‘A hell of a place to lose a cow’

One thing I learned while visiting Bryce Canyon National Park is that people have been describing it in print since 1916, when articles about the area appeared in magazines owned by the Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads. That’s around the same time tourists started driving their automobiles up to the Colorado Plateau to gawk at the park’s gallery of sandstone hoodoos. (A side note: According to a roadside marker on Highway 89, those old cars had to climb the steep road to Bryce Canyon in reverse because their gravity-fed fuel systems couldn’t get gas to the engine the other way around.)

My point is this: Our national parks have been around nearly as long as the combustion engine, and rivers of ink have been devoted to their wonderfulness. Ken Burns alone spent six years filming his 12-hour PBS special about the park system, and a Google search for “national parks” on the Interweb turns up 188 million hits.

Jill and I were discussing this particular reality the other night at the Canyon Lodge, in Panguitch, Utah, as we sipped cheap bourbon from disposable motel cups. After several minutes of semi-serious deliberation, we decided we are not going to kill ourselves trying to out-Burns Ken Burns. Instead, we’re going to treat our visits to national parks like mini-vacations within our “working honeymoon” and document them in travelogue style: with snapshots and narration. (Only our travelogues will be two or three minutes — not two or three hours like the ones my parents attended in the ’70s.)

To be fair to Jill, I should point out that all of the photos contained in the slideshow below were shot in less-than-ideal light (read: not at dawn or dusk), and a few of them were snapped by me using the little Canon PowerShot D10 Jill gave me for Christmas. (It’s snowproof!)

It should also be noted that both of us hate the sound of our own voices. We can only hope that Bryce’s epic beauty outweighs our aural insufferability.

—Scott

                                                                                               

February 10, 2010 | Scott | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments »

Sage advice

As newbie bloggers and fairly rudderless travelers, one of the greatest rewards we get is when a reader takes the time to tell us about a destination we should point our car toward. People we meet keep asking us what our plan is, and the honest truth is that we don’t have one. At least not much of one. Our unofficial rules of the road are, (1) if we like a place, we linger; (2) if we can avoid interstates and chain restaurants, we do; and (3) if someone tells us about a place we shouldn’t miss, we circle it on the map.

That’s why I loved reading the following comment from Greg Lewis, an old friend and former professor of mine at Fresno State:

“To do Utah right, you need to include a trip down to Moab. Just north of there, heading west off US 191, is state route 313 which, on the map, runs about 30 miles to a dead end and a spot labeled “view point.” Any place on a map so labeled and served by a 30-mile dead-end road is worth checking out. But when you do, you must plan to be there well before dawn. Park at the dead end and walk about 200 yards south to the edge of the cliff. There will be no machines there, no animals, no insects and no other people. Sit there, preferably alone, and wait while the sun comes up. Then you will understand part of why this land is sacred to it’s earliest inhabitants. If you don’t breathe too hard and your heart doesn’t pound, the only sound you’ll hear is the wind blowing past your ears.“

We’re headed away from Moab right now, but you better believe we’ll circle back. I’m pretty sure the only way to get Scott anywhere “well before dawn” is to sleep there, but if I have to head out alone with my camera, I will. After such a thoughtfully and thoroughly composed suggestion, how could I not?

Thanks, Professor Lewis, for pointing us in an enlightening direction.

—Jill

February 6, 2010 | Jill | Tags: , , | 4 Comments »

Bringing Sundance into focus

A few days ago, in Park City, Utah, Jill and I sat in a theater with about 600 other people for a 5:15 p.m. screening of a movie called “Get Low.” At precisely 5:14, a slender man walked to the front of the room and introduced the film, eloquently and succinctly. The house lights dimmed, and rows upon rows of iPhones went dark, like a mass suicide of fireflies.

When the movie’s opening credits rolled, the words onscreen appeared slightly out of focus. Had we been at a cinema anywhere else besides Park City during the Sundance Film Festival, I would have squirmed in my seat, wondering how long I should give the projectionist to fix the problem before I got up, walked out, and reported the issue to the nearest teenaged employee in an ill-fitting shirt and crooked bowtie.

But before I could get squirmy at this particular screening, hundreds of fellow audience members shouted “Focus!” in perfect unison, as if prompted by the firing of some shared internal synapse, and the credits sharpened instantly. I turned to Jill, and we exchanged a smile.

This moment perfectly defines Sundance for me. It’s not about gawking at celebrities, kanoodling in front of ski-lodge fireplaces or cradling lattes between conspicuously new mittens; it’s simply about experiencing movies in a setting where everyone appreciates them.

I’m often hesitant to tell folks I attend Sundance because I worry about being viewed as uppity or “artsy-fartsy.” But the festival, at least the way Jill and I do it, is far from glamorous. We spend hours standing in lines. We pack snacks and sandwiches in Jill’s camera bag. We lurch from theater to theater aboard crowded city buses. After midnight shows, we make the long walk back to our accommodations in the bitter cold.

This year we rented a room in the condo of 65-year-old ski bunny with two cats. Last year we slept in a single bed in a loft we shared with 12 stoned-out vegans. We found both on Craigslist. We allowed ourselves only two luxuries last week: dinner at Bangkok Thai on Main (an old favorite) and glasses of rye at High West Distillery (a new one).

In a way, our pilgrimage to Sundance is a microcosm of our larger road trip. It would be easy to write off Sundance as an indulgent waste of time if we didn’t so love watching and discussing movies; and it would be easy to classify the festival as unattainable if we weren’t inclined to figure out ways to make it work for our fragile budget and simple-folk sensibilities.

Don’t get me wrong: If you prefer a little glamour with your film festival, you need not go to Cannes to get it; there are plenty of parties and concerts afoot in Park City where you can shed your puffy jacket and rub naked elbows with industry insiders, indie ingénues and guys who look like, and may actually be, Ryan Gosling. You just have to be cooler than us to get in the door.

Luckily for me, Jill is content just walking around in the snow discussing documentaries about cultural anthropologists who exploited the Yanomami in the 1970s. Me, I’m just happy to see my hot-blooded Phoenix girl with a smile on her face in sub-freezing temperatures.

—Scott

February 2, 2010 | Scott | Tags: , , , | 6 Comments »
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