Southwest Journal

Southwest Journal

4/13-15 We are at Tecopa Hot Springs. Wm has been chatting with an old guy who pulls a trailer behind an old school bus. He says it is great fun here in the winter. I don’t know if I could live off the grid that long. No Cell, No Internet, No Newspapers even. He said they had great activities in the Community Hall. I went over to the community hall looking for a Pahrump Weekly for Wm and it smelled too much like old cigarette smoke. I think these old desert rats must smoke in there in the winter. The Lucky Rollers? A RV group were having their officers meeting in there. The last day we were here the place was filled with Koreans who chattered a lot. Lots of people come over here for the healing waters from Pahrump. Not any pics of the spa as it is segregated men and women and no suits are allowed in the pools.

4/15/07 Kingman AZ. We are at Blake Ranch RV Park and Horse Ranch. A very nice place that has cell and internet but not enough time to blog. The koi pond in the front is fun. The koi come over to you as if they expect to be fed. Wm went for a walk while I cooked dinner and accidentally walked into a few cactus spines.

4/16/07 Trailer Village at the Grand Canyon is actually nice. The Shuttle bus system takes you all over. We rode on the blue bus today and got off at the end of the line, A big raven was on the trail very unafraid. The air quality is quite hazy. Winter air quality is supposed to average 100 mile visibility but today is 55 miles. The canyon has a blue haze. I don’t know why. The polluting coal burning Navajo power plant is shut down. I guess it is just from southern Cal and Phoenix. I took a picture of Wm with a rock formation in the background that I thought looked sort of like the now nonexistent old man of the mountain formation in Vermont. We also saw a cute nuthatch bird and some scruffy looking mule deer and elk. I thought they could use a brushing and I was reminded of the brushing I will have to do on Teddy when we get home. No Cell and No Internet here so journaling will have to do. We had a talk at dinner and agreed that the last good Republican President was Eisenhower. When I was nine years old I went over to the neighbors and watched the GOP convention on their TV. If I had had an “I Like Ike’ button, I would have worn it. I am thinking also that I would have liked to call Cyndi again and find out how Axel is.

Non Sequitur for 4/16/07

Some Say facts are alot more fun when you get to make them up. Yup!

4/17/07 I do not like the new Visitor Center at the Grand Canyon. It looks like a big high ceiling bus station manned by a couple of elderly docents. It has a few hardened exhibits and some places that tell times of interpretive programs. It certainly does not look like a regular Visitor Center with lots of interesting exhibits and plenty of things to read. Maybe this is the new Illiterate Center. In the basement of the Kobe gallery near Bright Angel we did see an interesting exhibit of old postcards and correspondence about the canyon. We have got a new best zip code to give out when you are at a store when you are asked for your zip code, the zip code of the Supai Indians (864xx) who get their mail by mule to the present day.

We did quite a bit of shuttle bus riding and walking today. We saw a group of rafters, but missed seeing them go over some rapids. The canyon looked slightly clearer today but still has some haze. We were able to see spray from a waterfall going into the canyon, though we could not see the falls itself. Today we were using the binoculars.

Last night I heard the coyotes, yip, yip, yip, owwww.

4/18/07 We spent hours watching the comings and goings on the Kaibab Trail. We first got off the shuttle bus at Yaki Point. From this overlook you can see many parts of the trails and part of the Kaibab Trail. We then took the shuttle to Pipe Creek Vista and walked part of the way along the rim trail until we spotted our own semi-private overlook to shelter from the high wind today. We watched 3 trains of mules going up and down between Kaibab and Phantom Ranch. We could see 2 way stations and much of the trail. So we counted people and mules. One last mule train had gone out of sight when we walked on to Mather Point and bused on to Yavapai Observation point (after some shopping) where we spotted that last mule train heading over the Kaibab Bridge and on to the ranch.

Decided to go ahead and post this journal I had been keeping in lieu of blogging.