"It's A Hell Of A Place To Lose A Cow"

These words are attributed to Ebenezer Bryce, when asked about the canyon that now bears his name. He and his family stayed just five years, from 1875 to 1880, relocating to southern Arizona due to his wife's bad health. During the five years he lived here, he cleared fields, dug irrigation ditches, constructed a logging road, raised cattle, and with hard work, prospered. So, here's the question. Was he a stoic or just too busy to notice the profound beauty of his home?

Bryce Canyon, land of the hoodoos (rocky promontories that over millions of years have been scoured by wind, water, and ice and transformed into so many chess pieces), is truly a an artist's pallet of color. Iron rich sandstone cake in tan, red and pink, interspersed with the purple of manganese is capped by white concrete icing. Holes in the rocks form arches, bridges and windows that let the cerulean blue sky shine through, a blue so dark and deep that it is hard to tell day from night. White patches of snow, under the greenest of pines and firs, melting in the warm sun, trickling down the hills as clear cold streams. So it is today. So it was in 1875.

Was old Ebenezer too busy to notice? After five years was he inured to the beauty of this place? Or was he just so focused on survival in a harsh climate that food and shelter trumped these considerations? And if he was just a man without feelings, it is too bad. Too, too bad.

We Went For A Walk... Or Was It A Hike?

After leaving the Katy Trail in Missouri, Leonardo has become a reluctant passenger on the back of the car. Out west most of the "back roads" are unpaved and his 1.5" wide tires are not suitable for biking on those types of roads. The paved roads tend to be more heavily trafficed and the distance between towns much greater than back east. So we walk.

Trudging along the trail, I had plenty of time to ponder on some of life's unanswerable questions. For instance, what makes a walk a hike? If you consult a dictionary, and look up "walk" and "hike", you will be as puzzled as I am. Go ahead and look them up. You'll see what I mean. Having been on over a dozen hikes (walks?) in the past three weeks, I have a few thoughts on the subject.

If the trail is paved, is it a walk or a hike? The Rim Trail at the Grand Canyon runs 12 miles from Pipe Creek Vista to Hermits Rest. It offers breathtaking views of the Canyon and connects the lodges for those who wish to walk rather than ride the shuttle buses. All but 3 miles of it is paved and very flat. However, the non-paved portion is rocky and steep in places. Last Tuesday we traversed 8 miles of the Rim Trail including the non-paved portion. The Grand Canyon web site describes it as a hike, and the distance did leave our legs a little sore. But we were never more than a short distance from camera toting, flip-flop wearing tourists. Walk or hike?

If it's not distance that differentiates a walk from a hike, could it be exertion? On three occasions we climbed down the Canyon on very steep trails that eventually lead to the Colorado River. Well placed warning signs cautioned against attempting the trip to the river (15+ mile round trip) in one day due to the heat and the lack of water on the trail. Park Rangers advised carrying one liter of water per person per hour of hiking and suggested wearing sturdy hiking shoes due to the steep rocky terrain. Weighted down with a gallon of water each, our packs filled with food, rain gear, a compass, and a medical kit, imagine our surprise when we were passed by people wearing sandals and carrying only a camera and 1/2 liter bottle of water. What were they thinking? Walk or hike?

Maybe a hike is a challenge and a walk is not? In New Mexico we visited the lava field of McCarty Crater, a volcano that blew 3000 years ago. A one mile trail marked only by cairns (there is no path since the ground is hardened lava) guides the visitor onto the lava field and to the crater itself. A cairn is a pile of rocks that marks the trail. To prevent disorientation, walk from cairn to cairn (and hope that no one has added a cairn off the trail just for fun). After 20 minutes we reached a cairn and for the life of us could not see the next one. Nor could we still see the one behind us which was blocked by sagebrush. The compass that would have shown the way was left in the car since we anticipated a walk and not a hike. Although we knew the general direction of the parking lot that was no more than 1/2 mile away as the crow flies, we are not crows and we needed to force down the panic that was beginning to cloud our judgment.  Hearts pounding as if we had just climbed a 15% grade, the hidden cairn came into view. In less than 10 minutes we were safely ensconced in the car and on our way for our next adventure. Walk or hike?

It seems to me that the difference lies in one's expectations and the degree to which we challenge ourselves. Stay tuned for more hikes to come.

Do You Believe In Ghosts?

I have not given much thought to this subject, and I have certainly never experienced anything remotely paranormal. Many people report to have seen ghosts, and others say they can feel the presence of the dead in a very conscious way. There is an entire industry devoted to "ghost tours" in places like Key West and St. Augustine. So what exactly is a ghost?

Having given it some thought, I believe there is another dimension beyond our conscious world and some people have the ability to sense it. We smell. We taste. We see. We feel. And we hear. We all have different abilities. Some of us have the extra sense, and some of us do not. Maybe that sense can be developed. Maybe some of us "feel" the paranormal to make up for a weakness in another area. I'm not sure.

So what brought on these thoughts? Just outside the mountain town of Magdalena, NM is the ghost town of Kelly. Two miles up the hill stands an old silver mine and the remnants of a town of 3000 people that petered out before the end of the 19th century. As we drove the coarsely rutted road I imagined a ghost town like the ones in the movies. You know, the ones with broad streets, tumbleweeds, old hitching posts and saloons. A town of that size would have hotels, merchants, stables, a jail, maybe even a school. What we found was a church that had been recently restored, and on either side of the narrow roadway, the skeletons of adobe structures built 150 years ago. No wide streets. No tumbleweeds. No people. No sound except the "drip-drip-drip" chirp of a brown-headed cow bird that sounded like a slow moving rocky stream. What of the ghosts that the sign said had been "seen" hanging around the town? I did not "feel" anything. Maybe the bird can.

To my knowledge, there are no government programs to contact the dead. But, 20 miles from Magdalena is the National Radio Astronomy Observation Very Large Array. If you saw the movie Contact starring Jodie Foster, you may recognize these radio telescopes. The movie was shot here. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the visitor center details all the wonderful discoveries about the universe that have been accomplished at this facility. No mention about contacting aliens that was the subject of the movie. Some people see UFOs, but no one seems to believe them. Are they out there? Maybe they have already been here and are not coming back.

Preconceived Notions

Kansas is flat.

Flat, flat, flat, flat flat.

Or is it?

We drove over 400 miles from east to west, and OK, most of Kansas is really flat. But not all of it. Had we trusted all that we had heard about Kansas we would have driven through Arkansas. Instead we decided to test conventional wisdom about Kansas' flatness. And we found hills.

The Flint Hills are mainly located in east-central Kansas, between Emporia and Manhattan (Readers-it's map time again). A long, long time ago, Kansas was under a shallow sea. When the seas receded, this area was left with deposits of limestone and shale. Erosion caused hills to form, and fossilized rock known as chert or flint was left behind. Due to the rocky soil, plowing proved an impossibility resulting in cattle ranching becoming the primary industry on the prairie. The beauty of this region is subtle, with emerald colored grassy hills, speckled with stones and rocks that have pushed their way up into the daylight. These green hills stand in relief to the more prevalent brown flatness that surround them.

A hike in the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve enabled us to spend a few hours admiring the beauty of the Flint Hills. Long before the white man trampled upon the plains, grasses over five feet high covered the prairie from Canada to Texas. A sea of bison from horizon to horizon grazed on the nutrient rich bluestem grasses. Now, this preserve is the last contiguous prairie left. As we walked the trail, I tried to imagine the grasses stretching endlessly. Purple, yellow and red wildflowers poking up from the brown grass provide some contrast to the green hills in the background. The warm, southerly wind passing through the giant cottonwood trees and the bellowing of the grazing cattle provided the only break in the silence.

 After leaving the Flint Hills and driving west past just planted wheat fields and passing through dismal farm towns, we found ourselves in the northwestern part of the state. The elevation gain of 800 feet meant that we were now on the fringe of the high plains. Think Clint Eastwood and tumbleweeds. Rocky outcroppings began to appear, and although the land was still very flat, it began to have the feel of the old west. Towns with broken down houses that the highway and railway abandoned years before provided some break to the monotony.

One hour east of the Colorado border stands a geological marvel called Monument Rocks. Also left over from the receding sea of 80 million years ago, these limestone formations stretch over 70 feet into the clear blue sky. The striations of color that range from bright yellow-brown to very dark gray indicate the many geological events back to prehistoric time. Looking closely we were able to pick out fossils embedded in the rock. Standing away from the monuments one can imagine how the waters rushed through and left the pillars standing as a reminder of our origins.

Kansas flat? Well, yes and no.