The Road to Marble Canyon

For a variety of reasons, I decided to skip Zion National Park.  Having spent the previous day at Bryce Canyon, with the sunburn to prove it, I didn’t necessarily need another symphony in stone, no matter how famous.  “Zion is better!” the hotel concierge assured me.  But it also turns out that you can’t even drive the best part: for traffic control reasons you must park and take a shuttle.  Add in a look at the map, which showed it a good lateral stretch off my route, and I threw in my lot with movement, 89A South past Marble Canyon and the Vermilion Cliffs, and the free natural beauty to all sides as I went.

I stopped at a strange roadside attraction called the Moqui Cave, which is a combination trinket shop, stoneware gallery, and museum of ancient artifacts—all in a cave.  It was run by a pair of elegant middle-aged women who collected your five dollars at the cavern mouth, lifted the rope to let you in, and showed you the old black-and-white photos of children at the raw cave mouth in 1951 before admitting (“Tell them!”  “I was about to!”) that one of the children was the guide herself.  Past the baskets of polished stone art pieces and racks of Southwest guidebooks the cave extended into darkness and weirdness: we had the black light junk sculpture, the room of luminescent minerals, and finally a room with glass cases holding arrowheads, ancient Indian pottery, Mayan and Olmec clay figures, and rocks bearing dinosaur tracks.

Two of the figures were labeled as being from the Teotihuacan site in Mexico.  If I get there I’ll tell the others how far their kin have gotten.

89A, a smooth two-lane blacktop, perfect for top-down driving, first wound through a high-altitude pass, with occasional views over the mighty valley below under the brow of a long brick-ruddy butte.

After a steep, fun descent we entered the valley and ran parallel to the base of the butte, whose gigantic red scree sent its debris of boulders almost to the road itself.  Looking at scree, it’s hard to believe that it’s NOT in motion, it so resembles a snapshot of ongoing flow, and driving under it was oddly nerve-wracking.  Some of the boulders, indeed, seemed to have come to rest impossibly upon their tiniest point, such that only a breath of wind would set them tumbling again; however, on this 90-degree day it was possible to believe there had never been one. 

We then crossed the Colorado on Navaho Bridge at Marble Canyon, which is actually a double bridge, one for cars and one for foot traffic.  The scale of the gorge rather defeated my camera—I would have needed a much wider lens to do it justice—and something about it defeated me too.  The day was scorching hot, and although I was drinking plenty of water, driving with the top-down was taking its toll.  The gorge with its masses of sunbaked bare rock, nursing a radium green trickle of a river, seemed too close to lifeless. 

I wasn’t missing Zion National Park.  I was sorry to have missed Horseshoe Bend, for which I would have had to take the main highway through Page.  But I gave scenic 89A a nod of respect as a hard and humbling road for a little convertible to endure, and was glad to rejoin the main highway, put the top up, and turn on the AC.  In that mode I crossed into Arizona. 

And a little over an hour later I was recovering with a coffee at an eclectic little coffehouse called The Rendezvous in downtown Flagstaff, with loud rock music and fast Internet.  My sojourn in the wilds was over, for the moment.