On the road in the USA

By Alistair Paton

Published in the Herald Sun, January 2008

THE look on the security guard’s face said it all: we weren’t welcome here. After three weeks walking and camping in America’s badlands, we just weren’t the type of people they wanted on their tables at this Las Vegas hotel. Either that, or our inflatable dinosaur put them off.

In a good old-fashioned American road trip that involved several weeks of roughing it, Las Vegas was admittedly an unusual choice for the one night in what can loosely be termed civilisation. But in the middle of a desert and on the main highway, it’s kind of hard to avoid.

I had flown to the US to meet by twin brother, who had been working in Denver for the previous six months. We had friends in San Francisco and a month to get there, and in between lay some of the most spectacular scenery in America and, indeed, the world. And we had an inflatable dinosaur.

Or, to be more precise, my brother had the dinosaur, which I had given him as a joke Kris Kringle present the year before. It had since become his unofficial mascot and travelling companion to wild and wonderful locations around the globe. During our trip, T-Rex was photographed atop mountain peaks, on the edge of giant chasms, in narrow, twisted gorges, beside serene lakes and at the slot machines in the Golden Nugget hotel and casino – at least until he was given his marching orders by a security guard.

Our starting point, Denver, provided a quick introduction to life in the United States – roads lined by fast food chain restaurant after fast food chain restaurant (from McDonald’s to Popeye’s, In-n-Out Burgers, A&W All-American Food, K-Bob’s Family Steakhouse and Good Times Burgers and Frozen Custard) are patrolled by cars of a size that in Australia you would pay to see crush normal-sized cars (or hire car, a sedan, was classed as a “compact”). The mile-high city doesn’t have much else to offer tourists, its most notable feature was the overpowering smell of the local dog food factory.

But behind Denver is the Rocky Mountains. The Rockies stretch for almost 5000km from Canada to New Mexico, but for many visitors travel the gateway to the mountains is Boulder, Colorado, which is just 50km north of Denver. Picking up camping gear at an outdoor store with a gun department and filled with dead wildlife (a stuffed raccoon was perched on the sunglasses counter wearing the merchandise) and our hire car in central Denver  - occasionally remembering to drive on the right side of the road - we made our way to Boulder and on to the start of a hike to a lake perched high in the hills.

The walk was breathtaking and our timing was good; there were wildflowers everywhere. We passed through surprisingly beautiful pine forest (it still looked like a plantation, but somehow it fit here) and an unexpected waterfall before arriving at the lake shore, where we pitched our tent, stringing our food up from a distant tree to avoid bear attack. 

The lake was about 3500 metres above sea level – not terribly high by world standards but higher than I had ever been, and a lot higher than where I was about two days’ earlier - that is, Melbourne. Flying at 8000 metres is not, it turns out, sufficient acclimatisation for a trip to altitude, and I woke up with an eye-splitting headache and feeling like I was about to die. Between bouts of vomiting I squeezed off a few photos of the lake at sunrise (well, when would I be there again?), then my brother dragged me back down to the car. Fortunately, a day in bed in more oxygen-rich air had me ready to hit the road.

Our route led south then west, through the open Colorado plains and the afternoon thunderstorms that were apparently normal for this time of year. The first significant stop was at Mesa Verde National Park, which preserves the ancient cliff dwellings off the Pueblo people, the ancestors of the American Indians. They spent 700 years perfecting villages built into sheer cliffs (which they scaled each day to farm on the plains above), then moved out for reasons no one can explain. 

From there our travel route took us west into southern Utah and a landscape I recognised instantly – from Road Runner cartoons (we even saw a coyote, although disappointingly it wasn’t attempting to fly off a cliff in some contraption comprising a rocket, sail and an anvil).

There are a string of national parks here that demand inspection: Arches (home to more than 2000 natural arches, including the world’s longest), Canyonlands, Capital Reef, Bryce Canyon and Zion, as well Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the last place in the continental US to be mapped and the site of spectacular slot canyons.

Each of the parks deserves its own article, collectively they offer a grand vision of wild nature, somewhat unexpected find in the middle of the US. Zion was my favourite, a narrow sandstone canyon framed by sheer cliffs over 300 metres high. A host of walking tracks start at the canyon floor, including two of the best day hikes anywhere in the world, Angels Landing and The Narrows. The Angels Landing track scales a series of switch-backs then crosses a knife-edge ridge which is barely more than a metre wide and hundreds of metres above the canyon floor. The Narrows track – well, there isn’t a track. You just walk up the river beneath the jaw-dropping cliffs. 

Continuing east from Zion required a major detour, zig-zagging back east to go around a giant roadblock known as the Grand Canyon. There isn’t much left to say about this wonder of the world. Suffice to say, it’s huge. Even standing on the cliff edge, it’s hard to grasp the canyon’s sheer size: 446km long, up to 29km wide and 1.6km deep.

The detour took us past Monument Valley. If you haven’t heard of it, you have definitely seen it; the giant mesas rising from the flat Arizona desert have been the backdrop in just about every western movie ever filmed.

The road from the Grand Canyon to California heads straight through Las Vegas, where we were welcomed back to populated America by billboards promoting “Girls, Girls, Girls: Sexy Librarians”, “24-Hour Nude Shopping” and grinning photos of small-claims lawyers holding bags with dollar signs on them. The centre of town was just as subtle: a 400-metre long TV screen showing images of the American flag, the constitution and declaration of independence accompanied by a blaring soundtrack of the national anthem. This stirring display of patriotism had a beggar punching the air and shouting “Go USA!”. He’s living the American dream.

Sadly, we had to leave Las Vegas behind to continue west into California, where the desert continues for a surprisingly long time, almost all the way to the coast. We passed giant wind farms that would give an orange-bellied parrot a heart attack to arrive in San Francisco, a cosmopolitan city that could be in Australia. Except for all the American flags and the International House of Pancakes. And the dinosaurs.   

Click here to see some photos of our US road trip