zwol | roadtrip to georgia (part one)

Forthwith a long series of posts detailing what queenpam and I did while driving to Atlanta, where she is starting a graduate program in HCI at Georgia Tech. This covers the first two days; more as I write 'em.

I have a Flickr photoset of the journey and so does Pam. Hers is done, mine will have days added as I write the corresponding blog entries.

day one (Sun 6 Aug 2006)

It took quite a bit longer than we would have liked to load up the car, and we still had a few loose ends to tie up this morning; so queenpam and I only got on the road at two-thirty PM. The plan was to take I-8 to Phoenix and then I-17 north to Flagstaff, and stop there for the night, but we were too tired to drive all the way there so we found a motel in a little town off I-17 called Black Canyon City, and if I had actually written this the day it happened, it would be a very short entry indeed.

Mostly, the interesting bits of this leg have had to do with things visible from I-8 between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona. The most eye-catching one of these has to have been the giant windmills. I didn't get a photo, but here's one taken by Jennifer M. Nicoloff. These things are so huge that the turbine housings (on top of the poles) have windows in them. This news story from when they were installed says there are 25 of them, they stand 20 stories tall (to the top of the pole, I think; the blades go another hundred feet or so up from that) and they generate 50 megawatts collectively. These are not the largest windmills ever built! The largest one stood in Wyoming, had a pole 262 feet tall, generated four megawatts all by itself, and was destroyed by a storm in 1996.

Also, this highway is just a little north of the Mexican border. There's one stretch where there's this mysterious red and white triangular-cross-section fence — I use quotation marks because you could just step over the thing, it's only about two feet tall — running along the south side of the highway. We wondered whether this was the border marker, but we're pretty sure the border is a bit farther south than that. I'm not finding anything about it on Google. Anyone know?

It's not all about the works of man, though; the road runs through some spectacular bits of mountain and desert. Did you know there were sand dunes in California? I sure didn't. Wikipedia has some nice photos: Algodones Dunes.

We stopped for dinner in Yuma, at a very nice little Mexican restaurant, and were most confused by the time zones. See, Arizona is on Mountain time, so it should have been an hour ahead of California, but it...wasn't. We didn't find out why until the next day, but I may as well go ahead and explain now: Arizona doesn't do daylight savings time (mainly for historical reasons). Therefore, when California is on DST, Arizona and California are at the same GMT offset.

I'm sure the terrain between Yuma and Phoenix, or Phoenix and Black Canyon City, is also spectacular, but as I was very tired by this point and anyway it was getting dark, I don't recall any of it. We didn't do the Sonoran Desert or Saguaro National Monument per original plan, as it was too late and they would've been too much of a diversion south.

day two (Mon 7 Aug 2006)

We didn't make much forward progress — by which I mean toward Georgia — today. Instead, we diverted north to the Grand Canyon, which neither of us had ever seen before. To get there, you go to Flagstaff and then you drive another 150 miles north through pine forests. I, iggerant coastal type that I am, had no idea there were pine forests in Arizona; I thought it was entirely the arid desert plateau that you see farther south. In places, there are stands of birch trees, also unexpected; in fact, I seriously wonder if they are imported. [EDIT: According to this nifty USGS site's species distribution maps, almost all North American birch species are found only much farther north, much farther east, or both; however, Betula occidentalis appears in small patches of northern Arizona — farther north than we went, I think. I'm now wondering if what we saw was something else entirely.] Furthermore, one thinks of saguaro as something found only in the southwestern desert, perhaps only in the national monument named after them, but in fact they're all over the hills from Phoenix to just south of Flagstaff, intermingled with other chaparral-type vegetation.

Then you get to the canyon and you stand there for a time going SOOO BIG. Ten miles across (on average), nearly three hundred miles long, four thousand feet from top to bottom... It's almost too big to look real; queenpam described it as looking like a movie backdrop. After a while looking at it, the SOOO BIG reaction turned into a feeling of being dwarfed not by space but by what the geologists call deep time. The Colorado River took only a few hundred million years to carve the Canyon; but it cut all the way to and through the Great Unconformity, which means the bottom of the canyon is older even than the Mesozoic shallow sea that laid down most of the sediment that is now the Colorado Plateau. The oldest rocks so exposed (the Vishnu Schist formation) date to the Precambrian, 1.8 billion years ago, the beginnings of multicellular life.

The other thing I realized after I stopped just going SOOO BIG is that the Grand Canyon is a comparatively small planetary feature. Yeah, it's big enough that you can see it from low orbit. But compared to the Rocky Mountains? The Colorado Plateau, even? Or, more personally relevant, to the total distance we're planning to cover this a week, sea (almost) to shining sea? Tiny.

It was far too hot, the air far too thin, and we had far too little time, to consider any of the hikes or mule trails down into the canyon. Instead, we took one of the buses that goes along the south edge and stops at a lot of scenic overlooks. From one of these, you can see the hoist tower of what used to be the country's richest uranium mine, operational from 1953 to 1972. And before that, it was a (meager) copper mine, going back to 1906. They used to climb two thousand feet down the side of the canyon on wooden ladders to get at the copper. This is the sort of anecdote that ought to have a moral, but I can't think of one better than humans will do incredibly crazy things to make a buck.

We left the park just around sunset, and I have a very few photos of the last light reflecting off the cliff walls. They don't really capture the glowing redness of it; you will just have to go and see for yourself. As we drove back down to Flagstaff and then east until we got tired, we were treated to another natural light show: three or four thunderstorms on the horizon, competing for most spectacular lightning strike (to personify matters far too much).

Also, as we were leaving the park, there was an elk. I have nothing to say about the elk except go look at the photos.