From the south exit of Petrified Forest, the drive is about 125 miles, mostly through the Hopi Reservation on Arizona highways 77 and 191. I was able to stop and take some really fantastic pictures along the way--beautiful, anonymous mesas, buttes, and hills. They certainly have names, but I've failed at finding them online.
I wanted to check the status of the trip so opened the app and was a bit perturbed to find Google Maps declaring "You have arrived!" when I was only about halfway there by my estimation. I've been dropped before, with the "rerouting" message running and running, but I'd never experienced a false arrival. Somehow, this is much worse.
Luckily I had my handy Atlas to rely on and it saw me through to Canyon de Chelly and back through to Flagstaff again. The atlas, I might add, is hilariously huge and sort of makes me feel like a bespectacled explorer and cartographer, owlishly tracing all the squiggly little lines and mumbling to myself.
When I was researching the route I would take for this leg of my trip, I looked up "Things to See in Arizona" and Canyon de Chelly (pronounced d'SHAY) popped up in the results. I had never heard of it, but it sounded worth the drive. This park is different from other parks I've visited--it is on reservation land, so does not belong to the US government. The Navajo people cooperatively run the park with the government, but it is entirely their land. When you drive to each of the viewing areas, you are also driving past neighborhoods and farms, with many roads marked "private" so that the thousands of tourists that take this route aren't constantly tromping all over homeowners' property. |
| Nope. Not disconcerting at all. |
All of the surrounding civilization is what makes the canyon itself so astounding. For most of the drive, you can tell something is over there, but it isn't clear just what you are in for...then you reach one of the better viewing points and it's like getting smacked between the eyes with a clown hammer. Boink. It is absolutely beautiful and stunning. The drops are horrifyingly gorgeous. To be a bird living in this canyon...if I am very, very lucky, I'll dream of it someday.
A couple of days later, when I was packing up my camp at Grand Canyon, I had a great conversation with a lovely family that had arrived only the night before. They had driven there from Wisconsin--mom, dad, and four kids under 10--in a fully loaded minivan packed to the gills with camping gear and supplies. We were comparing adventures and my recent Canyon de Chelly visit came up--they were wondering if it was worth the side trip on the way back and I offered that I thought it was. The dad said he'd heard it was more beautiful than the Grand Canyon and wondered if that could be true...it is an interesting question. There is no doubt that the Grand Canyon is more gobsmacking incredible--I can only imagine how people discovered it without losing a little piece of their minds in the process. It's almost too much. Beautiful, intense, unreal...it's the one place I wish every person on earth could see at least once.
Canyon de Chelly is not as large, but it is greener and narrower, and it even appears as deep as the Grand Canyon in places. It must be the immediacy of the walls of the canyon, the clarity of the light and air to the ground deep below, but it only ever drops as far as 1,000 feet (source) vs. Grand Canyon's heartstopping 6,000 feet depths (source). I found it very difficult to express why Canyon de Chelly was more beautiful to me, and the only word that I kept coming up with is how immediate it was. Driving up and down hills past all these homes and cars and normalcy, then you take a few turns down the right road and there is this incomparable, enchanting vision of grandeur and shocking, swoon-y heights. Words are, to be clear, stupid and pale.
What it most reminded me of was, weirdly enough, the movie Legend. You can ignore just about everything about this movie: the dialogue, the Keebler elves, the storyline, sexy Darkness Tim Curry, and awkward and miscast Tom Cruise, but you will not ignore the rich, vibrant locales created by set designers and imbued with magic by the cinematographer/art directors. It is an almost comically beautiful film where every last detail was sweated over and created within inches of perfection. I could easily see the Canyon de Chelly playing a part in a movie like Legend. It is a place you revisit in dreams.
The drive back toward Flagstaff was serene and kind of gloomy, despite the bright skies and loud music. I was thinking about the night ahead of me, sleeping at the rest stop near the Meteor Crater, as I'd originally planned. Having spent the prior evening freezing my ass off, the thought of another night shaking under the cold lights, never really sleeping but dozing to a shiver then waking up hour after hour was weighing heavy on my mind. When I finally arrived at the rest stop, the decision was made: I had to spring for a hotel. The rest stop was serviceable, but remote and bleak. I just couldn't make myself do it. I managed to secure a room at the same place I would be staying just a few days later and, while it wasn't the Ritz, really...what is these days? |
| Boom! Goes the Meteor! |
Freshly rested under real blankets and sheets in a properly insulated building, I headed out for a quick visit to the Meteor Crater. I was a bit reluctant to pay for admittance, but figured it would be the one time I would visit the site and, as it so happens, it did have some minor significance in my little world.
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| Part of that mean ol' meteor. You can touch it if you like. |
Do you like Jeff Bridges? He's someone you could sit on the fence debating yea or nay until the stars fall out of the sky. Some people love The Dude (I was too drunk to remember much of that movie), some spit venom at The Fisher King...and I will admit his reputation took a massive hit when he appeared in The Vanishing, a movie that creeped me out so completely I still really haven't recovered from it (and don't think road tripping wasn't forever affected by it, either). But! First and before anything else, there was Starman. I saw this movie in theaters with my mother when I was 12 years old. I was already a fully formed Space Nerd, so Starman was added to my considerable love list from the very first viewing. I loved how he called her Jennyhayden and was such a freaking weirdo--a typically Jeff Bridges weirdo--but he was a charming kind of weird. We all want to believe the Visitors will be nice and curious and it will be humans who threaten first contact...and people especially love his assessment of our species (You are at your very best when things are worst). At twelve, it plucked all the right heartstrings (nice alien! mean government!) still violently twanging from just a couple of years previous by a far more precious and squishy E.T. I loved it.
Spoiler Alert: The movie came out over 30 years ago so cry me a river? They go to the Meteor Crater because that's his pick up spot to go back with his kind. So I had to go there, too. Besides, this is where a space rock slammed into the planet and caused some serious havoc--space things! It's kind of mind blowing just how much awesomeness Arizona has within its borders when you really think about it (meteor craters, grand and magical canyons, cacti). And to think: I just wanted to come here for the sunsets and the otherworldly silhouettes of mesas and buttes on the horizon.
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| Crazy upside-down rainbow over the crater. |
It was worth the $18 admission and I strongly suggest a stop by if you're ever in the area. First of all, once you leave the main road and breach the first big hill of the access road, you can see the impact of the meteor very clearly. The edges of the crater rise up from the desert floor so starkly there's no mistaking what you are seeing. The crater is actually privately owned, but they do a really great job at presenting it to the public. The facility is accessible to everyone (lots of elevators and non-scary stairs) and they have higher platforms outside for the more daring and curious. I didn't feel compelled to climb farther up because you can see the whole thing from the main platform, and really it is quite a sight.
They also have a great, interactive museum, a 20 minute movie about the history of the crater, exhaustive gift shop offerings, and a Subway. (Sing along: Meteor Crater foot looonnggg)
When you think of the universe and all that it must contain far from our infinitesimal perspective, it is fair to marvel even at the somewhat pedestrian happenstance of meteor impacts. They happen to all planets all the time. Look at our lovely Moon, or space puppy, constantly circling our ankles and chasing the tides in and out. She's a pocked creature, shining those marks brilliantly through the night (I have now spent many a restroom run to and fro pausing to wonder not only at the stars but our singular, shiny moon), and even our own planet has plenty of craters to evince a wild thrashing over the years we've been orbiting the solar system.
But it is that otherness, I guess, that confounds and inspires...it's the reminder that there is so much more out there. And yes, 99% of it is probably space junk (debris from the big bang and all that followed), black holes, and void...but not everything is terrestrial. In fact, earth is a rare, tiny jewel set deep in the back pocket of this one small galaxy. Well, you could fall into a 550 foot deep crater thinking about it.
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