On the Plateau, Part II: Northern Arizona

Millions of years ago, the bed of a massive inland lake rose upwards, creating a plateau larger than most western states. Thanks to the work of erosion, the Colorado Plateau is now one of earth's most spectacular regions. You could easily travel here for a month, avoid the most well-known attractions, and come home satisfied. I’m not sure why you’d want to, but you'd have a great time. Our ‘Grand Circle’ across the region began in Las Vegas: this journal describes our road trip east through the Arizona Strip, that portion of the Grand Canyon State north of the Colorado.

The well-known advantages of the Grand Canyon's North Rim—that is, less people, less heat—also extend to the Kaibab National Forest on the National Park's north side. If the North Rim attracts only one-tenth the number of South Rim visitors, the Canyon overlooks in the Kaibab must attract only one-tenth of them. In addition, these treks give you more time in the forest, so unexpected after the hot, dry, rocky country to north and south.

Navajo National Monument is a rarely-visited gem. Monument Valley—despite its distance from practically everything—attracts a fair number of visitors. Make that journey there even more rewarding by heading 10 miles off US 160, where you'll probably get a better introduction to Navajo culture (although without the spectacular red rock pinnacles, and frankly, without the commercialism). An hour or a day here will reward you—I'd love to return for the half-day ranger-led hike to the Betatakin ruins we saw from the overlook trail.Betatakin Ruins, Navajo National Monument
As for more modern western living: Glen Canyon Dam will give you some insight into another way of thinking. If you look at all this dry, arid land as a correctable mistake, you, too might consider damming the Colorado to 'make the desert bloom'. Although several major projects were considered, only Glen Canyon was built in the post-Hoover-Dam era. It created Lake Powell, which I have to admit is fairly pretty, despite the massive incongruity of a major boating center in the desert.

Best of all, every journey here is a destination. If your map indicates 'scenic routes', you'll note that it's nearly superfluous here. Every trip takes you through, along, or over sites nearly as wonderful as the ones you're headed to see. I particularly enjoyed the Vermillion Cliffs near the Arizona-Utah border.

Quick Tips:

Spend time in the Kaibab Forest—it will give you a even deeper appreciation for the Canyon you're probably heading to see, and is a terrific way to experience this immense, awe-inspiring structure for the first time. Plus, the roads—though nearly empty—access some spectacular places with relative ease, given the near-wilderness state of this country.East Rim Overlook, Kaibab National Forest
Stop at every overlook you come across. They're all there for a reason, and (at least until the rest of your carload runs out of patience), you'll get to see why. After all, didn't you come out here to see these landscapes? And after you've stopped, if there's a trail: take it.

Bring plenty of water! It's dry and hot nearly everywhere (even—uncharacteristically so—when we were on the Kaibab Plateau). We bought two cases of bottled water at the first opportunity, figuring we'd rather have it than be sorry.

Bring binoculars—they'll reward you almost everywhere you go. I threw a tripod and binocular adaptor in my suitcase, and was glad I did—your arms will tire long before you lose interest in the view.

Bring sunscreen that doesn't get in your eyes—much of this country is at high altitude, letting more UV at your skin. I also got accustomed to wearing a hat with a much larger brim than I'd like, despite the fashion statement it made to my kids.

There's so much to see, visit and experience out here. Are you fascinated by the evidence of ancient peoples? Do you live to visit every National Park Service site? Will you hike any wilderness trail? Even if you have only one of these tendencies, your itinerary—whether constructed on the fly or months in advance—will risk serious overload if you don't make some selections. My general planning technique is to read about everything before I go, and then let serendipity play more of a role when we're there. As you plan, check out two terrific websites devoted to the southwest and the Colorado Plateau: DesertUSA and The American Southwest are comprehensive sources that list hikes, routes, and more for the major destinations and many of the ‘minor’ ones, too.

You might save some money with the America the Beautiful Pass, which covers entry fees for every federally administered site (including those run by the National Park Service, Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, etc.), and replaced the cheaper National Parks Pass a few years ago. Buy it online here, or at any park. But hey, the parks can use the money even if you don't get every penny out of it.

Best Way To Get Around:

Our ‘Grand Circle’ started and ended in Las Vegas, and this journal describes our road trip and stops along the trip east. If you’re interested, the seven-part series chronicling our trip includes:

• Zion National Park
  
• The Grand Canyon’s North Rim
  
• Southeast Utah and Monument Valley
  
• Capitol Reef NP
  
• Southwest Utah's Backroads and Badlands
  
• Bryce Canyon NP
  
• Las Vegas and Valley of Fire
  

Clearly, you gotta have a vehicle. There's people all over the region willing to take you on jeep tours, plane flights, raft rides, helicopter excursions—but you've gotta get to them first. This is sparsely populated country, too, so use more care than usual in reading your gas gauge, taking risks with your (or the rental company's) car, worrying about overheating your engine, etc.

The best map for the Colorado Plateau (southern Utah and Colorado, northern Arizona and New Mexico) is AAA’s Indian Country Guide Map (actually published by AAA of Southern California). It’s free, of course, if you’re a AAA member, but you’ll find it online and at gift shops and bookstores throughout the region for .95. I’m guessing its ancestry lies well back in the now-ancient pre-Interstate period, before many of these sites were even set aside as national preserves, and such a map was invaluable in touring the area. But even now, it gives more detail than any published state map (evidently, Tony Hillerman’s famous fictional Navajo detective Joe Leaphorn uses it), and was recently expanded to cover the area north as far as Canyonlands and Capitol Reef in Utah. It shows unpaved roads, scenic turnoffs, distances between every intersection (especially important when you’re off the main roads), and generally comes closer to the detail of a topo map than anything I’ve seen. For this area, it may be the only road map you need.

Vermillion Cliffs from Navajo Bridge
But once you get there: park your car. Should you ever be at risk of developing 'it's 2 pm, this must be the Grand Canyon' syndrome, just get out into the country. If you're not sure what to do, ask someone who knows. Rangers, desk clerks, restaurant workers, gas station attendants—I learned something interesting from all of them. The people who live here love this country, and they're usually happy to share it with someone who's interested.

Leaving Kanab (elevation 4900’) Alternate US89 (a.k.a. 89A) quickly descends 2000’ and brings you along the gorgeous (and aptly named) Vermillion Cliffs, the reddest rock in this red-rock region. I was glad to ride shotgun—I couldn’t keep my eyes off the deep red cliffs, the southernmost stage of the Grand Staircase.

These ascending stair-step edges stretch from Hurricane, UT to Tuba City, AZ, and the vermillion-colored bottom-stair runs along 89A for much of that distance. My youngest daughter, confused and intrigued by the idea of a natural staircase, wanted to know where we could see it. Unsatisfied with my pointing at the horizon, she sought out the ranger at the Grand Staircase-Escalante Visitor Center in Kanab, who directed her to LeFevre Overlook.


This spot is 15 miles east of Fredonia, just after 89A enters the Kaibab National Forest and turns sharply to the south. It was a fairly busy spot, with a few dozen travelers, Navajo vendors, and a researcher tracking the northern progress of California Condors (to no avail). From the parking lot, a short trail led north to a 1930s stone platform, giving us a 180-degree view to the north. Binoculars were a help, but even without them you could see the red, white, and pink edges rising in the distance.

89A now headed south, quickly climbing onto the Kaibab Plateau, gaining nearly 5000’ on the way to Jacob Lake. The altitude made a huge difference in the surroundings: we quickly found ourselves in pleasant aspen forests, and later pine forests, that we never expected while moving through the arid, red rock desert just a few miles away.

89A U-turns north at Jacob Lake, one of the few outposts in the Arizona Strip. Named after Mormon missionary, explorer and negotiator par excellence Jacob Hamblin, this village serves as gateway to the Grand Canyon’s North Rim (40 miles south on AZ 67). The Jacob Lake Inn, the heart of this village, is a real trip back in time. With its wood construction and low ceilings, this lodge/restaurant/bakery/gift shop must look much like it did when in opened in 1923. The bakery is top notch: we sampled the cookies, turnovers (!), and the bread.

The Kaibab National Forest Visitor Center is just south of the Inn. We found a lot of helpful information here about the myriad of roads, trails, and Canyon overlooks throughout this beautiful forest. You could spend a vacation viewing the Grand Canyon from these; we had time for only one.

We headed east, descending off the Kaibab Plateau and rejoining the Vermillion Cliffs (here, in the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument). You truly can see for miles here—without a car in sight. After 25 miles, the road turns around the southeast corner of the cliffs, heading to the Colorado and the Grand Canyon’s beginning in Marble Canyon.

Resources:
The Bureau of Land Management site describes scenic roads and overlooks throughout the region. The Arizona Scenic Roads site also features some helpful routes and trip guides.

Call up Jacob Lake, AZ on (almost) any on-line map site (Google misplaces it NW by 25 miles). You’ll see a spiderweb of gray roads radiating south in all directions: this is the ‘highway’ system of the Kaibab National Forest, a gravel-road network through this alpine environment (the AAA Indian Country Guide Map shows them all). It leads to any number of spectacular views of the Grand Canyon and Colorado Plateau. The National Park boundary is still 25 miles away (and the rim another 15), but even 2,000 square miles of park doesn’t fully encompass the entirety of the Canyon, leaving many overlooks in the National Forest.

We stopped at the Forest Visitor Center in Jacob Lake; they had printed guides to many of the overlooks. (To plan beforehand for picking among the many options, check out Bill Weir’s excellent Arizona-related Moon Handbooks pages: either the Kaibab Plateau page from his Arizona Handbook, or the East Rim Viewpoint page from his Moon Handbooks Grand Canyon. Go-Arizona.com also lists 10 scenic Grand Canyon drives; most are Kaibab Forest treks.)

We planned to see the Canyon from several vantage points before reaching the North Rim. As we drove in following an amazing visit to Toroweap, the remote rim-side wilderness area in the western canyon, we planned for a few stops in the Kaibab: East Rim Overlook, Marble Viewpoint, and Buck Ridge Point Scenic Drive.

In the end, we had time for just the first. We didn’t have much company on AZ 67; we had none after we left the highway. I love the feeling of having this country to yourself, and I’m sure any Kaibab trip will provide that sensation. The route was easy to follow, and in 10-15 minutes, we were at the parking area (with only one other car, who must have been out hiking).

Following a short, paved trail brought us to a wonderful panorama at the edge of a steep, brushy and wooded canyon edge. To the left, trails headed along the rim or down the slope into the Saddle Mountain Wilderness; to the left, we could see the end of the canyon and the location of the Marble Viewpoint, and everywhere in front of us was plateau, with the Colorado hidden at the bottom of the sharp-edged crevasses.

We spent 20 minutes here enjoying the view and the solitude. The Grand Canyon itself was still ahead of us, and eventually that became too much to ignore. The experience left me hungry for more trips on the forest roads of the Kaibab, but they’ll have to wait for the next time.

Directions:
Head south on AZ 67 from the Forest Visitor Center at Jacob Lake. In 27 miles, you’ll pass the DeMotte Park Campground turnoff; in another ¾ mile you’ll hit the (paved) turnoff to Forest Road 611 (be ready; you won’t be sure it’s the right road until you’re on it). From there, it’s 4.5 miles to the parking area.

Do you wanna go here? I don’t know… I’m not sure I did. On a scale that runs from ‘Full-Out Tamer of Nature’ on the right to ‘Hug Trees, Not People’ on the left, I’m somewhat left of center. 12 years ago, I spent a half-day at Hoover Dam, my reactions pinging between ‘Wow, what a project’ and offense at the 60-year-old mosaics celebrating ‘subduing the destructive forces of nature’.

This newer dam is from the same mold. One of many proposed Colorado projects, Glen Canyon is one of three actually built. Its Carl Hayden Visitor Center memorializes the late senator who spent 57 years in Congress, largely devoted to ‘water issues’ and development of the west. The center sits on the dam’s edge, and its floor-to-ceiling windows look straight into the spillway, down the long, massive, nearly-vertical concrete slope. Free 45-minute tours are available, but you must register for tickets.

The exhibit chronicles the dam’s construction, which subsequently created Lake Powell, the swollen, 200-mile long stretch of the Colorado that slowly rose into being after 1963. It covered the beautiful, wild, often inaccessible terrain of Glen Canyon—such as Rainbow Bridge, whose water access is also receding with the lake level—with hundreds of feet of water, trading the red-rock canyons for a new boating vacationland in the desert. It wasn’t without controversy—Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang chronicles a fictional group of misfits cum proto-ecoterrorists who (in the midst of other mischief) long to remove the Colorado’s "temporary plug". David Brower, the Sierra Club’s long-time director, toured and photographed the canyons in advance of the big backup, and came to regret not fighting harder to stop this project (this expedition led to the book, "The Place No One Knew").

Ironically, the canyons have been slowly reemerging: in 2005, Lake Powell was lower than any time since 1969 (six years into its 17-year filling period). You can easily see how the lake has fallen from the marks above the water’s edge. This increased the pressure to let the Colorado move closer to its natural state, which only requires letting using the dam’s diversion tunnels to finish draining the lake (and not destruction of the dam: sorry, Mr. Abbey). There’s plenty of local opposition to that idea, based mostly on the likely economic impact. But perhaps uncovering the gorgeous side canyons, lost for decades, might attract enough new visitors to dull that pain somewhat.

Looking out of the visitor center, you see the red rock tops of the canyon before the Colorado turns sharply to the east. There’s several nice hikes in the area, out to and along the river’s rim—to Horseshoe Bend (west of 89A, 3 miles south of Page); or Wire Canyon, north of the dam. Ask the rangers in the Visitor Center’s nice bookstore; they were very helpful (or see DesertUSA’s list). But it’s hot here at high noon, and we reluctantly skipped hiking and continued our trek east to Monument Valley.

How do you cross the Grand Canyon? Well, for starters, you look for a spot where the rims are closer than the 10-mile separation in mid-canyon. Early travelers followed the 18th-century priests Escalante and Dominguez, who forded the Colorado far upstream, never approaching the Canyon (their ‘Crossing of the Fathers’ is now submerged under ‘Padre Bay’ in Lake Powell). After the Mormons began settling the Colorado Plateau, John Lee established a ferry in the same general area. Lee’s Ferry was the crossing for half a century, until the 1929 completion of the steel bridge here over Marble Canyon. It's elegant design earned a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark designation.

Navajo Bridge was the first highway bridge over the Colorado for a 600-mile stretch. Even with this (sole) access to the northwest corner of Arizona, it made more sense to make the 'strip' part of Utah. The area’s isolation from the rest of the state has made for some interesting history.

But here where the the strip joins the rest of the state, it's beautiful: the walls of Marble Canyon are nearly vertical, and the canyon is gorgeous. Even if—as we were—you’re leaving the awe-inspiring edges of the Grand Canyon further downstream, it’s still worth spending an hour here.

Best of all, there’s now two bridges: in 1995, a second structure (an award winner on its own) was added to accommodate the increased traffic and loads. The new bridge was built as a twin to the original, using high-strength steel to make the same design work. The highway now passes just to the south of the original bridge, which is open only to pedestrians. There are parking areas on either side, and you can walk across the 800-foot span, admiring the view and the river 500 feet below. It was a beautiful day when we were here, with blue sky, white clouds, red cliffs and a light breeze. We spent 30 minutes on the bridge, watching the river (something that’s usually missing from a Grand Canyon experience), enjoying the canyon, and admiring the elegant bridges. Several displays outside and inside describe the bridge’s history and construction.

On the western bank is the Navajo Bridge Interpretive Center. The building is nicely designed to fit the location, and houses a bookstore run by the Glen Canyon Natural History Association (this stretch of the Colorado lies within the huge Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which encompass es Lake Powell and the Colorado all the way to Hite and as far north as Canyonlands NP). The eastern shore also lies on the edge of the Navajo Nation, which stretches from here into western New Mexico.

A short ways upstream is Lee’s Ferry—mile 0 of the Grand Canyon, reached along a paved spur—where you can walk to the river’s edge. It’s a remote area, but several establishments west of the bridge (Marble Canyon Lodge, Cliff Dwellers Lodge, and Lee’s Ferry Lodge) have fed and housed travelers for years.

This is an out-of-the-way place—but if you get anywhere near it, take the last step and go. We hadn’t planned to take the turn north off of US 160 down the 9-mile spur to the Visitor Center for this small but dispersed monument; we were worried about reaching Monument Valley in time to meet our guide for a sunset tour. But having made better time than expected, we decided that a short visit was better than none.

We were glad we came. The visitor center features exhibits on Navajo cultures, the vanished Ancestral Puebloans who built the dwellings preserved here, and demonstrations of weaving, jewelry and other traditional Navajo crafts. There’s a 30-minute movie (made by a local middle school class) that chronicles the process of basket-making, from gathering the materials to making the dyes to explaining the significance of the patterns. It’s definitely worth your time.

The monument was established to preserve three sets of Puebloan dwellings. Two of them—Betatakin and Keet Seel—are reached from the visitor center, although located at separate sites. The Sandal Trail, a one-mile path, leaves the visitor center and heads a little ways down hill to an overlook of Betankin. The interpretive trail includes markers that identify traditional Navajo plants and their uses (save them for the trip back: it gives you some nice excuses to stop). As you descend, you never see the ruins until reaching the observation point, and coming upon them suddenly is stunning. Like many other sites, the residences here are tucked under a cliff, in the eyebrow-shaped indentation formed by an ancient collapse of the cliff base. A free telescope gives you a better look at the structures themselves.

The climb back to the visitor center wasn’t too bad, and definitely worth the time and effort (parents and kids agreed). You can hike to Betatakin—despite the apparent proximity from the overlook, it’s five miles roundtrip—but only on regularly scheduled ranger-led trips that depart each morning. The Keet Seel ruins require a lot more time and dedication. It’s 17 miles round-trip, again only by ranger-led expedition (which takes you across private property in the Navajo nation).

After 90 minutes here, we reluctantly left. You won’t find much other company here, but you will find yourself in among those living and gone who have called this austere, beautiful land home for many centuries.

Resources:
The National Park Service’s official website is uncharacteristically sparse. DesertUSA, a good resource in general for the Southwest, actually has a more complete description of the site and the trails.

Details:
Navajo NM is about 30 miles SW of Kayenta, and 90 miles SE of Page. From US 160, turn north on AZ 564 at Black Mesa. It’s about 10 miles to the Visitor Center. There is no camping, lodging, or dining at the monument; the closest establishments of either kind are in Kayenta, where a Best Western, a Holiday Inn Express, and a Hampton Inn can be found, plus local options.