriptions sometimes verge on the rhapsodic (I say this affectionately, as anyone who reads my stuff for any length of time knows it's a failing of mine, too). But I have the sense that the land is there and the story takes place within it, whereas in 'Riding for the Brand' I often had the sense that the land was somehow elastic, conjured into being to provide the needed cave, spring, rocky defile, or small-town street that would make the story work correctly.

But I think that what I most loved about this, and what moved me, is that this is not some cocky fast fiddle tune about proving yourself to someone else. It's a largo for cello, on the heart-hunger that makes the huge desert distance and the finality of death touch us at the centre - and about our best innate miracle - leaving all those sandstone wonders and wide skies behind - the miracle of how we can abruptly see everything anew, in the blink of an eye.

Springs and the Calligraphy Highway pt 4 (Really? 4?): Calculating Pie

Okay it's officially the Weekend that Would Not End. Did we really do all this stuff in two days? Brain hurts just thinking about it and carpal tunnel syndrome on the horizon.

After our sobering visit to the Meadow Mountains site, we continued south down the valley. We were on the way home, but by no means finished yet. I'd seen Gunlock Reservoir and State Park on the map, it was over 110 degrees and we thought a swim would be all right. So, turning off at Veyo, down the 3184 - ooh, 4 digit road - we were bound.

But we got a bit side tracked by a sign about pies (that this can happen explains a lot about us.)

And not just a sign, but an actual pie bakery. It was too much to hope that there might be proper meat pies like at home, but the coincidence was too much to ignore. With a nod to the great Viands bakery in Kihikihi, we felt we really should stop at Veyo Pies. (Check their website. Many gifs.)

Pros:

• Pies, obviously
• Both start with V
• Both at the turnoff to expected awesomeness with swimming above a dam
• Hungry
• Is that guy on the bench there actually real or one of those very lifelike porch dummies? (He smiled back at me, so I'm going with 'real'.)

Cons:

• Yeah, hurry up so I can lock the car. It's hot out here.

Result:

• They have a volcano pie.
• Yes, a volcano pie. It is chocolate pudding and caramel and cream. Though I think I preferred the sour cream and lemon pie.

At Gunlock we picnicked in questionable shade and made coffee in the crazy heat - I'll post more some time about my wonderful stove - gotta have coffee with your pie. Then walked across the dam to an orange sand beach and oh yes that water was not boiling, not even once you were in.

But the pleasures of more eroded sandstone were still in wait. We continued down the gorge of the Santa Clara, through the extremely lovely Shivwits Paiute land, and around east towards St George, to find further wonders:

How had I never heard about this?

These sandstone cliffs are stunning. I have never heard anyone mention them, never really seen them in guidebooks. It's amazing to live in a region where something this exquisite is no special cause for comment. 

If this weren't enough for a sense of perspective ... we proceeded through charming, historical, Santa Clara town (once a separate place, now part of the ever-spreading urbanosis that is St George) to this stop that Simon wanted to make and I happily seconded: Tuacahn Performing Arts High School and its astounding amphitheatre. You have to ask yourself, how confident would a performer need to be to have this as a backdrop?

And finally, a run down through the wild and scenic Beaver Dam Wash, a brief stop at quirky Beaver Dam AZ for iceblocks and cold drinks ... and on down the I15.

Coming down the interstate, you crest a gentle rise of land and Las Vegas is suddenly revealed, wrapped in the milky, fine, and alkaline dust of a million years of erosion, evaporation, wind blowing over desert. The towers and strange shapes in that soft light are like a dream half remembered, or a memory half dreamed. 

Yeah, we're nearly home.    

Itinerary

Sunday: Meadow Mountains Historical Site Overlook, Turn right onto 3184 at Veyo, Gunlock State Park, Kayenta, Tuacahn, Beaver Dam, Las Vegas.