The wild (ish) west - end of part 2!

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written on here. I'm just finishing over 2 weeks of travelling: over 3000 km exploring parks and canyons in Arizona and Utah. This was kinda one of the main parts of my trip, going back to where my Dad went. So I was too busy driving, looking, walking and being amazed by the beauty of the landscape in front of me to think about the blog thing. But now I am back and I also happen to be the end of my second month here, which went really quickly. So here's something about all the beauty I saw the past couple of weeks, which felt a bit like being on a first-year geology fieldtrip: seeing all possible rocks and forms of erosion, the scale of which is hard to imagine. Kinda my highlight of places, from least favourite (but still totally amazing and still loved it!) to my top preferred place. This is obviously entirely objective. Not.

5. The Grand Canyon: I’m sorry if this is not PC. But, yes, it is my least favourite amazing place of all the amazing places I've seen. I might be dropping a bomb shell here, I know. Don’t get me wrong, it is jaw droppingly amazing, grand, huge. All of this. And I really liked it. But it has remained for me something to look at from a distance. Tall, big… and far! Too far and a tad overwhelming (and I went on both the south and north rim just to be sure!). “Why didn’t you hike down?” I hear you say – well yeah good point. The hikes are quite challenging, going down and up isn’t something that can be done in a day, and I just didn't. I tried one hike which was very steep and very quiet and after half hour I just thought… nah. So I suppose I did go half an hour down the canyon. But still, I won’t bulge - I’ve preferred other stuff.

4. Monument valley: this is what you see in Westerns. It’s those big red forms. You actually drive around. Sooo impressive. I went there when I went 17 and I loved it just as much as I did then. Not sure what else to say.

3. Canyonlands NP: That park is huge. From where I was based (Moab), the closest part of the park (Island in the sky) was about an hour’s drive away. It’s stunning. And there I went on walks and stood on cliffs, and looked at canyons down below, and climbed boulders… Amazing. I wish I had taken more time to explore more. But hey.

2. Arches NP: smaller and with the main attraction of… arches in the rock! Self-explanatory really. So you can go and see them, get close, touch them… the park caters for anything from the lazy tourist who takes photos from the car, to the more adventurer who hikes for hours on not always very clearly marked paths, climbing on top of huge smooth boulders to eventually be standing on a not very wide rock with quite a huge drop on both sides thinking “how will I ever get off this rock on the way back?”. And you will be pleased to hear that I did it all, and thought just that (but managed it). I also got under one of the arches for sunrise and that was pretty amazing. The fact that I had been the first one and everyone turned up later also made me quite smug – always a bonus.

1. Bryce Canyon NP: OMG. My absolute favourite. It is like being on mars: a never-ending landscape of red chimneys (called hoodoos) carved in soft rock by water and ice. The top is quite high in altitude (about 2000m I think), and it was late November, explaining the arctic temperatures. I had it all: hail, snow, sleet and bright sunshine. I did two long hikes on two different days where you walk down the canyon and you’re surrounded by hoodoos and trees, and not much else. Plus there are trees (which were few and far between at Arches). Totally my favourite.

No ranking - Zion NP: I have no ranking for that one. Not because it’s so exceptional, but because I lasted about 15min: I only had a day and I had heard it was crowded. My gut feeling was telling me to find another canyon to hike and explore… But then I thought I wasn’t THAT far (1h), and it looks amazing, blah blah blah so I gave it a shot. And guess what? My gut feeling was right. It’s not that it’s not beautiful, quite the contrary. In fact, it would have had the potential to become my number one NP. No, the problem to me was the crowd. Awful. To limit the traffic, you can only go up the canyon using a shuttle bus. Well, the queue for that looked like what I remember from trying to get on the ski lift in Chamonix on the first day of the school holidays, but times 10. It would have taken over an hour just to get on a bus. And I didn’t want to wait or to feel like cattle. Hell. So I cut my losses, enjoyed the drive out (beautiful) and did something else instead (some caves and some sand dunes if you wanna know).

There we go. A long post, but it was an amazing couple of weeks. And now I’m about to have a cultural shock: off to Las Vegas for a few days, where I’m meeting my good photographer friend Nicolas and will become a millionaire. Til next time!