Let's rock!

Having left Roswell, we spent an uneventful couple of days in Albuquerque searching fruitlessly for a new skylight to replace the one that had been annihilated during that unprovoked attack by a tree. Undeterred by our lack of success, I managed, through my experiences in Europe of mending a broken van with gaffer tape, to lash the carcass of the old skylight together in such a way that at least it wouldn't liberate itself from the van entirely. With the RV all bandaged up we headed west, out into the desert wilderness, for a week of rock-based adventure. We drove through an old volcanic area called El Malpais – the badlands – in which we visited an extinct volcano called Bandera. While this was all very nice and, you know, volcano-shaped, the real surprise was what lay down below. Beneath the ancient lava flow was a cave and in that cave was a "lake of ice". The temperature down there never gets above 0°C so this ice has been there for centuries – scientists have dated the oldest ice as being 3,400 years old. Native Indians and early settlers used to 'mine' the ice (to keep food fresh in the days before refrigerators) but now it is merely a spot for tourists to gawp and marvel at while getting goose bumps on an otherwise hot, sunny day.

From a wonder of volcanic rock we went to wall of ancient graffiti called "Inscription Rock". This cliff face is next to a pool of natural spring water, the only fresh water for miles around, and so over the years it has been a stopping point for weary travellers. Once refreshed, these travellers then took it upon themselves to carve their details into the adjacent sandstone cliff. There are ancient native-American petroglyphs, inscriptions from Spanish conquistadors of the 1600s, right through to the settlers of the mid-to-late 1800s. Some of the carving is crude, a sort of early form of "Kev woz 'ere", but some of it is stunning script and calligraphy of the sort of you might see in churches. Absolutely amazing. It was while looking at these old carvings that Claire's bare ankle garnered the unwanted attention of a rattlesnake. Thankfully it did what rattlesnakes do and gave a little warning rattle before it chose to hospitalise anyone but it was a close call. We've been enjoying the company of a lot of reptile life out in the hot and dusty deserts of the southwest. Most seem to be harmless lizards but since the snake incident they all make me a little jumpy.

 

We found ourselves next at "Four Corners", the only point in the USA where the borders of four states meet. It means you are able to stand in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and Utah all at the same time. So we did. Once that was done, however, there isn't really a lot else to see or do except peruse the slightly tacky offerings of the surrounding Navajo stallholders, but as we didn't need a gaudily painted necklace or a "dream-catcher" we left. Our next calling point was a balancing rock called "Mexican Hat" (from a certain angle it did look like an upside down sombrero) and then we entered Monument Valley. Monument Valley is full of those distinctive buttes and outcrops that are synonymous with old western movies, Roadrunner cartoons and the cowboy level on Angry Birds. It was like driving past a vast painted backdrop and didn't seem real at all. Especially when we spotted an actual cowboy.

Then we dipped back into Arizona and arrived at Antelope Canyon. Like Four Corners, this is on Navajo-owned land and, as such, is subject to their own creative pricing system – but it was worth every cent. It is simply one of the most amazing places I have ever had the fortune to visit. If I've said that about anywhere else before then forget those, this is the new number one. Unlike the Grand Canyon, this one is very compact and bijou and you enter it through a narrow slot in the rock – like you're actually climbing inside the ground. You are then enveloped in this extraordinary red swirling rock as you walk along a narrow channel that has been carved out of the sandstone by years of river torrents and flash floods. The combination of smooth stone, rich red colour and ethereal shapes is just mesmerising. At the risk of sounding like a wet hippy, it's a genuinely spiritual place. You slowly make your way along this seemingly-organic channel and emerge at the other end, in a sort of symbolic rebirth, and feel attuned with the Earth itself. Or we would have if our Navajo guide hadn't brought his guitar along to serenade us with Radiohead songs.

 

 

Our rock odyssey continued into an area called Grand Staircase – Escalante. We wandered across a landscape worthy of any early Star Trek episodes and replete with alien rock formations known as "toadstools". As with most things in America, the name is of course bleedin' obvious. Softer rock erodes beneath harder rock leaving boulders balancing on spindly columns of sandstone and the result is a crop of rocky mushrooms. This type of erosion was even more evident and even more spectacular at our last rock-based destination – Bryce Canyon. This is a fantastical, magical place where rocks do things that you wouldn't expect rocks to do. There are fins and arches and thousands of these weird sort of knobbly columns of rock which, in a departure from the normal American naming process, are mysteriously called "hoodoos". I wasn't sure how I was going to describe these bobbly towers of orange sandstone but then it struck me – they're like an enormous terracotta army of Spicy Knick-Knacks. I'm not sure I'd get a job writing brochures for the National Parks Service but at least I know what I'm on about. I mean, really, what the hell is a "hoodoo"?!

 

BURGER OF THE WEEK

While in New Mexico I tried out what seems to be a popular local delicacy, The Tortilla Burger. It's a standard grilled burger, wrapped in a flour tortilla and refried before being topped with three kinds of cheese and then grilled again. The resultant offering should be filed under 'over-cooked'. This driest of burgers is accompanied by a cup of homemade green chilli – a sauce so hot and spicy that it renders all of your mouth's sensory functions inoperable to the extent that you could be chewing polystyrene and not realise. Highly recommended!