I love astronomy in Arizona, but I already miss being up north.
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The 11th Hour in Spokane
It’s been nearly a month since my last blog post. I’ve needed to mentally decompress coming back down from Idaho/Washington, because I’ve done a lot in the past couple weeks and I tend to get emotionally overwhelmed after big trips (yes, even when you live on the road, leaving a place you’ve fallen in love with gets to you). Even now, writing this post on September 21st, three days before you’ll read it, my brain still hasn’t fully recovered. Sure, you see me out here in Sedona giving tours and views of the Moon, but that’s work-brain Alex. He’s a totally different guy.
Admittedly, it doesn’t help that I spent most of my time in Idaho living in a state of stress and anxiety. When I drove north on July 27th, my van’s fuel pressure regulator decided to malfunction just three hours into my 19-hour drive, causing my van to hard start (chugchugchugchugchugchug)…and it did this for the next month.
If you followed the drama on my Instagram page, you know how many times I opened the hood, took apart the rear of the engine compartment, replaced small sensors, things I worked on myself before the service center could finally get my van in at the end of August, you know, after the lunar eclipse on August 27th. A month of this puts strain on the catalytic converter, too, as raw fuel gets flushed backward through the exhaust, but it seems my CCs scraped by with minimal damage, probably because I all but stopped driving and sat still for days on end.
Maddening, I tell you.
The climax of this fiasco occurred the day the shop fixed my van: they gave me the keys, I drove ten miles, and then it began violently shaking and making popping sounds, which resulted in me getting it towed back the next morning–all for them to then take another FOUR DAYS to finally pull it into the bay, inspect it for five minutes, then blow some oxygen mixture through the fuel system.
Immediately fixed. Hasn’t had a problem since.
That same evening, someone messaged me on Instagram saying how well I’d been handling the situation, to which I replied, “Oh I cried yesterday.” Living in a van is great, and it fits my lifestyle so well. But when problems like this happen, and when the shop takes an extra four days to fix an issue that lingered after they did the repair, it does things to your brain.
But on the night of September 4th, I was back on the road just hours before I was supposed to attend my friends’ wedding the next morning.
The next 1,500 miles
I speed-ran around Washington, Oregon, and Idaho for the next week.
September 5th, I drove six hours from Spokane to Mount Hood for my friends’ wedding (friends who I met two years earlier in Florida at my telescope!)
September 6th, I drove three hours south to Sisters, Oregon, where I hosted two nights of stargazing and telescope training, plus hiked near the Three Sisters, which had fresh coats of snow capping them.
September 8th, I drove eight hours to Boise, Idaho for another stargazing tour, stopping to hike a little bit at the John Day Fossil Beds, which reminded me of Petrified Forest in Arizona blended with Prescott National Forest.
September 9-12th, I camped in the Sawtooth Mountains and hiked to see some stunning alpine lakes tucked into their folds. This hike became my favorite of any I’ve done in the past two years.
September 13th, I hosted a stargazing tour just outside Yellowstone National Park, which started great but was cut short by a front of clouds that decided to move in, despite the forecast saying it would be clear the entire night!
And then I DROVE
Like. Drove-drove.
All the way from near Yellowstone to the other side of Phoenix, a full 15 hours top-to-bottom.
I’ve pulled long haul days before going west-east and east-west, but for most of my longer trips these days, I try to keep it under seven hours of driving per day. And as a few people called me out on, I did say I would break up this drive.
But I lied, apparently.
I’m glad I did the entire drive in a single day, though, and not “just to get there.” No, you start on I-15 in east-central Idaho, which carries you all the way down to Utah, then the entire length of Utah until you divert over to SR-89, which takes you to I-17 in Flagstaff, AZ, which takes you to Phoenix.
Yeah, 1,000+ miles and only 3 main roads!
You start in the green wilds of east-central Idaho, move through the denser forests and rivers, then spill out onto the desert prairie of southern Idaho. From there you climb a mountain and enter Utah as you drop down the other side. Then you wind through a valley between two mountain ranges, zip through Salt Lake City, and drive down a relatively flat stretch for several hours with mountains rising on one side. All the while, the colors of autumn peek through, yellows and oranges spotting the greens up in the higher elevations.
Then you turn east to SR-89, where the landscape shifts. Edges of mountains chisel away, leaving red and pink and white rocks exposed, and then you’re driving through the canyons of Kanab, Utah, with red sandstone cliffs towering above you. From Kanab looking south, you see a distant green plateau: the northern rim of the Grand Canyon, nearly 9,000 feet in elevation.
From Kanab you drive due east to Page, and the red cliffs run to your right. Beyond them you spot white cliffs and pink peaks, all of them buried in a remote wilderness few ever see. As you approach Page, the bushes of the desert fade away, and solid rock takes their place. Suddenly you see mesas and buttes, rock towers and sheer cliffs, canyons and…water: Lake Powell. The landscape is among one of the widest visual spectacles I’ve ever seen, a sight that runs hundreds of miles distant across a colored desert. I’ve driven some of the roads winding amongst those rocks, but I’ve never seen them from the angle I approached now.
From Page you cross the Echo Cliffs, a range of crimson red mountains that are my favorite in all of Arizona. Once you reach Cameron, AZ, you look to your right and see a wide hump rising from the otherwise-flat land: the Grand Canyon, inconspicuous, almost unnoticeable if you don’t know what you’re looking at. That hump is the north rim. Drive toward it, and you’ll hit the eastern edge of the canyon miles in front of the rim.
From here your sights are set on a series of triangular mountains directly in front of you: the San Francisco Peaks, with Humphreys Peak looming tallest, the ceiling of Arizona at 12,633 feet high. Flagstaff lay just beyond the range, and then you descend 6,000 feet as you fly down I-17 for the next 3 hours, erupting off the Colorado Plateau at the Mogollon Rim (mohg-ee-ON) and descending into the Phoenix Valley.
I said I’m glad I did this drive in a single day, and here’s why: I crossed the width of a continent and saw the landscape shift, the green trees morph into colorful rocks, the mountains turn into canyons, the water run dry to a desert. Experiencing this transformation from the ground, and in only 15 hours, was a real-life timelapse of sorts that even views from an airplane don’t give you. The diversity of the land flashed before me from sunrise to sunset. Truly, the experience was magical.
I won’t make a drive that long again for a while, but I am glad to have done it.
Now I’m back in Sedona
After 7 weeks up north left me pining to return, astronomy calls. I’ve been in Sedona since September 18th, where you can find me for free sidewalk astronomy nightly (barring clouds/rain). Or hire me for a private stargazing tour at your hotel, rental, or let me take you a dark sky area for a view of the stars that will fill you with wonder.
I’ll be in Sedona through November 6th, then I have two events in California’s Anza-Borrego Desert. From there I’ll either return to Sedona or head to San Diego for two weeks before driving north to Oregon for Thanksgiving.
Then….well….we’ll see what’s going on with the El Nino. Aka, I might not be going to Florida this year.
This world is beautiful.
Alex
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