Utah Tour '95

More lolling about looking at the view, followed by a leisurely drive down into the Park and along their scenic drive through the canyons. The mormons who settled here grew a lot of fruit trees - the area where the visitor centre was is called Fruita, which may have said something about their intentions about staying there long term. Fruita is a bit incongruous, sitting like an oasis surrounded by towering red cliffs.

It says in the guide book that they spent a lot of time trying to settle the southwestern corner of the State, but had problems because of the terrain (understatement of the year - they had to negotiate blinkin' big sheer cliff canyons, with large rivers in the bottom of them.) They spent a lot of time trying to set up obscure trails, to difficult to get to places, until they realised it was easier to use the old indian trails. Quick on the uptake, they were.

And the really odd thing is that the road we were about to take has only been there for 20 years or so. It was built in celebration of the bicentenary of the United States. Before that, you couldn't get from the east side of the state to the west without taking a detour of hundreds of miles. For me, this represents a huge contrast to England, who's "new roads" comprise a handful of by-passes.

When travelling in the West, you are constantly aware of a foreshortened and continually evolving history. Whereas in Europe, changes in the landscape have slowed to an imperceptable speed; the Western states are still developing.

But it isn't alarming. The areas are so huge that you can't imagine them ever getting close to being filled. The population will always remain grouped in certain pockets - Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and its surrounding towns...

We took the road to Hanksville, which was a welcome twisty running down a narrow canyon carved out by the river, and then dropped down behind the Henry Mountains. The scenery went from brilliant red, to whites, to yellows and finally to grey mesas that looked suspiciously like slag heaps. The terrain resembled a moonscape at times, with no vegetation at all. At Hanksville we were careful to get lots of petrol, because we'd been told the next petrol stop wasn't until we crossed Lake Powell at Hite, some 60 miles further.

The scenery surprised us again. The earlier cliffs and canyons of Capitol Reef gave way to a flat arid plain, with only the mountains in the distance to give us some idea of how far we'd come. After 40 miles of this, we finally began to drop through the earth's crust again, à la "Journey to the Centre of the Earth". We were nearing Lake Powell, which is the top end of what is effectively an extension of the Grand Canyon, chiselled out of the red rock by the Colorado River. The temperature began to heat up again, and by the time we actually dropped to the river, it was 102°F.

People flock to Lake Powell to spend their holidays bobbing about in the water, which is a sludgey greeny brown colour. The combination of that, the temperature and the almost complete lack of any vegetation didn't exactly endear us to it. But it is an interesting place. Just not my first choice when it comes to picking holiday spots. To give you an idea, they filmed the original Planet of the Apes here.

We got more petrol at Hite marina (as well as refilling six of our nine pints of water and soaking our t-shirts under the tap.). Patrick fed us on Gatorade (what every good small American child drinks). It is one of those isotonic drinks, like Lucozade, and does actually give you a sugar hit, not unlike caffeine. Very useful when you are starting to sag in the heat.

The worst thing about driving bikes in really hot temperatures is that you start to get really dopey. You reach a sort of transcendental state, able to drive, but unable to carry out more than one thought at a time. Any deviation from your train of thought is dutifully carried out, without ever making the jump back to what you were thinking about originally. Complex decision making ("where are we going to stay tonight?") becomes an unendurable chore, and you secretly hope someone else will come along and take charge.

Two days previously, when we first came across pink rock, it was the best thing. But after yet another 60 miles driving next to pinky red cliffs, I decided that they were making me feel queasy and I began to long for white/grey rocks.

We intended to spend the night in Natural Bridges National Monument, but after consulting the guide book, found out that there were only 13 sites at the campsite and the next nearest one is 60 miles away.

I got slightly obsessive at this point (as you do when it is very hot) and even as we were driving down the road into the Park, I was racing to keep ahead of the car behind us, in case he stole the last available plot.

As it turned out (slightly embarrassingly), the campsite was deserted (it being 3pm) and we got to pick whichever site we wanted. We unloaded both bikes, dumping everything unceremoniously on the table and ground, stuck the tent up, shoved the matresses and sleeping bag into it and set off to look at the "natural bridges".

To do so, we broke every rule we ever made about bike riding. Utah has no helmet laws, so we left them sitting on the table, along with all our leathers and boots; and went dressed in our shorts and t-shirts (Patrick took along a pair of gloves. This is his particular bike riding paranoia - you must wear gloves). But the road in the Park is a 10 mile, one-way loop road, so driving 15mph is quite acceptable.

At Natural Bridges you get the feeling you're at the end of the world (it is sort of in the middle of no-where) and we had the place to ourselves. The rock bridges are amazing huge things in a deep white gorge (ingeniously named "White Canyon"). There were also ancient Indian kivas - round house-lets built of stone - stuck on a narrow ledge, 20' above where the river would be if there was one and several hundred feet below the top of the cliff. The signs said they didn't know much about the Indians living in the area as they had left few artefacts.

Seems a bit sad, really. The only chance the Americans had of having something really old, and Anasazi Indians forgot to leave them any souvenirs.

There were signs up, suggesting that people not stand on the top of the cliffs in a thunderstorm, because in 1992, 8 people had been struck by lightning in the Park. This seemed a bit incongruous, hey, this the desert, right? And it never rains in the desert... Famous last words.

Around 7pm, as we were leaving the final bridge - 180' (55m) across and 106' (32m) high (having climbed down underneath it) - it began to pour with rain, with heavy, fat raindrops that felt like hailstones when they landed on us.

To quote the Natural Bridges pamphlet: "Precipitation is infrequent, unpredictable, and at times dramatic"

I think I'd put this in the dramatic category.

It was all very exciting, until we remembered we'd left everything out on the table and the tent open... It's a bit disheartening to realise that every single thing you own is abosolutely soaked. It was complete shambles. Bags of soggy clothes, boots full of water, wet books... The tent had all but collapsed and there was a puddle in the bed.

We hung everthing in the juniper bushes around the camp and made washing lines of bungees between the pinyon pines. I supressed the panicky feeling resulting from 28 years of camping in Europe, that everything was going to be soaked for the rest of the holiday, and we were going to spend a damp night sleeping in soggy bedclothes.

My stack of "damp stuff" was a stack of "dry stuff" in the morning. I still can't get over that. Everything was supposed to be soggy and stay that way, but instead it was completely dry within 12 hours of the event. But, bearing in mind it was already 85°F (30°C) when I got up at 8am, I suppose this is hardly a revelation.

At this point, we reached a dilemma. We'd been recommended "Moki Dugway" which was due south of us.

The previous day, a guy came up to me in the campsite and asked if we'd come up that way. He said that his wife had driven up it, and had been very nervous. We'd also been sent information from Lissa Shoun who travelled north on the road:

"After about 10 miles of nicely paved 2-lane road, you come to the base of a mesa. I kept wondering whether the road would go east or west to go around but it goes right up. About 3 miles, I think, of gravel. It was lightly washboarded and required a very low speed to be comfortable. We were travelling on an EX-250 and EX-500 and I had no previous experience with dirt or gravel roads. Probably not such a big deal for me now. Stopped a couple of times on the way up to let the engines cool in the shade of the cliff. It's big, long switchbacks cut into the side of the mesa. A few cars passed on the way down. Got to the top and found tour buses, and a parking lot for cars that weren't about to attempt the road! They just drove out there to look over the edge and then drive back north. I do recommend this going north (up) because it would be much more tiring to ride down the road. "

It didn't sound impossible, but we weren't quite sure. After the Brian Head episode I was more nervous than usual of gravel roads. The main problem was that we'd already done 60 miles on the tank of petrol on the CB-1. If we went south, we could get petrol in Mexican Hat. But if we went the 30 miles south and found we couldn't get down, I wouldn't have enough petrol left to get back north again and to the next petrol stop in Blanding.

We consulted the Park Ranger, who told us an alarming tale of getting stuck in neutral in his pickup and screaming down the grade with no engine braking. He strongly advised us against attempting it on bikes.

As I said before, complex thought processes aren't a strong point when you're hot, so I was quite amazed that we came up with a good compromise. We packed everything up, left it sitting in the campsite (if people are really that desperate to steal our dirty laundry, then they are sad enough to be welcome to it)(actually, out there the only sort of people you seem to come across are good, well-brought up, clean cut outdoorsy types, who don't tend to go round stealing people's stuff) and both of us hopped on the copiously petrol-tanked f2 and went down to look at Moki Dugway.

There you are, driving along a flat plain, looking at the sagebrush and not much else, when suddenly you drop off the edge of the world. Well, you would if you didn't stop.

Patrick cleverly disguising the fact that he is dying of heatstroke, while sitting at the top of the 1100' (335m) Moki Dugway cliff, with Monument Valley in the background

We did (stop), and took a side turning to somewhere marked on the map as "Muley Point Overlook". If it's on the map, it must be good. Trouble was, I couldn't remember how far Muley Point was supposed to be. The "road" wasn't so bad, it was the soft sand covering it that caused the problems, and we were two-up on the f2 , as I said before, complete with expensive plastic bodywork. After a mile of driving, Patrick started to ask difficult questions, such as: "How far is this overlook?". Each time we came over a rise, I'd hope fervently that we were there. But we never were. The sand track was four miles long. But it was well worth it.

It ended at a deserted rocky plateau at the top of a 1000' (300m) cliff, which looked out over the goosenecks of the San Juan River, across into Arizona to Monument Valley 30 miles distant. The immensity of it all was hard to take in.

We sat on top of the cliff for a long while, until we reluctantly realised it was getting late and we should get on. But it was the highlight of the trip.

Back the four miles along the sand track and over to look at Moki Dugway. We drove the first 200m down the gravel grade and decided, rather sadly, that we could have managed it fairly easily. Compared to Brian Head, it was luxury. But the view was, again, amazing, with striped cliffs and tortured lumps of rock in strange formations. Good stuff. This is what we'd come to Utah to see and it lived up to and beyond our expectations.

But it was also over 100°Fs (38°C).

In these temperatures, dressed in full leathers you start feeling like a shark - you have to keep moving in order to breathe. So we zoomed back to the campsite, grabbed our stuff, booked ourselves a motel room in Moab over the phone and "got on with it"...

...until we had to stop again ten miles up the road, when we saw a sign for more Indian buildings. This little cluster even had the remains of a two-storey tower, as well as the standard ceremonial pit and tunnels leading from it to the tower.

All that stuff about Indians living in teepees is crap.

My intercomm copped out 20 miles later, so we were reduced to driving in silence (having worried about the fact that they'd been sitting out in the pouring rain the previous evening, it turned out that the battery pack on it had somehow disconnected itself, and taking it out and putting it back in again (in highly technical fashion) sorted the problem out). So we drove in silence at 80 mph, through Blanding, through Monticello, until we reached the Newspaper Rock turnoff at the Tea Cosy Mesa (which was infact misnamed the "Cathedral Mesa").

After 5 minutes Patrick asked me what I thought dinosaur footprints actually looked like. "I dunno. Like very large chicken footprints?" A further 15 minutes of aimless stumbling about revealed nothing that even remotely resembled a chicken footprint and we concluded that they had been hidden under the red silt that had been washed down across the dry bed, and sadly made our way back to the bikes.

My trip was ruined. The only chance to see dinosaur footprints and we were too stupid to identify them.

We got into Moab around 8pm, just as the sun was setting behind the red cliffs. Having had a rest from "pink rocks" for a while, I was able to palate the fact that Moab sits in a deep valley of red cliffs and is surrounded by red slickrock.

The Inca Inn was a wondrous place (particularly after camping for the previous three nights, and in view of the fact that it was still, even at that time of night, around 90°F (32°C)). It had a pool and airconditioning.

We feasted Mexican style at the Poplar Place - an old (as far as I can remember, built in the late 1800's) adobe building that used to be the local dry goods store. When it burnt down more recently, the owners completely remodelled the interior using local craftsmen and plenty of wood, and turned it into what it is today, a "pub and eatery". It was very good.

We were obviously tireder than I realised - I was beginning to develop the "Lucy Patented Tired and Stress Indicator" - heat rash on the inside of my elbows. That's nothing, you might say, but one holiday this sort of manifestation got completely out of control, and I turned, quite literally, into a pumpkin and had to stay in hospital for three days. So it was a good time to stop, rest and lie in bed all night with icepacks glued to your forearms.

We spent most of the day lolling in front of the airconditioning. Finally, around 4pm (probably the hottest part of the day) we were overcome by guilt and got on the CB-1 and went scouting for campsites.

The two choices apparently open to us were:

• the campsite just to the north of town, with "shade trees" like twigs and offering about as much shade as a washing line
• the scattering of campsites thoughtfully provided by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) on the bank of the Colorado River,

The Colorado River got our vote, except for one small problem. It was 105°F (41°C).

We went and sat fully-clothed in the river for a couple of minutes to aid in the thought process and stop my arms itching. Then scrapped the camping plan and retired back to the airconditioned motel room, and booked ourselves in for another couple of nights.