Snowy Sumos: Pandemic Road Trip Part 14

According to my credit card statement, the morning of November 11 we had coffee at the Caffeinated Cowboy in Evanston, Wyoming, a little drive-up joint of the same general ilk as Dutch Bros. Across the way, this red sumo crouched in the snow. He may have been an omen.

Michael had been leery of the lightweight tires on the Malibu when we rented it. The sumo in the snow gave him pause. He decided we'd better get going before it really started coming down. Soon we were packed up and on the road, but we moved cautiously. Michael had no illusions about how those tires were going to handle an icy road.

Unfortunately, many of the motorists speeding past us had illusions to spare. In short order, we saw them by the side of the road, spun out and wrecked. We tip-toed past them, thinking we had dodged a bullet. And then this happened.

I-80 turned into a parking lot, because there was a tunnel up ahead. Apparently it's pretty common for motorists to go speeding into that tunnel and hit the black ice that tends to form in there. They wipe out and block the tunnel. We sat for an hour and a half while they cleared the road. By the time we got rolling again, I really needed to find a bathroom. We made a beeline to the facilities. I took a phone pic and sent it to my Facebook friends.

I felt like I had been saved by civilization. Outside, the Malibu had collected some icicles.

We still had to drive through snow flurries. Yet my mom decided she wanted ice cream.

My email notes were a tad uninspired:

Baggs WY near Colorado border

Craig CO 

I took a lot of photographs -- once again, from the car, often with the window closed, which means that quite a few of them were blurry and splotched. But not all of them.

I couldn't get out a look at the formations up close, so I had to guess at their composition. I thought they were probably sedimentary, maybe mudstone and sandstone. But there are volcanic rocks that can look similar to sandstone, limestone, etc. Ash deposits in particular can look sedimentary. After all they are clastic. They can end up settling into drifts like snow. 

Our route seemed counter-intuitive. By Friday we wanted to be back in Flagstaff, yet we were headed in the opposite direction. Michael had a town in Colorado he wanted us to see, with a beautiful canyon nearby, so first we went east, and then we went south. By the time we crossed the border into Colorado, we were on HWY 13. On our way south, we saw some very fluffy sheep.

Our destination for the night was Glenwood Springs, a bedroom community for the exceptionally chi-chi Aspen. We had been on the road 9 1/2 hours, partly because we had been stranded for so long and partly because Michael moderated our speed to match the road conditions. We had supper at a restaurant called Tequila's. Then we settled into our warm and toasty hotel rooms. Ernie and I watched various Murder Channels. Mom and Michael drank their peach wine and watched the mayhem on MSNBC. We didn't know it, but Mom was going through changes. She had accomplished one thing that was keeping her alive: voting Trump out of office. She would soon reach the end of the other -- this road trip. 

Michael was saying a lot of things to her that he needed to say. Here's his account of an unexpected conversation that occurred in the middle of the night on the 10th:

Michael here: It is November 10 here in Boise. Mom is standing by her bed when I hear her at 3:23 a.m. I ask, "What are you up to, Mom?" "Ma," she corrects me.

"Okay Ma. What are you up to?"

"Well, you see, no one wants to help me." She pivots slightly, peering through the dark in the general direction of the bathroom.

I say, "Your driver" (whom she - as of late - has taken to calling me) "is here. He can help. Do you want to go to the bathroom?"

"Yes."

"Well, would you prefer to walk or to ride in your chair?"

She weighs the question. "I don't see why we shouldn't walk. What does the driver think?"

"He's not paid to think, Mom. He's here at you disposal."

"Ma."

"The driver apologizes, Ma."

"Why don't we walk?"

"Why don't we?" I slid out of bed.

"You're a good son."

"And a good driver, Ma."

"That too."

I take her arm and off we go toward the biffy. It is a slow walk through the dark but the driver knows where he's going. When we reach the sink and mirror area just outside the bathroom I flick the switch for that light and what seems like one hundred fifty watts suddenly showers us, causing her to wince and squint in response.

She asks, "Do we need the interrogation light?" I quickly reach around the wall and turn on the bathroom light which, with its perhaps one hundred less watts, throws out a warmer, gentler wash. I quickly kill the powder room light.

"Better," she says, inching forward.

"You need a hand perching on that throne?"

"No, I think I've got that part." I retreat around the corner a respectable distance.

I've heard mixed stories from Em and Ern regarding her middle of the night forays and lucidity. She arose only twice during the Coast trip and for the most part, "all hands on board" both times. For the most part she slept like a brick until seven a.m. (give or take).

Whether or not she ate the pastry we brought her (about 60 - 40 on that one) she proved to be an absolute coffee lush - sixteen (and, on occasion, even twenty) ounces at a pop. No matter how hot, she dispatched the coffee shack brew we fetched her each morning in short order. Extremely short order. I refuse to drink coffee that hot. I couldn't remember from one day to the next what the hell concoction they were buying her - hell, to me, coffee is nothing other than black water, an oil slick and bubbles - so one or both of them had to go along to order it.

Em here again: As of this writing, my mom can no longer walk anywhere, let alone to the bathroom. She can't even sit in her wheelchair anymore. She's locked inside herself more often than not these days, and she seems to cycle between that unhappy silence and brief periods of being more like herself, followed by long bouts of sleep (22 to 23 hours). It's not impossible that she'll live to see the New Year, but I check to see if she's still breathing dozens of times per day.

Yeah, we went on this trip just in time. On the 11th, we survived a snowstorm pileup. The next day we were in for an unexpected treat. 

Sandstone/Mudstone/Conglomerate: Pandemic Road Trip Part 13

I took a lot of pictures on Nov 10, partly thanks to some amazing volcanic deposits that form the Snake River Canyon. Apparently the spot we visited was also famous because Evil Knievel jumped over it with his motorcycle -- I seem to recall that happening back in the 70s. 

I can tell by my email notes that I was kind of sick of taking email notes. Or maybe the distance between towns was growing wider:

Road Sign: Burley Paul

Utah, Tremonton

Ogden Utah to Evanston WY

Henefer and Echo

I-80 sandstone/mudstone/conglomerate

Dutch Bros. provided morning coffee as usual, and soon we were on the road, looking for the bridge over the Snake River. I snapped a lot of photos, but I didn't realize someone was hang gliding over the canyon until they had come to a safe landing.

Michael had finally conceded to the cooler weather and put on a long-sleeve tee. He was fascinated with the underside of the bridge, where large voids from gas in the magma were exposed.

I can never resist the underside of bridges.

Because we were driving on I-84 and I-80, we managed to visit 3 states in one day, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. I knew when we had entered Utah because we began to see fantastically tilted strata. Much as I love my home state of Arizona, I don't think any other state can compete with Utah for fantastic landscapes. There's a reason so many movies set on Mars are filmed there. I suspect this bit of folded strata reveals the roots of mountains that were deeply buried when they were deformed by regional stresses.

Michael introduced me to a Utah thrift chain that gives Goodwill Industries a serious run for its money, Deseret Industries.

I love that the state symbol for Utah is the bee hive. As we continued along I-80, Michael demonstrated the tilt of the strata we were passing through just as I was trying to photograph a particularly dramatic scene up ahead, causing me to miss it, but it kind of worked out for the purposes of telling this story. Besides, what do you expect when you snap pictures from inside a car like a lazy bum? You're supposed to pull over, get out and brave the weather and the traffic. Though if we had done that for every good shot on this trip, it would have taken us about 5 times longer.

 Eventually we saw some beds that had been turned on their sides, tilted 90 degrees.

Utah also has a lot of thick sandstone deposits, from dune systems that extended throughout the Colorado Plateau. These deposits have weathered into landforms, from the whimsical to the majestic. 

Some of those sandstone deposits end up looking like battleships.

True, the shapes can be fantastical, but the colors are even better.

As we rolled out of Utah and into Wyoming, I thought about the supervolcano far to the North, one of the few features on Earth amazing enough to give Grand Canyon a run for its money, Yellowstone. Most of the world's geysers are located there. My mom took us there when we were in grade school, and it was like visiting another planet. It even had its own atmosphere (with a lot of sulphur in it). 

We settled for the night in Evanston, Wyoming. According to my credit card receipts, we had supper at another Costa Vida. Ernie and I were beginning to tire of Trump's pathological denial of his election loss, so we found other TV channels to watch, variations of the Murder Channel (which still seemed more soothing). 

We had been on the road for 9 hours that day, a very different approach to the first half of our trip, during which we meandered a lot more. We were running out of time if we still wanted to get back to Flagstaff by Friday the 13th. I had a feeling the most interesting part of the trip was probably over. But I was dead wrong.