The Switzerland of America

High into the dense snow of the mountains we curve along steep slippery roads partially covered in slushy ice.
Up and down we go until we arrive at a small town at the foot of a sharp peak. A decent little place that has multi-coloured houses as we head down the short main street.Most places are shut and the roads deserted. We later find out that this small town sometimes gets soo much snow and is that isolated that food has to be helicoptered in.
We carry on as the light begins to fade over another mountain pass to the self named 'Switzerland of America' Ouray.
An alpine looking town with excellent buildings along a short main street that seems well looked after. The whole place is also surrounded by high peaks seeming right next to the edge of town.
Our motel has the air of an alpine chalet about it. The twee décor and piped through swing music, mainly Sinatra, all add to the throwback cosiness of it all.
We awake in this soft warm haven to look outside at equally soft snow coming down into the pocket of flatland on which this town is built.
Large flakes are silently covering the streets around town. It's a friendly place and certainly looks the part but whether I could live out here for any length of time I doubt very much. We leave Ouray and the snow behind us and into the flat plains that also make up 'Colorful' Colorado. We pass through some dull backwater towns, one comically(so I thought) named Dinosaur. Imagine that, 'I'm from Dinosaur.' What a great thing to be able to say.
Unfortunately the town itself was tiny and horrendously grim. Dinosaur footprints and fossils have been found around this area and a few lame dinosaur models stand out in front of crappy tourist shops.
And just like that we're back in Utah and the state continues to unimpress with it's decaying towns and people. Vernal is the town we decide to stop overnight in but, as we soon found out, the expensive motel rooms due to a local construction boom move us on. I'll admit it does look like a building site.
I would rather drive on to a town where the motels are half the price, particularly when most of these places are particularly dull. So, by this ideal we drive on for a couple of hours deeper into Utah.
There isn't much in-between the towns other than pristine white snowfields that resemble white sand dunes and equally as thick.
Altitude is obviously a major factor in the snow coverage here as we descend for mile after mile in ever decreasing snow until we're into yet another bland city that consists of the usual chain everything and roads, not much else.
One saving grave is at least it's a cheap place to stay. The other advantage is that it's close enough to check-in and then have a look around our next and quite controversial destination, the capital of Utah and the home of the U.S. Mormon church, Salt Lake City.

The stuff movies are made of

We're now into Indian territory and back in to the state of Arizona. We drive through a couple of towns in a few hundred miles, Blanding(aptly named) looks like the edge of a scrapyard and Monticello, which looks like the scrapyard itself.
We drive through a baron landscape of not a lot until the sun begins to set and we suddenly drop down between a huge cut length of rock into the small town of Bluff. This is like many other towns in size and relative dustiness but manages to have a charm about it. One restaurant, one petrol station(that also doubles up as shop and pizzeria) and a friendly old wooden motel with tumbleweeds bounding about the car park beyond an outdoor jacuzzi lit by a trail of lights in a small garden.
The reason we're in Bluff is because the road through it leads on to the place above, Monument Valley. This place has featured in most Cowboy films over the years. Many a classic shot from any one of those films would show the enigmatic hero astride a horse with these horizontal rock formations standing up in the desert landscape behind. Thing is those very same cowboys were usually kicking up dust trying to find and fight with those belligerent Indians. How ironic that now the land is Indian owned, Navajo tribe in fact, and they're the ones charging film companies to come in and shot those type of movies. Well sort of. They don't really make em like they used to so the last major film that extensively used Monument Valley was Back to the Future 3.


Unfortunately for us the Navajo ownership also means that it's not part of the National Parks system so we can't use our annual pass and have to pay $10 to get in.
There's not a massive amount to see once you're in and driving around on the bumpy dirt road. A few classic shots and it gets a bit dull. It takes the sudden add of the foot on the accelerator and the imagination to become the late great Colin Mcrae and in a heartbeat we're now competing in the Monument Valley World Rally Championships. The competitors? The lumpy Americans in their oversized sloth-like 4 wheeled drives of course!


Leaving a trail of dust behind we drive on through some third world country looking towns until we arrive at Four Corners. This is the point in which four US states converge at one point. Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. Typically the actual point is also Indian owned and you have to pay for the privilege to stand in the very spot. I wasn't that bothered and after driving a few metres into New Mexico we turn round and face the car towards Colorado.
We enter into the town of Cortez, it's probably called a city but as we now know in America that means nothing. We've passed through 'cities' with under 100 inhabitants. Cortez isn't a great looking place although it does have a great mountain backdrop but the usual line of fast food chains and obligatory huge Walmart spoil the view.
We're here to visit Mesa Verde National Park. Mesa Verde is again Spanish meaning 'Green Table'. This name is probably due to the green flat top mountains around here. You climb up into the park getting wide views of the flat plains you've left behind you. The warmth of those plains is also gone and been replaced by snow and a severe wind chill.
This area is all part of an ancient American civilisation. No-one is quite sure why these peoples left the site, I reckon it's because it's frickin cold and they hadn't invented Gore-tex to keep them dry. But they did leave behind various large dwellings, the best being the cave village behind the visitors centre.

It's a complex set of buildings and small courtyards that have survived all conditions the past few hundred years have tried to throw at the sheltered cave. In fact some of the 4000 ruins that exist here date back to around 300A.D., the latest being up to 1200A.D. and are in very good condition. Some restoration has been undertaken but not massive amounts.


It's thought that around 35,000 people, Pueblans as they like to be named here, lived around the area. It seems all the more odd when you realise only 25,000 people live here now. Where did this large population go and why?
Mesa Verde, as we read in the park newspaper, was voted the best National Park in America last year. Fair play I suppose but at the end of the day I was a bit ruined out and almost glad that some of the huge site was inaccessible due to snow.


We descend from the snowy heights of the park back down to the relatively warm plains of Colorado towards distant mountains. After a few hours these mountains are all around us as we ascend back into snow and narrow mountain passes. We have entered yet another world that couldn't be more different than the one before.

Arched Utah

We've seen the Arch image on every car registration that has gone past us in the last few days whilst in Utah. It's one of many red rock arches within the unbelievable Arches National Park. Just off the highway is the entrance to this stunning park. You instantly begin climbing the u-turned road into another strange Utah world.

We're soon presented with tall and narrow slabs of red rock rising high above our heads. Rounding another corner shows us the distant mountain peaks and the foremost towering red monoliths of the park. Five minutes in and this place is cracking already.

Okay, so it is busier than the parks we've visited in the last few days but that just doesn't matter once you start seeing the crazy natural arches around the place.

Every rock and shape in said rock has been named, some with better names than others. So we have Park Avenue because the rocks look like a City Skyline. Then there's Courthouse Rock, which looks like a courthouse.

Double Arch, which is two arches close together and of course Balanced Rock, which is well you guessed it. But then there's Broken Arch, which is an unbroken arch. Odd. One thing they all have in common, apart from being arches, is that they're all superb looking. Just seeing all these naturally formed red arches below the deep blue sky in the sun of the day is a great way to spend a day, or two as it turned out.

There are over 2000 natural arches within the park in what is another humongous expanse of land.

We walk a few trails, one to Pine Tree Arch(it has Pine trees in it) another to Tunnel Arch(it's an arch shaped like a tunnel) until we get a bit lost on one trail and end up walking in the hot sun for a couple of hours. We slide in-between upright smoothed rocks, scramble over petrified sand dunes and mope across hot open land and through a campsite before arriving back at the car totally knackered. Excellent.

Just 2 miles down the road from the park entrance is the town of Moab. Not a bad town but not a great one in any respect but it's definitely clear that the main business here is related to the park and that mainly consists of mountain biking. Plenty of shops and tour companies also exist for quad bikes and Jeep tours. Arches National Park is yet another giant playground. Not just for overgrown kids either, under one arch a group of kids are sliding and digging around in the sand.

It gets incredibly hot here in summer so I'm glad we're here now, it's hot enough. Saying that, if there's a place to come back to for some amazing mountain bike action then surely this must be one of the spots on the earth.

Before leaving the place we have some soup and bread in the sun overlooking the perched Balanced Rock, that surely would fall if there was a slight tremor and would probably be rolling through town if an earthquake hit.

As for the Arch featured on the Utah registration plate, it isn't that great but it's a simple instantly recognisable symbol of one of the best places I've seen on this trip.

Although the towns of Utah so far have been dull and uninspiring the landscape has been continually amazing. There's still more to come too but we just have to pop out of Utah before we come back to see it.

Another canyon, another river

We stop for a couple of nights in the dilapidated town of Green River. It's nothing more than a street of ramshackle buildings, a petrol station and a couple of motels. We didn't stay here for the dusky ambience no siree. We stopped for a couple of reasons, one the motel is actually decent and really cheap and the other being it's proximity to yet more wonders of Utah.
A German guy chats to us about his U.S. travels and of the small German towns he's visited whilst here. He seems slightly mental but we later realise he could be just slightly pissed after the brewery visits he mentioned in the late afternoon.
We miss breakfast that morning, a damning blow on this budget I can tell you, due to the clocks going forward of which we had no idea.
But the day wasn't to be cursed and soon we were in the stunning surroundings of another National Park which we knew nothing about, Canyonlands. Great name. I could only guess that it was land with many canyons?
At the entrance we see quite a few cyclists preparing for a day out in the park, not altogether common on this trip. Not far from the entrance is a couple of large red rock buttes, these are huge rectangular shaped lumps of rock jutting out of the desert landscape.


Across from the visitors centre there's a decent lookout and our first real glimpse at the land we'll be seeing today. Our first impression is like that of a smaller Grand Canyon but obviously not as wide and cluttered. Either way this place undeniably huge.


Thankfully the park is fairly quiet for a weekend, there are people about of course but it's certainly not busy by any means. It makes for a more peaceful visit away from unbelievably loud Americans, the shear size of the place helps.
We drive the 12 mile scenic drive to the end of the road at a 360 degree view of the canyon and the surrounding area for miles around. This is an odd vast flat land that appears to have just sunk straight down in the places where the river winds it's way. It also turns out that the whole canyon is a lot wider than previously thought, by a long way.
It's a lot easier on the eye than the Grand Canyon too, or maybe I should say it's just different. It definitely looks more defined, the edge of the canyon has a white rim that seems to highlight the view much more clearly than that of the Grand Canyon.

I really shouldn't compare the two as they're different landscapes but I just can't help it when one place gets soo much hype and the other goes seemingly unnoticed. But the fact is that not every place in this varied West of America can be in the forefront of promoted U.S. destinations around the world and the Grand Canyon is one of those quintessential icons for a reason.


We walk for an hour and a half to and back from Upheaval Dome. This is a large crater of sorts seemingly filled with a series of peaked earth of pale blue, yellow, red and grey colours. There is a couple of explanations as to how it's here. One of which is that it's the result of a meteorite impact that unearthed the salty soils beneath the surface.

The other scenario has almost completely left my mind but I'm sure it had something to do with erosion and wind, the usual. Whatever the cause the smooth rock scramble to view it and the sight itself was tremendous.
It's clear that Canyonlands is not a one trick pony. Mountain bikers and old guys in Jeeps ride around the unpaved ridge road. It's a fairly serious undertaking to take on the whole length of it, even overnight camping can be involved, but I didn't pay too much attention to that as I knew it was out of the question for us.

The views keep on coming of this immense land carved by the Colorado and Green Rivers. The power of water and time is an amazing thing.
A shorter walk takes us to a wide stone arch looking out over the canyon and mountains formed by our good old friend wind and time and all that. I take a photo, as often has happened around the world, for some random people stood together on top of this arch. This gives me the idea to scale it myself. For some reason my fear of heights briefly left me. On the other side of the arch is a shear drop down a smooth canyon wall. Yikes! Photos taken I can now climb down. The views were awesome non the less.


There's clearly plenty to do and see here and the long ridge road could be explored without being dull for years if you lived here.A huge varied park that is reasonably quiet and yet stunning.
Utah just keeps on surprising and the next place is featured on the state's car registration plates so it must be good, surely.

Bryce and the Capitol

From Zion we enter Dixie National Forest which has stumpy pinnacles of red rock that could've easily featured in the Arnie film 'Total Recall' as a landscape on Mars. It all looks even odder with the thick snow lying atop the red sand under foot.


An 18 mile road leads one-way along the rim of Bryce Canyon. This place just happens to be stunning as well. Again this is another place I never thought existed on this planet. Thousands of rock pinnacles, called Hoodoos, stand up against the wind in a naturally rounded amphitheatre of the canyon.
Because of it's altitude, just over 9,000ft, and position Bryce Canyon gets around 200 days of icy conditions in a year. Snow lies on parts of the rocks and the different shades of oranges and reds look superb as the light fades for the day.


That night we stop in the tiny hamlet of Tropic on the edge of the national park. Luckily we just get into the only open restaurant before it closes....at 7pm! They sure know how to live it up here! At least the food was good and the motel room had a good heater, handy in this chilly climate. Just when we had the slight inclination to camp for the night the temperatures up on the bulletin in the Visitors Centre instantly put a stop to that. -14 degrees Celsius overnight. No thank you.
More stunning views from various view points along the icy edge of the long canyon's edge before we move on. The stunning views continue outside the park and through the couple of small settlements along the road to Capitol Reef National Park, of which I knew nothing about.
It turns out that Capitol Reef is in fact a huge crease in the landscape due to large shifts in the tectonic plates. The land has a Death Valley quality about it with multi-coloured layered walls of rock all over the show. In many places large straight-edged red rock shoots up vertically towards the sky and fans out nearer the floor showing different layers of colours.
We drive along a narrow road that soon runs out of tarmac and becomes a dirt trail squeezing between overhanging rocks and cliff faces. We take a walk along a dry riverbed and scale up smooth rock to water pools spotting petrified trees along the way. It's hard to imagine that wood thousands of years old turns into rock but it does and looks superbly yellow, black, purple and green striped.
We also see ancient petroglyphs carved into the rock by native Americans centuries ago still looking vivid on the rock face. Characters are visible, possibly hunting, along with the odd sun depiction. Further along the trail are the wall inscribings from the late 1800's from American pioneers who forged a trail along the riverbed. Not quite the same as the petroglyphs, a bit like 'Jeff was ere 1880' and so on.
We walk a trail along a gushing river leading up towards a huge natural rock arch sculpted by wind over many years. It's huge and voices, mainly of obnoxious teenagers, echo around us.
On the way to Capitol Reef we'd seen a few trucks pulling trailers with ATV's and scrambler motorcycles on. We stop overnight near Capitol reef in the middle of nowhere at the only open motel and it's packed full of bikers. A few older guys who seemed to have biked straight here through the mud are hanging around the entrance and trailers full of bikes are everywhere.
The landscape around Capitol Reef is grey and strangely undulating. All of a sudden we see where all these bikers are spending their time. Guys jump over huge mounds of earth by the side of the road and off into the distance. Motorbike trails cover the whole area. The whole area is a giant playground and it's just a case of parking up getting on yer bike and ride. There's almost a quarry look to the place but somehow it all manages to look good.
Then we're back on wide open plateau again with distance mountains ever present in the background. A policeman has pulled someone over nearby an overlook to the mountains where we're parked. By our car is a conglomeration of animal skin and hooves but no blood or flesh. Odd.
Further down the road a group of young lads of about 16 are chasing each other by the side of the road near their huge brand new pick up truck. I just knew that one of them would run out into the road and of course that's what happened as I approached at 65 miles an hour. They didn't even look once. If I'd have arrived in that spot a couple of seconds later there would've been a serious mess. Thankfully we were just far enough away not to have to swerve into the sand of the roadside.
We drive on as black clouds point down at the desert and tumble weeds roll across the road at speed, a storm is brewing.