[MF Comment on yesterday's blog: I can't believe he got fresh AND political!! It's 8 o'clock and I'm beat - enjoying this very big, western-furniture style room at Best Western. The Sox are on, but they're losing badly. Met some Sox fans from Ludlow, MA today; of course, there is always also a Yankee fan somewhere nearby. Goodnight! ]
One dam tour after another...We had such a great time yesterday touring Lake Powell that we decided to take the Glen Canyon Dam tour this morning, deep into the bowels of the potential 1500 megawatt power plant that is a bonus since the dam was built primarily to control water for agriculture and human use in the southwest. One hundred years ago all the water from the Colorado River emptied into the Gulf of California. Today, every drop of it is used or collected before it ever reaches there. There are ecologists who are pained at that, but in fact the great southwestern cities and the huge California agribusiness would not exist without the nine dams along the Colorado, and the water they conserve and the power they produce. Our tour guide was as enthusiastic as a National Park Service employee could be, and thanks to two very convenient elevators, the 528 vertical journey to the turbines was an easy one.
Mary Frances downstream of 28 million acre-feet of stored water
The highest steel arch bridge in the world when it was built in the late 1950's.
Eight turbines capable of 192 megawatts each
Escalante/Grand Staircase...
That's the name for this entire area of 21,000,000 acres in south central Utah that's surrounded by National Parks. If none of them existed, it would still be one of the most beautiful places on earth, with towering buttes, amazing great mesas painted in horizontal tiers of rust and pink and white and vermillion. In recent times the Grand Staircase area has become the world center for paleontology, with incredible finds of known and hitherto unknown species of prehistoric reptiles, fish, insects and mammals. This Department of the Interior employee was particularly proud of the 54-million-year-old ceratops fossil he's standing next to:
Keeper of the dinosaurs, Big Water, Utah
Zion!
Every place we go on this trip seems better than the last. For Zion National Park, neither words nor pictures can say enough. The only way to appreciate the astonishment that takes your breath away with every bend in the road is to come here and experience it. On a flat little blog on a flat little computer screen you can only get a taste of the majesty of these mountains, buttes, mesas and hoodoos, but here is the best we can do:
Look up from nearly anywhere inside the park and see massive limestone cliffs
Mary F. with the river beside here, the mountains behind her, in Zion.
Under the Weeping Rock, Zion National Park
Runoff from the Weeping Rock, Zion National Park
Majestic structures at every turn
When words just can't do justice...
I'm sure Ansel Adams felt it and John Muir felt it: there aren't words enough to describe a beauty more beautiful, a majesty more majestic, that astonishment you feel when suddenly you're confronted with something that would never have occurred to you could exist. When you drive along a narrow road, around a turn, and suddenly an edifice a hundred stories high and painted with the colors Michaelangelo would have chosen is right in front of you, and another turn, another gasp, and another. In this tour of ours we have enjoyed this kind of wonderment in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah. What a magnificent region of the world this is. How lucky I am to be able to share this adventure with the best traveling companion, in a 2005 Mazda MPV or in life, that a man could have.
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