My brother and I arrived at the airport about 0515 carrying huge duffel bags containing our packs, food, boots, and everything that we would need for the trip. It'd been so long since I had flown I had not seen the automated check in kiosks. We checked in there, paid for checking out bags, then went and turned them in. My bag weighed 49 lbs., one pound shy of an additional fine. Once we checked in, I took the first of my Ativan. It went to work fairly quickly, as I remember singing stanzas of operas as we waited to pass through security. After clearing security went to the gate and waited for our plane. As we were waiting for the plane, I realized that I was still pretty uncomfortable, so I took another Ativan (I had two for each way), which was a good decision. Our plane finally taxied in and we boarded, though about 20 minutes late. As we stowed our stuff and buckled in, the Captain came on, made some disparaging remarks about the crew that apparently forgot to bring him his airplane, and then announced "We're running about 20 minutes behind, but fortunately we have a jet plane, which can go fast, and we're going to do that. I'm not worried about the fuel burn. Everyone will make their connections." Nice! This cut the 4 hour 45 minute flight down to about 4. Sounds good to me. And then we took off. The Ativan did its job, because frankly, I don't remember very much at all about the flight. Except thinking that the little TV thing on the back of the seat pretty much kicked ass because it had a Google Earth like display on it that I could use to see what part of the country we were flying over.
Once we landed, we got our stuff, got the car, and headed south towards Zion, UT and Arches National Park. Upon leaving the airport, you know you're not on the East Coast anymore, and thank God for that. There are mountains, and sky. Big sky. And geology. And it's just goo
d. We made one stop on the way out of town to pick up some stove fuel that we couldn't take on the plane and were on the way. We angled southwest on a state road for about two hours, though we had to pull over and get a nap a little ways in, me getting over being stoned, and both of us pretty damned tired from the hour we left.So we finally got to I-70, which is, somewhat ironically we felt, just outside the town we went to high school in, 2,100 miles to the east. What made this particular stretch of road way better is that the speed limit is 75 MPH. Which pretty much kicks ass. And about the time you hit the interstate, the road opens up into valley and mesa country. And it is incredible. So we drove through the desert with the radio up, trying to keep our maintain our lane while we were busy ogling the scenery. We finally arrived in Arches, which was a far different experience that I was expecting.
Here in the east, not many people seem like they go to the parks. I never have a hard time to find a parking space when I want to go backpacking or hiking, even at a popular place like Old Rag. Arches is more like a museum than it is what I think of as a park. There is a road through it, and almost all of the "attractions" are within a couple of hundred yards of that road. And there are people. Lots of them. Most of whom would be naturally selected if they went into a real wilderness. At first the structure and the people really bothered me. What the hell are all these people doing in what should be my backcountry. But then I kind of came to the realization that the infrastructure was really doing a good job to preserve the park, and that without places like that, there are a lot of people who would never see some of the incredible things that you can only see when you haul your duff off the couch and get out of doors. And maybe a few of those people might one day grow up into real outdoorspeople.
We saw a couple of things, then decided that we were hungry and tired. After examining the possibilities for camping in the park (zero) we decided to head into Moab, get a hotel where we could get a good nights sleep, and find some dinner locally. We checked into a decent place then went out for food. Moab is a pretty cool town. There always seems to be something happening there; bike races, or four wheeler races, or rock climbing, something. And they make damn good pizza. After eating our fill, we returned to the hotel, loaded and organized packs, then turned in looking forward to the real start of the trip the next day.
