Road Trip 2022: Grass Pants

Our roadtrip was only a few days old, and already I had encountered Something Unknown that made me anxious (namely the process of buying ferry tickets). However, my worries about being late for the ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge had been alleviated the night before when I went onto the (somewhat glitchy) website and purchased a ticket for our vehicle that could be used anytime within the next thirty days. Hard to miss a gate time like that. Michael knows the area so well, he took us right to the ferry dock, but when we got to the window, the ticket guy said, “You’ve paid for your car, but where are your tickets for the passengers?”

 

I could have grumbled to him that the website doesn’t make it clear that you need to do both. Instead, I quickly bought tickets for the three of us, and with a minimum of fuss and muss, we moved into the parking lanes that would eventually allow us to drive onto the ferry. And by eventually, I mean within 20 minutes, which gave officers a chance to escort sniffy dogs around each vehicle to look for bad stuff. None of them raised an alarm. When the ferry pulled up, this desert girl marveled as we drove onto it, parked, and climbed the stairs so we could admire the Sound from the top deck. Once on the other side, we drove away from the ferry and onto the Coast Highway (101), famous for its fabulous views and quirky towns. 

To be fair, every town in the United States is quirky, especially if you're a bit odd yourself. This characteristic comes in handy for road trippers. It means you're more likely to spot the antique stores, ice cream shops, thrift shops, and yard sales. I found this beautiful clematis vine (pictured above) at an estate sale (no, I didn't buy it, I admired it. Its roots are firmly in the ground, which is why it was able to produce these perfect flowers.)

At this point in our trip, we had traveled through Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Utah again (we would pass through a third time before we were done), Idaho, Oregon, and now we were in Washington, headed down toward Oregon again. Later that night we would be staying in Quinault, in a lodge near a gorgeous lake, and we would just miss losing our room by ten minutes. Apparently they had tried to reach us during the day, but my phone was out of range, and their call didn't go through. Our lesson from that was to call our hotels as we went along to let them know we would be arriving late, because we were hitting a lot of stops on the road: shops, yard sales, and gorgeous nature spots. And of course, plenty of gas station restrooms.

Last year, our roadtrip was dedicated to scattering Mom's ashes in her favorite spots. This year, the Great Beyond seemed inclined to pay her homage with a sign.

We stopped at a burger joint for lunch, where we found this very well-fed mosquito.

Near Port Angeles we crossed this turquoise-colored river.

Farther down the highway, we had to stop and take pictures of Crescent Lake.

Olympic National Park and National Forest are both in this area, and we lingered among the ancient giants.

Fruit stands always seem to catch Michael's eye. They're a good place to get road food that won't break the bank. This one in Forks had some lovely colors.

They also sold T-shirts, and I discovered this guy who looks like the calavera version of the Most Interesting Man in the World.

The day was giving up on us by the time we made it to our hotel, which says a lot, because this was late June, when we have the longest days in the year (in the Northern Hemisphere), and the sun was going down on the West Coast close to 9:00 p.m. When we checked in, the guy in the lobby told us we had been minutes from losing our reservation. This disaster did not come to pass. We climbed way too many stairs to get into our rooms, which were charming and rustic. The WiFi wasn't great, and the TV only got three channels (we are spoiled brats), but after a long day, it didn't take us long to fall asleep.

I don't remember where we got coffee the next day, but I can tell you we hit plenty of Dutch Bros. on this trip. Early on, we spotted this buoy-themed yard art.

A braided stream in South Bend is emptying into the ocean.

Farther down the road, a library in Raymond honored the Bremen Town Musicians.

This antique store did not have a lot to offer, but it did feature two notable pigs.

This charming South Bend home is typical of the area.

We were only five days into our trip, and the nose of or faithful chariot had accumulated so many bugs, we were wondering if it would ever be clean again. Michael spotted an impromptu car wash being held by some gals who were financing a trip for their sports team. They did a bang-up job. Alas, just two days later, Michael had to repeat the process at a do-it-yourself car wash in Winnemuca, but for one bright, shining moment, we felt ready to zoom through another landscape.

Farther south in chinook, we spotted an antique store that we had visited on our previous trip up the coast. I don't recall if this metal fellow was out front then, but he needed to be documented.

Look for this sign if you're driving the same route. You won't be sorry.

And there's a giraffe for sale!

Here's one small corner of the interior of Shipwreck Cove antiques.

In Tillamook, the wonderful resale store we had shopped on our last trip had failed to survive another year. I had to settle for a mural of a rat in another gas station rest room. 

Had we stopped in Lincoln City, we could have participated in karaoke.

We might have also investigated these stone carvings that seem half-tiki, half-totem.

At Depoe Bay, Michael suddenly pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant and told me to run in and ask them if I could take a picture of the beautiful bay from their terrace. I felt dubious about this enterprise. The restaurant looked expensive and exclusive. But I dutifully trotted in to make my request. The maitre d' deserves some credit for at least considering my request for a few seconds, but his answer was a polite and firm NO.

However, all was not lost. When we drove further down the highway, we discovered a public park with several viewing spots for an even better look at the gorgeous cove. Photo managed.

Perhaps you recall I mentioned that we visited several ice cream shops on our journey. In fact, I believe we visited more of them this time around than we ever have before. This shop in Yachats had a long and well-deserved line. We did not leave disappointed. It's called Topper's.

By the time we pulled into Grass Pants (a.k.a. Grants Pass) it was dark. This time, we had called ahead to make sure they knew we wanted our room, only to have them call us back an hour later to ask if we still wanted our room. We said YES. But when we finally got there, we discovered they had sold our room anyway. Things looked pretty bleak for a moment, but my brother Michael is not to be trifled with. He pressed the guy, who finally parked us in a gigantic suite that isn't one of the rooms they usually rent (for some arcane reason I couldn't quite grasp). We had a home for the night. We slept like logs.

In the morning, we went in search of coffee. We had a lot of adventures planned. I'm pretty sure Human Bean is really Dutch Bros. with a different name. Either way, they're pretty good.

We have seen a lot of bigfoots on our journeys through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and even Arizona, but this is the first time we ever saw a zombie version.

The whole point of staying in Grants Pass was so we could visit Crater Lake National Park and ogle its gorgeous blue waters. It truly is a wonder, but I think I enjoyed another feature of the park even more: Rogue Gorge, a collapsed Lava tube with the Rogue River running through it.

There were several points along the path from which you could see water cascading through the volcanic landscape.

I could have taken many more pictures.

I love sandstone landscapes, but sometimes eroded lava can look so fantastical.

Still, Crater Lake is otherworldly. If you've traveled through this area without seeing it, you're missing something special.

Okay, one more shot of the Rogue River streaming through volcanic rocks.

After two nights of almost having our hotel room canceled on us, we really wanted to make sure our hotel in Winnemuca knew we were coming. Fortunately, they had no problem with our arrival time (which turned out to be a couple of hours earlier than those other two nights, no thanks to us). The young, tattooed clerk politely asked us what had brought us to her fair city, and we said we were just passing through. She laughed and said of course we were. No one picks Winnemuca as a destination – it’s halfway between everything else. 

 

It also happened to be the halfway point on our trip with Michael. There was still a lot to see.

Segues And Roadcuts

One life ended, another was beginning, and the best way to start it was with a roadtrip. So one Sunday in January, We drove East on Arizona Hwy 60, past the Superstitions, toward Globe and Miami. We couldn't see the Superstitions very clearly, because the morning mist obscured them like Shangri-La, but once we got near Superior we entered some of the most interesting highway scenery I’ve ever seen. We zoomed past the Boyce Thompson Arboretum before I could think about it -- otherwise we would have stopped there. But it’s so close to Phoenix, we made a mental note to visit it soon, and often.

The road cuts and terrain near Hwy 60 reveal the same fascinating and complicated geologic history you can observe in the Superstitions: millions of years of ocean, lake, river and stream, and/or swamp sediment, volcanic activity (including pyroclastic flows and clouds of ash), magma that cooled slowly underground before it was exposed, magma that cooled quickly while it still had gas bubbles in it. Many of these layers have been pushed vertical by magma chambers that formed beneath them as our part of the continent moved slowly over a super-hot spot in the mantle. As the older stuff fractured and faulted, more molten stuff was forced up into the cracks, forming the veins, rich with copper, that attracted the mining companies in the first place.

Erosion from snow, rain, sun, running water, and wind-blown sand have eroded fractured columns along that highway into a fantastical, mad-tea-party sort of landscape. Hwy 60 winds straight into a hoodoo-paradise called Devil’s Canyon. There are no scenic pullouts on that stretch of the road, or I would have taken at least 100 pictures of that canyon (I promise, ultimately I WILL find a way, hopefully one that doesn’t get me splattered like a bug on the grill of a big rig).

The gorgeous display continues until you suddenly see the gigantic open pit mine on the North side of the Hwy, near Globe/Miami. My husband Ernie says it's like driving through Middle Earth and suddenly finding Mordor. The mine isn’t pretty, but it is fascinating -- I'd love to tour it some day. You can definitely see the decline of the mining industry when you enter Miami and Globe -- they’re boom towns gone bust, though they still have some interesting corners. I contemplated renting a place in Globe, possibly even settling there some day -- though it might be like settling at the edge of the world the day before Armageddon. (Armageddon would be a great name for a ghost town . . .)

From Globe, Hwy 60 turns North and merges with Hwy 77, continuing to wind through spectacular geological terrain. I give the roadcuts on this leg of the journey an A+, and I became a bit of a hazard. Geologists are notoriously distracted when roads wind through interesting cuts. It’s a very good thing the speed limit declines to 35mph, or we might have gone over a cliff. The highway descends into the beautiful Salt River Canyon, called the “Little Grand Canyon” because the salt river has eroded it 2000 feet down, exposing layers that formed millions of years ago. This area of the highway has plenty of scenic pullouts, and I used just about every one of them. We crossed the salt river and began to climb again. At one point we encountered a roadcut that exposed a huge, thick layer of limestone. All of these layers have been bent and twisted, and the roadcuts reveal just how much valley fill has settled over the deeper spots.

Eventually our highway climbed up onto the Mogollon Rim at Show Low, a nifty little town that, happily, featured a JB’s coffee shop that served a good omelette with smokey tabasco sauce. In Show Low, Hwy 60 continues East toward New Mexico, Hwy 77 marches North, through geologically unspectacular terrain (except for the roadcuts, which reveal that wonderful stuff is hiding beneath the surface). North was our destination. This is a short drive, through Taylor and Snowflake, to Holbrook, where we checked into the BEST WESTERN ADOBE INN, a comfortable, inexpensive motel. Our room was big and attractive, and the hotel sits next door to a great restaurant, The Butterfield Stage Company. The food is good and the decor gets an A+. We also visited Jim Gray’s Petrified Wood Co., a big rock shop that also sells fossils. It’s a treasure house on the inside, and is surrounded by a giant yard where rocks of all kind are sold by the pound.

Holbrook seems to have a rock shop on every corner -- and they all feature dinosaurs. Why not? Up the road is the Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona's postcard from the Triassic.

MONDAY we headed to Petrified Forest from the South, HWY 180. We stopped at the Park Gift shop and watched the informational video, which quickly traces the history of the park from the Triassic Period to the present.

The impact of early tourists makes me wince -- it was a free-for-all, with rockhounds doing terrible damage. Rockhounds are still doing damage. Hard to believe people can call themselves good, honest, will stand up in church and sing with the choir, but they steal rocks from the park, in staggering numbers. One thing I didn’t know -- Park personnel receive numerous packages from remorseful bandits, stolen rocks enclosed, with letters of apology.

While eavesdropping in the gift shop I learned that Jim Gray, whose spectacular rock shop sits on the corners of Hwy 77 and Hwy 180, is not beloved to the park rangers. He has plundered adjoining lands with a backhoe, rendering them useless as natural settings. The Petrified Forest National Park recently acquired new lands, but declined to buy the ones he has stripped. It occurs to me that scientists require the same “chain of custody” for artifacts and samples that police investigators do. If an object’s context can’t be reliably documented, it becomes irrelevant.

I hate to think about the damage that has been done. But I love the park without reservation. Tons of petrified wood have “migrated,” but a lot of specimens are still buried in the mudstone and sandstone. And, despite its beauty, the petrified wood is just a part of the attraction. I love the melting mounds of mudstone, sandstone, siltstone, clay, and conglomerate, colored by iron, manganese, and carbon. You can also see chunks of basalt in the mix. The vistas seem to go on forever, and it’s almost completely silent.

We couldn’t do the Blue Mesa hike because of ice on the trail, but we’ll try to come back in the spring or fall to try it again. I REALLY want to walk down there.

We were lucky to have photo-gray lenses on our glasses -- the sunlight on the snow was dazzlingly bright, more blinding than the brightest light in summer. This is something warm-climate people can’t know until they experience it.

We saw more wildlife than I’ve ever seen before, friendly ravens (as big as cats) who seemed to be at every turnout, a fearless bunny who was determined to finish breakfast, despite the presence of tourists, and some deer with really big ears. Ernie is the one who spotted the four-footed creatures -- he’s got an eye for that kind of thing.

It’s actually pretty easy to believe this area was a giant swamp/floodplain at one time. It’s a bit harder to imagine the giant conifers that grew to 200 feet in height, and the tropical climate that created them. Bought cool, nerdy t-shirts at the gift shops and posters depicting geology, petroglyphs, and the Geologic Timeline.

We stopped at every site, then returned to the hotel at 4:00p.m. and ate once again at the Butterfield Stage Company restaurant, this time trying the steaks, which were perfect.

Sometimes, you just need to wallow in an experience. Ernie is the guy I can do that with. That’s why I married him.

Two days into our trip -- and it just got better from there . . .