The moon wasn’t full but it was god damned bright when my alarm went off at just after 4 in the morning. A drive to Moab the previous night and a bit south of there towards the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park found us sleeping in our cars on the side of a sandy road. BLM land means you can camp just about anywhere within reason so we drove down the road a ways and then found a nice place to park, rearranged our cars to get them ready for sleeping in and then we each drank a beer and chatted. A bit longer than we probably should have but it was a long weekend and he and I were going separate ways in the morning. We shared a friendly embrace and said our goodbyes at just shy of 1 in the morning under a bright beautiful moon and then crawled into our cars and went to bed. The moon was so bright I thought I’d have trouble sleeping but despite the night light I slept like a log.
So when my alarm blared at a bit after 4 and I looked outside I thought I’d overslept. My goal was Monument Valley by sunrise and I’d be damned if I was gonna miss that but the moon had me fooled a bit, bright as it was. There is something spectacular about the desert under moonlight especially as the sun begins to rise, every time I go I am still awestruck by its subtle beauty.
Two hours was the estimate to get to Monument Valley and sun up was at just after 6 so I rearranged my car a bit hastily and got around, then rolled out at 4:30 a bit behind but energized by the task at hand. As I’ve grown older doing crazy shit like this seems harder to muster the energy for sometimes, especially after only sleeping three hours but I couldn’t listen to that stupid voice in my head this time, I told it to shut the hell up and I rolled on down the road as fast as I could to make the valley by dawn.
Pictures and video don’t really do justice for anything the American Southwest has to offer, you can’t really capture the magnitude of its beauty on an iPhone or even a dslr. You have to go, experience it on your own, I implore you. The breadth of the expanses, the monoliths, those are that which you see in pictures but what you don’t grasp mainly because they occur during the journey to and fro are the colors. I swear there were at least 5 different colored deserts I drove through. Red, orange, brown, white, grey it was as if I had been deposited in some teleportation machine and each bend in the road zapped me to a different far flung world.
I have read about these places all my life, I’ve been infatuated with the southwest long before I ever set foot in it but nothing prepared me for the majesty of everything. The end goal of this trip was the North Rim of the Grand Canyon but that story will come later. This is about the scene wherein I rounded a bend and saw the purple and pink sky behind gigantic monoliths of Navajo Sandstone and shed a few tears as I pulled up to a spot to enjoy the morning. Its beauty overcame me and my eyes moistened.
I sat there and made breakfast on a little camping table, poured a mug of fresh made black gold and took in the view. Coffee never tasted so good.
Wandering Toto
– 2021
The Wandering Toto 