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Being recovered notes and imperfect recollections — better than nothing. |
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SouthWest SwoonPOTS ETC1999SONG LYRICS |
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SOUTHWEST SWOON (1999): we went thru Anza-Borrego again, and thru Yuma AZ and Gila Bend to Organ Pipe Cactus Nat'l Monument and Papago country and Tucson, up Kitt Peak and into San Xavier Del Bac mission, thru Nogales and Bisbee and Chiricahua Nat'l Monument and Silver City NM and Gila Cliff Dwellings Nat'l Monument and Clifton AZ. Oh yeah, and then there was that damn Van Gogh show in Los Angeles. But I forget just what happened and exactly when. We don't even have a gas log for this trip, not that I can find. Whatever. If it ain't written down it never happened, at least not when and how you thought it did. This trip will be tough to document. Somehow we made it back, and sometime I'll maybe find some notes about these and other SouthWest trips, and post them here. Or maybe I'll just make things up. Would I do that?
FEBRUARY 1999 | MARCH 1999
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat | Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 | 1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12 13 | 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 | 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 | 28 29 30 31
Probable Duration: 12 Feb to 14 MarchIt looks like we left Forestville on the Russian River on Friday night (12 Feb) or Saturday morning (13 Feb), a Lincoln's Valentine departure. Our new BikeE semi-recumbent bicycles were strapped on the back, along with our older Trek mountain bikes. We probably drove stolidly down the Central Valley to Tehachapi Pass and Kramer Junction (Four Corners) and over Cajon Pass, to stay with some kinfolk between Riverside and Ontario so we could go into Los Angeles the next morning. LOS ANGELES: Why venture into that noxious land under the smogberry trees? Because we had tickets to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) near the La Brea Tar Pits to spend a day looking at paintings by Vincent Van Gogh (pronounced fon-HOK). Or at least as much of a day as possible. Parking for the RV was burdensome. We put all the bikes inside, guarded by fierce dogs and cat. And then we set forth. Not being utter morons, and realizing that the musuem was shunting viewers through on an hourly basis, we'd bought tickets for the first hour in the morning. 'Twas barely adequate. The crowds were immense, stifling, surging like a sweaty tide. Fock'em — the paintings were sublime. We circled around the display rooms to revisit those glorious canvases as best we could, until we could take the humanity no more. Ah, but much more awaited us at LACMA. I remember Arabic calligraphy and Oriental sculptures and not much else. Too overwhelming. We must return. SOUTHERN DESERTS: We stayed in the then Joshua Tree National Monument for a couple nights in an upper basin at some elevation. We rode our bikes around. We listened to coyotes. All that high-desert stuff. And then down to Anza Borrego Desert State Park, probably to the free high Culp Valley site. Did we stay there long? I don't recall. But we soon headed east.
I know that we were in Joshua Tree CA on 16 Feb and in Gila Bend AZ on 18 Feb. We stopped at a petroglyph site near there and captured images on videotape; I"ll have to unearth and process those. We headed south through the dusty mining town of Ajo (garlic) and toured its vernacular museum, marveling all the old OPCNM is a surreal landscape, the northernmost extension of a unique Lower Sonoran environment found between here and the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). The circum-park road tour crawls over a landscape of strange harsh beauty, especially as semi truck roar by on the national highway just across the border in Mexico. Come here for some spring nights and you'll be mesmerized by the sights, sounds, scents, suggestions. Be sure to study up. MOUNTAINS AND MORE: I know that we were in OPCNM until 20 Feb but I have no firm dates beyond that. So 20 Feb might be the day we left and drove once more through the Tohono O'odham nation to the pinnacle of its holy mountain, Kitt Peak. The steep drive to Kitt Peak Observaory reveals almost two dozen substantial telescopes. If you're a spacehead, this is heaven. The vast terrestrial panoramas ain't bad either. We crawled off the mountain and into nearby Tucson, skipping the wretched Old Tucson theme park and bypassing the university. I'd bicycled sweatily there in 1974 but Tucson has burgeoned since then. We found a nice Injun Stuff shop (now gone) on Swan above River in the foothills, bought a couple of beautiful Mata Oriz pots and proceeded through the wretched Tombstone theme park to Old Bisbee, which was then appealing but not overwhelmingly so. (We've since bought a house there). At the Johnson Gallery on Main Street we bought a small Navaho pot by Nancy Chilly; then we kept going. We soon reached Chiricahua National Monument and stayed a few days. We took a shuttle to the top of the rocks and stomped the trail downhill through fantastic elongated boulders and crevasses. This was once a safe refuge for Cochise and Geronimo and their Apache bands, and it's a helluva place for any infantry to try to secure. INDETEMINATE TRAILS: Now we get to the fuzzy half (or more) of this trip. I know we headed north from Chiricahua to I-10 and rode east to Lordsburg and north to Silver City, then up to Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (GCDNM) and around the loop past City of Rocks State Park (where the wind howled like banshees). GCDNM was quiet and magical and we stayed a couple nights; the rest is a blur. Did we get over to the Rio Grande valley, Santa Fe, the Four Corners? I don't think so; I have a note that says we went through Clifton AZ. I just don't remember. So I might as well be inventive. We took a raw dirt track up into the Southern Rockies, encountered a few southern sasquatches and their pet chupacabras, partied for a week, then dragged ourselves back through Flagstaff and Cedar City and Area 51, where we were abducted (RV, dogs, cat, everything) by aliens who probed and prodded us, then dropped in the hills outside Mendocino. It was too cold to stay there, so we came home. That's my story and I'll stick with it.  Other Pre-2000 Southwest TripsSouthWest Shimmy (1995) - click here:SouthWest Shake (1996) - click here:SkyWatch Spring (1997) - click here: |
