Travels with Boyd and Susan Our trek to Belize --- 2002 part two: The Great Southwest (click here to return to part one)

A note from the genius:

     Okay --- you are not going to believe this. Susan, the whiz kid, made a big digital mistake (I told you you wouldn't believe this)! In downloading images taken between Seattle and Salt Lake City, I accidentally wiped out my whole chip. So all those pictures are totally lost. But never fear! I shall describe all! Be prepared to be bored - S.

   An odometer check showed that we put 2543 miles under our belts in getting to Seattle and that it took 7 days. Not too bad when you consider that we were two old fogies driving with a trailer behind us. While in Seattle we unhooked the trailer and got an oil change and an engine check. We also got the hot water heater in the trailer fixed. It had stopped working somewhere at the very beginning of the trip and we were getting pretty tired of cold showers!
   On Saturday September 28th, we were back on the road and on our merry way, driving south to Oregon and then east into Idaho and Utah. All along the way I took a lot of pictures (now gone) of the degradation of the mountains in Oregon and Idaho. It is amazing what they have destroyed through logging. In the high dessert areas to the east, they have taken out all the dessert environment to make way for grazing lands. And the deforestation has caused so much drought that it's pretty much useless even as grazing land. In many areas, you could see where sheep grazing had pretty much denuded everything. I imagine the only reason the earth hasn't all washed away is because they don't get much rain any more. There was plenty of dust though and high winds at times, but our trusty Dakota just plunged on into the dust clouds towing our little house behind. A very stark environment. Sometimes I felt like we were on the moon or maybe Mars.
   As we neared Utah, we started to get into serious pollution. It has become very industrial there since Boyd moved away in 1960. When I go into such areas in the US I always wonder why people care so little about their health and the health of their children that they allow such dirty industries in their states. You could see that they had a booming economy, yet they must have an amazing rate of infant deaths, asthma, leukemia and other pollution based diseases. How very sad. That is just too high a price to pay for financial security. The whole time I was in the Salt Lake City area my eyes watered and smarted.

    And now for the really boring part for all of you non-family members: Family Photos! Boyd has a large family living in the Salt Lake City area and he was able to get in touch with most of them and they come over to visit us. We laid over an extra day in a camper park there and had company all day. It turned into a great reunion and we really enjoyed seeing everyone after more than a 20 year absence. Of course, no one looked even one day older!
    Boyd has a really great bunch of brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces nephews, and cousins. We hope each and every one of them will one day come to see us down here in paradise.

Genetics at work . Three brothers out of 5!

sister-in-law Arda, niece Sandy, and brother Dean

The next gen - grand niece and nephew Melody and Christopher. 

    After a very pleasant stay we were back on the road again heading southwest towards Nevada and Arizona. We finally got out of the pollution of northern Utah and into some amazing sites. Southern Utah is really breathtaking. The rock formations are indescribable.

    As we headed on toward Las Vegas we got back into some pollution, but from cars this time rather than industry. We didn't stop in at the gambling Mecca, but took the bypass. It looked to be quite a large city and not the place for a couple of bumpkins from Alaska.

    In Nevada, we began to get into some very serious desert indeed, although it was not very hot while we were there. Every place we went as we traveled south was having "unusually cool" weather. It was as if we were dragging the cold from Alaska right along with us. Even in Arizona, while camped near Phoenix, the temperatures dipped into the upper 30's and that night Flagstaff was reported to have snow.
    On the border between Nevada and Arizona, we came to the Hoover Dam. I was amazed at the level of security at the damn. All vehicles were stopped and the drivers and passengers were interviewed. You had to park your car in very specific areas. Many vehicles were inspected. They went into our camper and looked it over. I am assuming all of this has been since 911. I could only take a picture of the lake side of the damn because there was no place to stop on the face side of the dam without getting in trouble with the law.

    Arizona and New Mexico were way too dry, for a gal from the eastern seaboard who has lived in the rainforests of Alaska for 34 years, but those states are very beautiful. Every picture that we took looks like a postcard. I could not get over the saguaro cactus. No matter how many pictures you see of them, you just can't believe it when you see them first hand. And they hold still when you take their pictures!
    The next few pictures are from those two states. I no longer remember exactly where they are, but I sure loved all the contrasts of rock, dessert plants, and the occasionally flowered wet area. Very beautiful indeed. And it looks like the highway departments are doing everything they can to preserve the plants along the right of way, even to watering them with huge barrels!

     Somewhere in New Mexico, about 150 miles or so from El Paso Texas, we spent the night. It had been a very clear day with a cloudless desert sky. As the sun was setting, a very orange haze began to glow in the horizon to the southwest with a very even pink layer above. In a wetter climate I would have thought it humidity in the air, but there was none around this place. The sky remained cloudless. Later that night, toward that section of the sky, for some reason the stars were faded.
     It wasn't until the next day as we began driving toward El Paso that we realized what was wrong with the sky. It was pollution on a massive scale. The closer we got to El Paso, the thicker the pollution got until by the time we reached the city you could not see very far ahead on the road. We locked all of the vents and put on the AC but still it seeped into the car smelling of a mixture of chemicals and sewage. The picture below is a lot more clear than the sky actually was. My digital camera has auto-settings that seem to cut through haze, so it was hard to get a photo of how it really was. None that I took show the actual pea soup that we were driving through.
     The city bypass for El Paso, like many cities, goes right through the heart of town. We saw factory after factory with dripping dirty stacks puffing away. They are not just on the edge of town either. Right in the city center we saw heavy industry. And the air was so bad that it coated everything in a red brown cloak. Even the lines dividing the driving lanes were hard to see because they were covered in the same brown and so was the tarmac. We coughed and choked all the way through that town.
     I have traveled in many third world and developing countries. Many have serious problems with pollution in trying to balance emergence from poverty with the environment, but I have never seen anything like this abuse anywhere. The city of El Paso has given up, it would appear. How this could happen in the United States is beyond me.
     As we drove across West Texas we found more and more evidence of this "I-don't-care" attitude. Miles and miles of land had been dug up and just abandoned when it played out, left to blow in the hot wind until nothing, no even a tumbleweed, could grow on it. The Rio Grande River, which enters Texas looking none too clean to begin with, leaves El Paso looking and smelling like a septic sludge pond. It took over 100 miles for us to get out of the really bad pollution, but everywhere in Texas that we went, we saw a cavalier attitude toward the environment. Even on the Gulf Coast.

     Nothing is ever all bad, however, and somewhere about a day out from McAllen, we found a little town on a creek which was almost dry from the dry season.
     It was just a sleepy little south Texas Village really, but it had a KOA camp right on the creek and the camp was filled with beautiful old pecan trees. We were directed to park under what looked like the biggest and oldest tree. It's lower limbs were so huge and heavy that they had shored it with a timbers. It made us feel good to think that in the midst of such careless destruction of the environment, someone cared enough about a grand old tree to help it along a bit.
     We got into McAllen Texas on October 5th. Day 22 of our travels. We unhooked the camper and once again got an oil change. Odometer reading was 5403 miles so far.

On to Page 3 -- Mexico and Beyond!

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