Horseshoe Bend is a meandering loop of the Colorado River in northern Arizona. To see it, you pay to park in a lot just off the highway and then walk about a half-mile to the eastern rim of the canyon. There’s not much else to say about it, except that it’s a phenomenal sight and a national treasure. I’ll let the images speak for themselves.
Look closely at the shoreline below. There is a campground down there with people, tents and a vault toilet.
Rocking my 1970s-vintage puffy vest and mismatching windbreaker, because I am stylish that way.
We had allotted an entire day to Horseshoe Bend, thinking that we might hike down to see the petroglyphs on the canyon walls. Turns out you can only see them from the river, via raft or kayak. So by midmorning we were back on the road, heading northwest toward Zion National Park.
A few months after we moved to Colorado in 2020, one of Luke’s coworkers at the time sold him an elderly Saturn for cheap so he wouldn’t have to keep riding a bicycle to work. It was an “as-is” cash deal for a car with over 200k miles on it, sold for the express purpose of keeping Luke showing up to work on time as the weather got colder.
Regardless, the first time Luke got a few days off work in a row he drove out alone into a February snowstorm, heading north through Wyoming with the rather nebulous goal of seeing Seattle. The Saturn took him as far as Oregon before its battery died forever at a rest stop in Weatherby. Luke had it towed to a garage near the Idaho border, where they put a new battery in and sent him on his way. Newly cautious, he gave up on Seattle and came home via Utah. Thank goodness for cell phones and the Internet; without them I would have had to sit at home wondering if he was still alive instead of getting to enjoy his philosophical ramblings on Messenger as he formed snapshot impressions of blue-collar industrial cities like Boise Idaho and the ubiquitous Mormon presence in Utah.
He sold the Saturn to one of those cash-for-junkers companies the following May, when it started overheating due to a leaking gasket, and bought an old Camry that had over 220k miles on it. Once again, the first chance he got he took off alone to try his luck on the open road.
When most people talk about “seeing the country,” they usually mean visiting its iconic cities and landmarks. Luke uses the phrase in a more literal sense: he wants to see what America looks like. The empty stretches and the tiny small-town museums and the winding mountain roads and the mills and factories with their busy smokestacks. He wants to see what it’s all about. On this second adventure he headed west, dropped by Anza to see his dad, then drove up the coast. This time he made it to Seattle, and came home via Montana and Wyoming. He’s done a few more solo road trips since then. His current adventuremobile is a late-90’s Toyota pickup that handles rough conditions better than the Camry can.
The idea of doing road trips the way Luke does them gives me the shivers. Just picking a compass point or a region of the country, finding a road that goes in that general direction and taking off in a cloud of adventurous optimism…that is not my way. I spent literally months planning every last detail of our 2022 Pacific Northwest road trip, just to make sure we didn’t miss anything good or fall behind schedule or end up in unnecessary danger. I am not as reckless as I used to be.
A few weeks ago, Luke realized he would have a four-day Thanksgiving weekend. For him that meant one thing: he got to do another road trip. He bounced around a few different ideas and then decided on a smallish loop that would take him through Steamboat Springs Colorado, Salt Lake City Utah and Horseshoe Bend in Arizona.
As it happens, Horseshoe Bend and the Great Salt Lake were on my bucket list. And seeing them sounded like more fun than cooking a turkey for just myself and Elizabeth. Luke was fine with me joining him. Of course I immediately started checking out the route, and pointed out that Zion National Park was not too far out of the way. Well, that was on Elizabeth’s bucket list, and so was nearby Bryce Canyon National Park. Luke said fine, we could all go together, but if we were visiting Zion and Bryce, then he wanted to see Mesa Verde. By this point we had realized that four days wasn’t going to be enough, so we used PTO to take off an extra two.
After some discussion, we decided to reverse the order of the stops and do Mesa Verde first instead of last. We left home Wednesday night at midnight to beat the holiday traffic, and rolled past the Mesa Verde park sign around 7:45 the next morning.
We had planned to buy an America the Beautiful annual pass at the entry kiosk, but the park was a ghost town. We did not see a single worker the entire time we were there. Presumably they were all home with their families for Thanksgiving.
Luke needed to sleep, so we pulled into an out-of-the-way parking spot inside the park and took a long nap. This turned out to be the best sleep we got on the entire trip. More on that later.
After our nap, we checked out the Park Point Fire Lookout.
This is the highest point in the park. From here you can see all the way to the southern edge of the San Juan Mountain range.
I haven’t yet replaced the camera that was drowned on the PNW trip, so all of the pics from this trip were taken with either the fisheye lens of my GoPro or the noisy camera of my phone. Hard to mess up the subject matter, though.
You can’t go into the cliff dwellings except on an official tour, and tour season is over for this year, so we were only able to view them from a distance. Still very cool, though.
The canyons themselves are as impressive as the dwellings. Phenomenal views.
Adventuremobile barely visible in background:
Some of the old ruins are protected from the elements inside large sheds.
This one is in the open at the top of a cliff.
It reminded me a little of some of the older Spanish missions in San Antonio.
We had a great time exploring. Still no one at the kiosk when we left the park. I would have felt guiltier about the “free” visit if we hadn’t bought the annual pass at the next park anyway.
From Mesa Verde we drove southwest to Horseshoe Bend in Glen Canyon Recreation Area. The entry gate is closed after hours, so we spent the night in the quiet corner of a Walmart parking lot in nearby Page.
Up till now I thought I’d gotten the best sleeping arrangements of our trio. The pickup has a camper shell (missing a back window, but one makes do), and we had put our old futon mattress into the bed. Pure luxury, especially since I had it all to myself. Luke slept on the front bench seat and Elizabeth slept on the rear bench seat.
So it turns out that on cold nights, the futon mattress basically fills up with cold air and just sucks all the heat out of your body. You cannot warm it up. I had to use one of my blankets as an insulating layer between me and the mattress, and then I didn’t have enough blankets on top. No more comfy nights for me until I got back home.
If our road trip could be said to have a destination, this would be it: the giant coastal redwoods and mountain sequoias of Northern California. I’d always wanted to see them, but before this trip the farthest north I’d ever been in my home state was San Luis Obispo in upper SoCal. When the KNP Complex wildfire raged for four months through Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks last fall and winter, I wondered if I had missed my chance to ever see those ancient trees. Luckily most of the biggest and oldest ones survived, at least for now. But that fire was the motivation I needed to start planning this trip.
We got a latish start on Thursday. There was plenty of stuff on the day’s itinerary, but for some reason there was no hurry in us that morning.
We took our time breaking camp, and dawdled to admire this absolute unit of a banana slug.
Pic on right courtesy of Elizabeth’s phone, which handles close-ups much better than my GoPro.
From the campground we detoured down Howland Hill Road, an unpaved scenic byway that rambles through the heart of the redwood forest.
The day was bright and clear, but inside these groves is a perpetual twilight. The trees are so tall and dense, direct sunlight never reaches the ground.
Wild spring rhododendrons bloomed profusely in the shaded woods.
Photos don’t convey the size of these giants at all.
You can’t hurry on Howland Hill Road, it’s too rough and narrow. We enjoyed the scenery and accepted that we would have to make up the lost time later in the day. We stopped to walk the Stout Grove Trail, an easy half-mile loop.
The kids and I each hike at our own speeds: Luke jogs tirelessly ahead, I’m usually in the middle and Elizabeth saunters leisurely, inspecting every leaf and bug. It’s too bad we were so far apart on this trail, because I could have used some humans for scale. The trees in the next pic don’t seem unusually large until you realize that the one lying on the ground is still taller than me.
GoPro at eye level:
This really is a “forest primeval.” You half expect to see colorful dinosaurs come shrieking out of the underbrush.
The coastal redwoods didn’t make me sad the way the Hoh Rainforest did, but I didn’t exactly feel at home among them either. They are a natural wonder, like the Grand Canyon: spectacular to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. The dinosaurs might get me.
Stout Grove ended up putting us even further behind schedule, because Elizabeth wandered off on a side trail and Luke and I spent over an hour trying to find her. Stressful AND late-making. Reunited at last, we crawled along the rest of Howland Hill Road without stopping, got back on the 101 and may have driven just a tad over the speed limit trying to make up lost time.
Even so, we stopped at a beach that wasn’t on our itinerary just because it looked so striking from the highway.
You can’t really tell from the pics because I lightened the exposure to bring out the details, but the sand of this beach is a very dark gray. Almost black.
A rather dramatic effect in person. Very pretty beach.
We stopped at Trees of Mystery, walking in past the enormous statues of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Babe. Luke for scale:
We weren’t at all sure what to expect there, but it was a pleasant surprise. Lots of great wood carvings, poetry, folk-style art, and a wonderful canopy trail that lets you walk through the redwoods 50 to 100 feet above the forest floor.
There’s also a gondola that you can take up to an observation platform.
It doesn’t show up in the pics, but you can see the ocean from this platform.
Lots of wood and metal depictions of events and characters from the Paul Bunyan legends.
And of course this guy, because apparently you can’t walk ten feet in the Pacific Northwest without bumping into him.
In Bandon, Oregon we visited Face Rock Creamery for some really good ice cream, and then headed down to Bandon beach to check out the famous rock formations and tide pools. We arrived at low tide, a great time to see both.
Of all the strange and lovely rocks on Bandon Beach, for some reason I like this one the best. Just a random boulder the size of a house. I love it.
Here’s the Face Rock that Face Rock Creamery and other local businesses are named for. Looks like a giant taking a bath in the sea:
And here is my second-favorite rock on this beach, the shattered one in front that looks like a wizard’s hat or a crescent moon. I wonder what happened to the rest of it.
This is just a really pretty beach.
Sea stars were more plentiful here than at the other tide pools we visited.
We could have spent half the day exploring Bandon Beach, but we had reservations for that night at Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in California and didn’t want to fall behind schedule. After an hour or so we got our sandy selves back to the car and continued down the coast.
We pulled into the parking lot at Prehistoric Gardens, debating whether to buy tickets and take the tour.
In the end we decided we were all a bit older than the target demographic and moved on.
Just north of Brookings we came upon a place of otherworldly beauty. A place where tall trees thrive on seemingly bare rock, where the land thrusts stony fingers into the sea and the sea cuts round culverts through them.
It’s one of the loveliest places I’ve ever seen.
As we crossed into California, the landscape began to change. We had left The People’s Coast behind and were back in the land of billboards and shopping centers. We stopped to see a big ship that had once been the gift shop for a tropical-themed resort.
By now the shadows were lengthening and we were in danger of losing daylight. We hurried on to Jedediah Smith Campground, found our reserved site and set up camp in the forest-scented twilight.
Eleven lighthouses stand guard along Oregon’s rocky coast. We stopped just north of Newport to see the tallest of them, on Yaquina Head. There’s a little fee station at the top of the road where you’re supposed to pay for day use, but it had closed for the day and the entry gate was locked. We parked on the side of the driveway and walked the mile or so to the lighthouse.
Luke for scale:
We – and by we I mostly mean Luke – worried that the car would get ticketed parked where it was. We met other walkers on the lighthouse road, but ours was the only vehicle there. So when we were done looking around, Luke jogged ahead back up the road to make sure the car was okay.
I was about three-quarters of the way back to the fee station when Luke came breathlessly around a bend in the road. “There’s a bunch of guys on motorcycles around our car! I hope they’re not motorcycle cops!”
“I don’t think motorcycle cops travel in packs,” I said, “Especially on quiet roads like these. Probably just a biker group touring the coast. I don’t think they’ll bother our car.”
The motorcycles were peeling back out toward the highway when we came around the last corner. Luke said, “Mom, did you leave the window down?”
“No…or…what the hell, it is down.”
The driver’s side window was indeed all the way open. I had rolled it down at the fee station and apparently forgotten to roll it back up.
The car was absolutely packed with valuables – iPads, MacBooks, camping and hiking gear, my wallet. Nothing had been touched or taken. Humans are okay sometimes.
We stopped in Newport to try the clam chowder at Mo’s Original Location. We had heard good things, and the chowder lived up to its reputation.
Tangent: The best clam chowder I’ve ever tasted is at a little kiosk in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square, just outside the Pieces of Eight souvenir shop. I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since we left California. All of the clam chowders we sampled in Washington and Oregon were objectively fresher and higher-quality than Disneyland’s, and very tasty, but it’s hard to compete with the magic of gustatory nostalgia.
I like this mural we saw in Newport:
We watched for real whales all the way down the coast, since late May is still at the tail end of their migration season. We never did see any, but we did enjoy a few lively rounds of “Is that a rock or a creature?”
The original plan was to spend Tuesday night at a campground wherever we happened to end the day, but none of us were feeling it. Instead we searched along the highway until we found a motel with a vacancy. “The only room we have left doesn’t have an ocean view,” the clerk said apologetically. I assured him that it made no difference. The room was twice the size and half the cost of the one at Lake Quinault Lodge, with more amenities. Shoutout to The Dublin House Motel in Yachats.
Our first stop Wednesday morning was the Devil’s Churn. The Devil apparently stores his kitchen accouterments along the Oregon shoreline.
The Devil’s Churn is hard to describe, and I wish I’d taken a video of it. It’s a narrow channel carved by a stream joining the sea. Waves roll into it and back out, so it’s nearly empty one minute and overflowing the next. From the highway it looks almost serene:
Luke for scale:
Up close it’s loud and violent and a little scary as the waves roil in the chasm and sometimes splash high into the air.
People have died here, washed into the Churn by the crashing waters. We kept our eyes on it and still got splashed unexpectedly. The sense of energy here is incredible.
We continued down the coast to Thor’s Well.
In my last post I included a video that I had misidentified as the Devil’s Punchbowl. Elizabeth pointed out that it was in fact a video of Thor’s Well. I have relocated it accordingly:
The tide pools here are full of life. And here’s something the GoPro can do that my camera couldn’t: underwater photos.
Next stop, Heceta Head Lighthouse.
We had arrived during proper visiting hours, so we paid our day use fee and got to speak with an attendant inside the lighthouse.
A little farther down the coast we pulled onto an overlook that offers another scenic view of Heceta Head. And here we saw sea lions sunning on a rock just below the turnout. This was the first time I really missed my camera with its lovely zoom lens. The GoPro failed miserably at capturing both the sea lions and the lighthouse in the distance.
Looks like a paint-by-number.
Got photobombed by a majestic raven.
Next we came to “America’s Largest Sea Cave,” where you can buy a ticket to get a closer look at the sea lions in their natural habitat. The GoPro utterly failed to do it justice. Trust me, there are sea lions in all three of these pics:
They are vocal creatures. Interestingly, they made different noises depending on their surroundings. Inside the sea cave they sounded aggressive and “liony.” Frolicking in the surf they sounded playful. On the sand in that bottom pic they sounded like a herd of drunk cows. That was a fun stop.
Moving on to Florence, we took a small detour off the highway to visit a quiver of cobra lilies.
These carnivorous pitcher plants grow wild here.
In North Bend we stopped at Captain’s Choice Fish House, an unassuming little place that served one of the best fish dinners I’ve had in my entire life.
A hand-rolled cigarette hangs from the mouth of the wooden fisherman in the foyer. Seriously, how high does this dude look?
Elizabeth ordered a seafood alfredo, Luke got the fish and chips, and I got fish and chowder. The waitress asked Luke and I what kind of fish we wanted: cod, red snapper or halibut. We both chose cod. Then she asked how we wanted our cod prepared, and offered a list of options. Luke got his fried, I got mine lightly breaded and grilled. It was A M A Z I N G. The chowder was delicious too.
A few days after I got back home, I was shopping at Costco and missing Oregon, so I impulsively grabbed some beer-battered cod from the freezer section. It tasted like disappointment.
An Invincible Summer 