A ride into GLORY

We bade goodbye to our little meadow and brook at 8am. Last night had been a needed recharge and now we were quickly climbing through the ponderosa pine forest on the flanks of the Aquarius Plateau. The road was twisting back on itself, the Vespas having no problem of it. One misconception is that scooters can’t climb, the other that they are slow, which I had already dis-proven at 80 mph. In fact my scooter will leave most cars well behind when a traffic light turns green. The reason is gearing, they are geared for city traffic speeds. Instead of carrying big macho speed gears (impractical even for cars with the majority of driving in the city), scooters will excel in the 30-45 mph range, a perfect mountain road speed.

Our little mountain goats took us all the way from 5300’ to 9400’. In four thousand feet we had climbed from the Northern Desert Zone, predominated by sagebrush varieties and grasses into the Foothills Vegetation Zone which was landscaped by pinyon pines, juniper bushes, cottonwood trees and box elder trees along the creek beds, through the Lower Montane Zone with large aspen tree groves, numerous willows and deciduous bushes, abundant flower beds of red Indian Paintbrush, fireweed, geraniums and violets of various colors, rusty Gamble oaks bushes then transitioning

through the Upper Montane Zone, forested with conifer trees, like the limber pine and Engleman spruce, finally topping out at the Alpine Zone, with bare knolls of thin grass and dwarf flower yet to bloom in the short summer season. Here in early June, snowbanks lined the road and the aspens had yet to leaf out. Locals would tell us how heavy the snows had

been this year, but to climb from sandstone desert to snow in an hour was hard to fathom. Intellectually I knew that 2-3 degrees Fahrenheit was lost for each 1000’ in elevation climbed. But to experience it so dramatically was alien to me. This was like stepping into airliner in New York and coming out in Paris. Smoke and mirrors. In fact, four times during our trip we would made this Jekyll and Hyde roller coaster trip of changing ecology zones, up and down, changing from shorts to parkas in minutes.

At the Homestead overlook we enjoyed a panorama of the five Henry Mountains to the east and below the Waterpocket Fold bisecting the canyoned plains in red. The scale was mind bending. New Mexico and Arizona were just at the horizon’s limit; terrain bringing unimaginable hardships for the early Mormon travelers.

We were looking for gas and Boulder, Utah didn’t have any. This town really didn’t justify being called a town; no gas, no food, no shops. What it did have was a nice Anasazi Indian Museum adjoining some excavated pueblo ruins. I’ve seen a lot of southwestern museums with Anasazi displays in my life. This was a good one and the modest ruins a nice walk back in time. It was clear that white man didn’t discover anything. Explorers from the Old World found well-established settlements coast to coast, north to south. Sacagawea led Lewis and Clark on their great journey of discovery, interpreting for them as them moved through various native territories. The Anasazi, or the ‘ancient ones’, lived in northern New Mexico and Arizona, southern Colorado and Utah in 200AD to 1300AD. For some reason they disappeared from their Utah and southern Colorado dwellings and moved south into the pueblos of New Mexico. Even the great Mesa Verde settlement was abandoned. Some speculate this retreat was cased by over-use of limited resources of wood and game. The tree rings suggest a time of drought. Some speculate even religion moved them. It was clear though that the region stood empty for 500 years, until in the mid-1800’s when white trappers arrived and shortly thereafter the Mormon migration wandered into Utah’s lonely canyons and found a home.

Boulder, Utah is the jumping off point for the Burr Trail Scenic Highway. One drops from rolling forests down to the Grand Staircase, into Escalante National Park, further on to the southern part of Capitol Reef National Park and finally making a dusty destination in the northern part of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. It is then possible to trek north back up to the highway 24, near the east entrance of Capitol Reef. In essence making a loop of 200 miles, with half of it dirt. Princess Vespa vetoed my suggestion with her eyes, putting this detour in the ‘future trips with the 4x4 truck’ category. I’d miss Deer Creek Campground but it was too early in the day to stop any way.

Any misgivings about not taking the DETOUR were overcome by the pure joy of the rollicking ride down the SPINE of this wild, steep ridge we were rapidly plunging down. Cliffs to our left and to our right plunged a thousand feet. No guard rails protected us from a BASE jump. I was dying for my helmet cam, lost somewhere back in a Colorado closet. I do not overstate the wonder of this section of the highway. It is MANDATORY that every aspiring scooterist ride this road, and only from north to south. This is the true sacrament, pardon me Jesus, of scooter faith. You will not be denied heaven in this life, for glory is this tarmac. And baptism is in Calf Creek Falls.

One of the “10 Best Reasons to Scooter” is you can park ANYWHERE. This is especially important when you just finished riding down one of the “10 Best Roads on the Planet” and you are swinging into one of the “10 SMALLEST PARKING LOTS in America” and hoping to hike one of the “10 Best Hikes in the USA.”

We’d heard Calf Creek Falls was a nice hike to do in Escalante National Park. Sort of a side note to the Slot Canyons which every aspiring Ansel Adams, Zone System worshiping, photographer lusts to record. Calf Creek Falls is nice,

in the way the Sistine Chapel is a nice place to read a book, even THE BOOK, if you don’t bother to LOOK UP!. The hike in (since you were a lucky parking scooter-ista) is a narrow track making it’s way up a red canyon that gets just more and more

amazing with each turn. Add a meandering brook, where I counted nine trout keeping pace with the lazy cool current, meadow bottoms with shade trees, all lined by gigantic Windgate red cliffs and you get something nice, damn nice.

We passed many other pilgrims on our way to the falls. Families with truculent kids, tolling in desert heat, trying, dear God, to ‘make memories’, while Johnny throws his water bottle to the dust, scuffing along in his $300 Nikes in the ocher grime. (I picked up Darwin’s mistake’s water bottle and gave it back to him as I passed by, with a word on how, “dumb shits die young.” What ever)

It took us an hour to make the falls and as we cleared the trees lining Canaan’s pool...glory be... I was a BELIEVER. A believer in water, regenerative water;

flowing from sources unseen above, plunging down 126 feet through air; foam, spray, slick sand rock, turquoise oasis. From biped to fish again I became, and swam I did. I lured Princess Vespa into the pool and soon another free spirit frolicked and swam with us, leaving her hot timid husband behind. For a brief time I had my harem, a harem of mermaids.