30 April ‘08
Wednesday
Today has been quite an adventure… first, we drove out the same route that we drove last night to find and hike the Shakespeare Arch Trail.
Wednesday
Today has been quite an adventure… first, we drove out the same route that we drove last night to find and hike the Shakespeare Arch Trail.
It was a dusty 3 mile road to the trail head, but once we got there we kind of ignored the wind as much as we could. The hike to the arch was easy so we decided to take the full circle trail. The whole hike was about 2 ½ miles so it should have been pretty easy. Once we got around to the opposite side of the arch, we found that the trail had been covered with sand. Not only was it covered with sand, it was on a very steep grade. Again, we are very glad we made the purchase of these walking sticks. With them, it gave us the grip on the sloping hill side that we sure wouldn’t have had without them. It wouldn’t have hurt either one of us if we had slipped in most of the areas, but on a couple of them…well, it wouldn’t have been so much fun. The sights from the height of the hills and the Shakespeare Arch itself really made the hike worthwhile. We had heard of a couple of other places we must see while here in Kodachrome. There’s a dirt road here that runs 60 miles to Page, Arizona.
Well we decided that we haven’t had enough of dirt roads yet so we turned left and headed out. That’s just a part of it…at the 3 mile mark, we had to ford a river. The road split into an on-coming and on-going lane, just in case someone didn’t make it across. At the 9 mile mark we took a right and headed off to see the magnificent Grosvenor Arch.
This is one site that we could just drive up to. The wind was still blowing like hell, but seeing the arch was well worth it. OK, now let’s really do a hike…Cottonwood Narrows is a narrow Navajo Sandstone canyon that we can pick up 4 miles further down that dirt road. After finding a spot off the roadway to park, we grabbed our hiking sticks, slid through a small rock crevasse,
and found ourselves surrounded by 1000 foot high granite walls. The floor of the canyon was mostly deep sand and larger rocks.
With that kind of canyon floor, our leg muscles are going to get a good work-out, which they did. Driving back to the coach, we had to pass through the water hazard again, only this time we had to use the other “lane”. A couple of different things happened… First the water was much deeper and hit just above the bumper which splashed water over the top of the car. Next, we must have hit something like a nail sitting under the water because we had no sooner made it to the other side and I noticed that it felt like we were riding on a very low tire…yep, here we sat, in the middle of nowhere and we had a flat. Now I’m getting a little upset…wind, water, completely wore out from a strenuous day, and now a flat tire???