Climb and descent. (As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words... and I have no pictures for this one. As they also say, do the math.)

Bright and early the next day, we packed up the expedition vehicle for the day-long drive to that wicked, sinful place, Las Vegas. It still strikes me as a novel thing that Vegas is as close as it is to southern Utah – I'd always had a disconnect in my mental map of the southwest, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico were all clearly contiguous and interconnected, but Nevada was off somewhere else. And California – well, that might as well be on some other continent from the Four Corners region. But no, the map did not lie -- it really is possible to get there (Vegas) from here (Utah).

So we head up into the Wasatch Plateau, past the rest area just west of the Rte. 10 junction. (Little did we know it, but this would be the last normal rest area we were to see for hundreds of miles.) Up past the Cretaceous coal beds that are the basis of much of what economy there is in east-central Utah, over the 7900 feet of Emigrant Pass, up and down into the valley of the Sevier River, with the brilliant red sediments of the Pavant Range to the west. Now south, with the unexpectedly high (12,000+ ft.) Tushar Mountains, remnants of relatively recent volcanic activity, sticking up above treeline on the southern horizon.

West and up again over the southern end of the Pavants. I-70 finally drops down for good, dead-ending into I-15 right in front of a prominent cinder cone, the most obvious bit of volcanism remaining. From here, we head south, through a series of densely agricultural valleys, the hills and low mountains to the west screening the view of the Escalante Desert, the first taste of the Basin and Range province. To the east, the land rises sharply along the Hurricane Cliffs, jumping up 3000 feet to the highlands of the Tushars, Kolob Terrace (from which Zion Canyon is cut), and finally the Markagunt and Paunsagunt Plateaus. The cliffs are the surface manifestation of the Hurricane Fault, an active hinge in the earth's crust; east of the fault, the crust is pushed upwards in layers of plateaus; west of the fault, the crust is dropping down and being stretched thin in the distinctive landforms of the Basin and Range.

Continuing south, past Cedar City; I recall seeing Coriolanus here, thirty-three years ago (thirty-three years!) in Southern Utah State College's replica of the Globe theatre.

Previously, it was as far south as I'd ever gone on this road, but now we drove on, and quickly started to lose altitude. We dropped down about 2000 feet to St. George, the "Mormon Las Vegas" (because of the climate, not gambling). By this time, we're low enough that the local climate is very dry; higher up, we could expect to see conifers, at least, but now we're surrounded by desert scrub and rock. The road finds the Virgin River and follows it westward. Soon, we discover we've wandered into Arizona. Hey, another state to add to the trip! The Virgin cuts a spectacular canyon through the rocks as it drops off of the last remnants of the Colorado Plateau onto the low deserts of the Basin and Range (sorry, no pictures).

The river canyon dumps us out onto a low alluvial plain, covered by sparse brush and the occasional joshua tree. We cross the state line into Nevada, and are immediately confronted with Mesquite, a sort of mini-Vegas for those Utahns to impatient or uninterested to travel the full distance. In the distance are rugged black mountains that look like the refuse from a blast furnace. Slowly, the road drops, then rises again as it mounts the alluvial skirt surrounding the blasted mountains. Eventually, we reach the summit, where the road crosses over the highest point of the pile of eroded debris, and then down the other side, where another range of bleak rugged mountains is silhouetted against the horizon. We drop until we reach the limit of this range's erosion deposits, then rise again as we climb the debris of the next range to the west.

By now, it is late afternoon, and quite hot. Part of the thrill of the trip is watching the car's temperature gauge climb, slowly, to regions it has never before reached. As we climb the alluvial fans, the gauge rises. As we descend the far sides, the gauge falls. The road is busy, but the landscape is empty – except for the city rising out of the plain to the south.

[All trip entries]

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Posted by David Fleck at 23 October 2006 07:41 AM