The Big Hole


Saturday morning on the outskirts of Flagstaff. Five o‘clock, Saturday morning in fact.
The trains continued to do what trains do, haul freight and make noise. Sleep by this time was forgotten, which was okay really because we were still pretty much on UK time so to us it was around noon. We talked of getting on the road. The diner next door opened at six - we‘d checked that out the night before - and we were there, at the door, waiting, when it did.

Now there were the two extremes, in terms of waitressing, in there that morning. The lady who met us at the door and showed us our seat, was the epitome of early morning happiness. Cheerful, full if life and smiles, if we‘d been as miserable as frogs, her attitude would have shaken us from any sombre mood. This lady almost danced as she moved. We figured she must be on something.

Our assigned waitress, on the other hand was the epitome of early morning unhappiness. The barely audible "...drink?" conveyed all the misery in the world which was all too clearly hanging on her shoulders. Poor lamb. She very obviously wasn't on anything.

There was one other customer besides us. He ordered the whole nine yards, or at least it looked like the whole nine yards, and barely touched it. A few mouthfuls of pancake from the monster mound was it. He drank his coffee and left. He left enough to feed most of Illinois I should think but that was his business. I really do wonder if he only ordered that much so as not to make the waitress‘s day any worse.

We ate, we paid the check. The cheerful lady, who was on till duty, liked Wendy‘s shoes. She asked where we got them. We told her. We offered to sell them to her. She smiled in that way which says she thinks we‘re joking. Us?

There are two ways of getting to the Grand Canyon from Flagstaff, the short route (FH180) or my way (FH89). I was fascinated by the sight of the snow covered San Francisco Mountains, to the north of town, and 89 looked to be the road that took us closest to them. Now where is FH89?

According to my US map book 89 heads north about where we were, in fact it should be real close to where we were. We drove up and down looking for a turn off but with no luck. It was on the second go 'up' that we realised that we were actually on 89. No wonder there was no turn off. No worries, we were on our way.

We skirted the mountains and headed out across the open plains that stretch towards the Grand Canyon. I kept seeing the snow caps in my rear view mirror and kept stopping to take pictures. This arrow straight road leading to the foot of The San Franciscos made for a wonderful image and there was always a 'better' one every time I looked behind. Of course, every time I looked in front, which was often as I was driving, this same arrow straight road went on forever.

There is something about a long road, disappearing into the distance, something intriguing almost mystical. Better men than me have tried to convey what it‘s like to stare into the distance and see that same stretch of tarmac seemingly going forever.
One of the truly great photographs was made by Robert Franks in the nineteen fifties. It simply shows US285 fading into the distance through the New Mexico desert but the way that the image draws you in to the picture is it‘s magic and brilliance. You have to know where the road goes, and this, of course is what fascinates me about roads like the one that I drove that day towards the Grand Canyon.

89 heads north fully forty miles to Cameron in a virtually straight line, and only takes a slight kick left there before carrying on for another thirty or forty miles. You can‘t see the whole seventy miles but you imagine that you can. It‘s heady stuff when all one is used to, in the UK, is a couple miles of straight motorway at most.

We stopped off at the Wupatki National Monument . This an area of archaeological interest, indeed importance, but you‘d never know it. We drove down a dirt track, more than once thinking about turning back because it didn‘t seem as though there could much down there, and finally arrived at the site.

Now, what we saw was interesting.
In the same way that ancient ruins in Britain usually comprise just the groundworks, the walls and roof being long gone, you have to imagine exactly what 'was' there when the place was inhabited. Wupatki makes you wonder about the size of the natives.

The rows of stones that are what remains, show the layout of buildings and individual rooms. And they are small rooms. I hoped that they all had a room each so that they could at least sleep diagonally. Anyway, that was it, we left. Except that we didn‘t see any of the real thing.

In an effort to add something to this piece, I looked up Wupatki on the net. It means 'Tall house' in Hopi. It has been settled for something like 8000 years. The Sinagua people occupied the are until around 1050 when the Sunset Crater erupted and they felt it sensible to leave. Later, Navajo and Hopi tribes occupied the area and many sites around there are still considered sacred to them.
The Wupatki Park and is set in 54 acres of parkland. The original 'tall house' had, or should I say 'has' several hundred rooms and is there to see if you know where to look.
In fact it looks as though you could spend many hours exploring this place but we didn‘t. Because we came in the back way. At least that‘s the only explanation that I can come up with to cover the complete lack of signs to indicate that there was more to this place than a few rows of stones.

Type "Wupatki" into your favourite search engine and have a look at what we missed.

From there it was back onto 89 and on towards Cameron, although we would turn off before then.

State Highway 64 runs into the Grand Canyon National Park. When you first turn left off of 89 even though you still have a good twenty miles to go, you know you‘re in the right part of the world.

Driving down 89 towards this turn off I wondered how we would get up on the South Rim. In the distance it was obvious, at least I thought so, where we were headed and that seemed to be quite a climb above where we were. I speculated on interesting routs clinging to side of the canyon, or rather hoped that we might start off in the bottom and work our way up, but no, SH64 just climbed slowly and relentlessly up onto the rim. Through the gates of the park and onto the Canyon proper. First however there was Little Colorado.

The cynic in me speculated as to whether the Indians had found a great way to get their own back on the white man as I saw a number of sites set up on the side of the road.
Once the road had reached an interesting height, there were several good spots to park the car and gaze into smaller canyons. These canyons had nothing on the Grand one but if you were on that road for the first time in your life, you had no idea how poorly these poor relations compared, so naturally you would stop and look. The Indians had them sewn up as ways to get you to part with your hard earned cash.
They sold pots, jewellery, all sorts of handmade stuff, aimed at tourists. In these somewhat backward looking places they take all major credit cards and I heard, in answer to one query, that they 'ship' but that might have been a joke.
Now, fair play to these folks, everyone has to make a living.

Anyway, back to the plot.

Little Colorado is a small tear in the Earths crust but it was a pleasant enough hors d'oeuvre before the main course a few miles up the road. Set up in such a way that you had to walk through the Indian stalls if you wanted to look over the edge, it was a couple of hundred feet, perhaps more, drop to the bottom if you wanted to make the trip that way. The truth is there is little that can be said about this sort of natural phenomenon because it's impossible to convey the beauty of what's there, even in the smaller form that we saw at Little Colorado.
Describe or not, we wandered through the stalls and admired the pots and cringed at the prices, very carefully replacing each item after we had looked. We met a nice couple from England, who took our photo with my camera so that I now have three holiday snaps. Then we peered over the edge and looked at the river 'way down there'. Now the scale of the thing is difficult to grasp. What looked like a small stream could have been a giant flooding river, it was very difficult to tell. Perhaps that was one of the reasons that the larger version just up the road attracted all the paying customers, because up the road, 'scale' wasn't something you need think about.

We moved on into the park itself. We handed over a wad of dollars at the entrance and drove on to the first viewing place.

Now I‘ve just said that these things are impossible to describe but that‘s not true, exactly.
What is impossible is to do justice in words to what the eye can see.
I can describe the Grand Canyon perfectly. It‘s a big hole. What I could never do is convey the splendour of the thing.

Because of the trains back in Flagstaff, we‘d left early and arrived on the south Rim before the crowds and, even better, before the day got hot and the haze began to form. That first sight of the Canyon was awesome. It seemed to stretch forever into the distance to the east while the west was tucked around behind some rocks.

I gazed across at the North Rim and thought of Evel Knievel‘s plan to jump across, I shuddered. That was simply too far.

Looking downwards was a vastly different experience from looking down into the Little Colorado gap. I said that 'scale' meant nothing here and that‘s because the bottom is too far down to see anything, to get an idea of scale from. Basically all you can do is drink in the view. I can‘t bring any of the glory that is the Grand Canyon alive with mere words, you need to see it for yourself, but go as early as we did.

We moved on to the next viewing spot and the next, and then the passenger seat cried "Enough". How many different views of the same big hole can you possibly look at?
Me? I wanted all I could get.

I used to be a photography fool. I did pictures day and night, I slept, ate and drank photography but I overdosed on it and for a long time I hardly picked up a camera.
Well you can take the boy out of photography but you can never take photography out of the boy, so although I‘m not welded to my camera anymore, the moment I have it in my hand I want to take pictures and this was the very best place.
Whilst I could understand Wendy‘s point of view, I just wanted to see if there was a better shot somewhere, but in the end I saw the light and passed several parking areas.
Such will power.

We came to a rest area with shops and a couple of eating houses so we decided to purchase the two worst sandwiches in the whole of North America. I won‘t go into detail but in my opinion defrosting a sandwich and calling it 'fresh' that day, didn‘t seem right, but it cost plenty so I chewed my way through it. Incidentally the coffee was pretty naff as well.

I had planned and schemed so that I could be at the depot as the train from Williams came in.
There were a couple of reasons why, not the least of which was the knowledge that on that train were the threesome that we last saw at the airport.
Well I figured that they would be on it. How else were they going to get there? They were coming by train and this was the only one.
We found a seat and waited.

Of course the other reason, and not the main one - please don‘t think that - was that I am a closet train freak. I won‘t cross deserts to get the number off the front of some uninteresting diesel engine or anything like that, but I do like a good head of steam. I might cross deserts for that, so I sat, camera poised.

The damned thing came in backwards.

They obviously turned the loco round at some stage just before it rolled into the Grand canyon station and the first thing that I saw was the guard‘s van. The second thing that I saw was the length of the thing. The locomotive didn‘t even come into view. Dammit.

The length of the thing caused another problem, I thought. There were going to be a lot of folks getting off. I mean they had to get off, the train didn‘t go anywhere else, so how were we going to spot Donna, Norma and Bobbie in the crowd? Wendy nudged me.
There at the window of the carriage right next to us was a frantically waving hand, and then the three of them hopped off.
A short reunion, an agreement to meet for dinner and they were gone.
Onto their coach for the rest of their trip, so I went to investigate the front of the train. It was a diesel.

It was a very nice diesel but that‘s not really the point, I expected to see something like the loco that sat at Williams, steam billowing, threatening, powerful. Diesels don‘t do that. This one tried, I‘ll give it that but a static diesel is a dead machine. Steam trains still steam even when they ain‘t moving. I hid my disappointment and took it‘s photo and that was it, really. We‘d done the Grand Canyon.

The best thing that I can say is that I 'will' go back. I want to see the Big Hole from the air and, more especially, from the bottom.
When we first planned the trip, we talked about riding the mules down to the bottom.
I wish that we had. I don‘t think you can see the Canyon at it‘s best from the South Rim.
You get a tourists view, at best. You don‘t get to see any of the sights that are shown on the very best photographs. I wanna go down there. Just one small lottery win please.

We drove steadily back to Williams and booked into the Super 8, and crashed for the rest of the afternoon. Our peace was shattered by a gang of Hells Angels roaring around the place. Actually there were only three of them and they were about as quiet as it‘s possible to be on a Harley. I wondered how they would react if I asked to be allowed to take one for a spin. I put the thought out of my mind.

A train went through the town and made that moaning whistle sound that I‘d come to love the night before, but that was the only one. This was one motel with no noise problems.

We had a very enjoyable dinner with the ladies from the train and we strolled back to our motel, contented with life and very happy with the holiday, thus far. The next day, Sunday, we headed back to Vegas.

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