Day 5: April 12, 2000
Drive through Grand Staircase National Monument

Perched boulder in moon-like landscape

Today we got up and out quickly, heading back west on 89 from Page toward the Grand Staircase. We found the tiny town from which the dirt road began, called Big Water city. Without much trouble, we found the unmarked "Smoky Mountain Road" and pretty quickly we felt like we were back on the moon again. Here's the route we took, with the purple being the area we covered today. The road connecting Smokey Mountain Road to Hole in the Rock Road wasn't on any of the maps we had, either regular road maps or tourist maps they hand out, so I was glad I'd found this map on the Web before we'd left. The landscape consisted mainly of huge yellowish buttes with gray sand cascading down from them and huge yellow boulders scattered across the sand. Some of the boulders had landed in odd positions that didn't look stable, but Walendo figured they'd landed on sand, packed down the sand below them, and then the looser sand got blown away around them. I took a few pictures of the bizarre but interesting scenery.

View of butte from road, and view of road from top of butte

After a while, we started driving straight for one of the huge reddish buttes. It didn't look like there was anyplace we could go, but miraculously, we drove right up into the butte and in a very short time we were up at the top, looking back over the huge barren landscape with Lake Powell in the distance. It was quite a view. We drove up over the top of the butte and ended up in a large labyrinth of red rock formations. It was very cool. We actually passed a couple of other trucks making their way along this interesting road. We stopped to take a few pictures and then continued on. After a short time, the landscape changed again, this time into a flat high desert with lots of varieties of cactus. More pictures. Then again, the terrain started including big rocks with twisted trees growing out of them. Yet more pictures.

Sign at Collet Top

Finally, the terrain become mostly yellow rounded rocks formations with trees and desert grass. There were cows wandering in this area, feeding on who knows what. More pictures. Eventually, we came to a split in the road that looked about the right place for the small road that cut over to Hole in the Rock, at least according to the Internet map. We took the branch and shortly after that, we saw another fork that put us at Collet Top, which was on the map, and it had a sign saying Hole in the Rock Road, 11 miles (see picture). It didn't seem to be in the right direction, but the sign was clear so we took it.

This road turned out to be quite an adventure. Very quickly, the road narrowed and started descending into a canyon between the hills.

Face in the rock

The road was very rocky and bumpy, and Walendo carved his way around the obstacles. We were surprised the sign hadn't even said 4WD was required, only that we should "watch for rocks," which wasn't hard to do -- there were plenty of them. We wound up deep in the crevice between two hills, with weird rock formations all around us. At one point Walendo noticed some holes in the rock that looked just like a huge face, so I took some shots of that. We also took some documenting snapshots just to show the road we were on.

Road turns into creek

Eventually, the road descended to the bottom where there was a mostly dried up creek. At that point, the road became the creek, which was a bit worrisome. We stopped to check out the road and after walking down about 50 yards, Walendo decided it was okay to try it. From that point on, the Expedition was really earning its stripes as it handled the drive through mud and over boulders and crevices in the rock. Walendo did a masterful job of navigating us through. We were a little worried that the road wouldn't go all the way through and we'd have to turn around and go up the way we'd came, which would be of concern since we didn't trust the 4WD ever since the problem on Heck of a Hill road in Wyoming. (Well, I would have been willing to try it since we'd had it looked at, but Walendo was worried.)

Road drives through cave

We kept forging ahead, with the road weaving in and out of the creek, at one point going under a huge overhang that felt like driving through a cave. Finally we seemed to come to the bottom where the road got more gravelly and the land opened up a bit. We had made it through and we could see that we should be intersecting Hole in the Rock road soon. Quite the adventure. I was psyched I had found this map, cuz we'd never have known about this road otherwise. Before we did, we came to some huge yellow rocks with big holes in them, which looked like a southwestern village built out of the rock with holes as windows.

Rock formation with holes

We stopped for some pictures, and then moved on. Finally, we hit Hole in the Rock Road, which seemed like an interstate thoroughfare by then. It was a wide dirt road, fully graded, much smoother than Summit. Oh, and there was a sign in the other direction warning "4WD only." It was probably good that there hadn't been such a sign at the top, cuz Walendo said he probably wouldn't have voted against going on the road if there had been one. Maybe cuz that direction was going down but the other direction would have been going up, so you'd really need 4WD. We'd managed to avoid 4WD the whole time.

Anyway, at this point we took a right and headed toward an area called "Egypt" where we thought there were pink sand dunes.

The shot Ellen was taking

The Grand Staircase photos showed pink sand dunes called Little Egypt Sand Dunes in the Escalante Canyons region, and the Internet map labeled it "Egypt," so we figured they were the same.

Ellen shooting in huge rock field

After about 5 miles on the main road, we turned off to head toward the sand dunes. The terrain turned to a really dark sienna color with dark green trees. We wound our way along, stopped for a few pictures, and finally got to the end, where there wasn't a sand dune to be found. Instead, there were about a half dozen trucks parked, with a pair of people near one, obviously having returned from a backpacking trip. It seemed to be a trailhead for backpackers. Oh well. We turned back and stopped a few more places for pictures, trying to find a good spot for the late afternoon light. We found one big crevice that had swirly red rocks and lots of craggy trees growing out of the rock, so we spent a bunch of time there. Finally, we finished and headed back to the main road. We took Hole in the Rock Road the 20 or so miles to the main road, Route 12, and it was fairly dull compared with what we'd done. We were glad we hadn't taken the paved roads to get to Hole-in-the-Rock road -- what we'd done was much more interesting. Despite the photos on the Web, the middle road turned out to be the most interesting. When we finally hit the main road, we drove a few miles to Escalante, where we'd figured we'd stay. However, the town was so small and desolate that it didn't look that appealing. Since we weren't going to drive the Hole in the Rock Road the next day, it seemed dumb to stop there. It was only about 6:30 so we decided to keep going and drive to Springdale, just south of Zion.

Swirling red rock

We drove for about two hours, listening to the last of Harry Potter. We got to Mt. Carmel Junction where you turn onto Rt 14 to get to Zion and there were a couple of hotels there. I said, "we could stay here," but we turned anyway since we were almost done with the book. About 10 minutes later, we finished the last tape. It had been a great story to listen to. Walendo stopped the car and we realized it made more sense to stop back at that last town, so we turned around and went back. Neither of us had wanted to stop with just a few minutes left to go in the book. We got a room at the Best Western and settled in. We were both exhausted and went to bed right away. The room was freezing, though, so we cuddled a lot during the night.

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