Kanab to Flagstaff

April 21st, 2016

The Canyons Motel in Kanab had an all-you-can-eat breakfast with anything you can imagine from a fruit assortment to king sized sausage.   Spent the morning eating and started out a few minutes before 11 am checkout.  Winds were reasonable; couple of grades.  Did a 50 mile day to a roadside hiking trail within a corner of Escalante Grand Staircase NM.  Pulled the bike up the trail to get out of sight and camped- so easy to do on a bike.   Walked the trail a 1/2 mile in waning light to a series of “toadstools”- erosional features not uncommon on the Colorado Plateau.

 

Cooked up some spaghetti and put the last of dried tomatoes and basil from last years garden in it.  Slept the sleep of the dead-tired, rose early and rode the last miles to Glen Canyon Dam and onto Page.

Got to Glen Canyon and found that the Bureau of Rec still worships Carl Hayden and, judging from the Tiberian fountains out front, really hasn’t figured out water yet.

I pulled up the brutal hill into Page and wandered  punch-drunk into a grocery store to get food and drink, took it all outside to some tables, couldn’t decide which table to sit at (sun or shade) and managed to leave my wallet sitting on the first one.  A concerned woman noticed right off and saved me some potential heartache.  She was on a bench with her husband with a computer in her lap and curiously close to an electrical outlet.  Nothing like scamming a little free power.  And so close the Glen Canyon source!   I struck up a conversation and found they were Brits, Dean & Linda, traveling the US.  Soon I was charging my iPad the same way.

I reluctantly left the amenities of  Page and got on the Coppermine Road to the south.   This highway was just recently paved to enable a bypass route to Page when Hwy 89 had a major washout on the hill coming up from Lee’s Ferry.   The washout’s since been fixed, took a couple of years, and now the Coppermine Road, though not completely abandoned, is a nice alternative to the line of cars and trucks found on 89.   It begins with a bit of a climb, more than I remembered, but then takes an undulating and scenic route over cedar forested top land and gradually tilts into a 25 mile gratifying down hill stretch back to 89.   Those last easy miles lured me into making a 75 mile day, something I don’t intend to make a habit of, but nice to know I can still do if I have to.

I found  an incredible camp site on some slick rock outcrops and had an evening and morning of hiking around and taking pictures.

The first few miles the following day saw me back on Hwy 89 battling spurious shoulders and heavy traffic.  A 50 mile day brought me to a camp on a windswept flat entirely too close to the highway.

 

I’m in Flagstaff now for a couple of days “rest”.  Got bike parts  (spokes,  tires, rear view mirror); a long sleeved cotton shirt and truly geeky straw hat for the desert (just emulating my heroes Buddy and Graham);  an ultraviolet light water purifier (filters evidently gone the way of land line telephones and floppy discs).  The purifier has a rechargeable battery I can hook up to the solar panel.  I got spur-of-the-moment overseas immunizations (finally!) at a place that specializes in such, Passport Health, and had the good fortune to get an hour or so of brain picking from the manager, Brad Heck.

Brad’s spent a good deal of time in Latin America including two years with the Peace Core in Paraguay.  I left feeling like I have after a physics lecture and had a wad of notes to take over to a next door breakfast shop to review and rewrite.  He clued me in on ultraviolet water purifiers.  But I’ll exit Flagstaff tomorrow and none too soon- spent over six hundred  bucks here.