Day 113 - Monday - up and down, up and down

Day 113 - Monday - up and down, up and down

We decide to start with a Hopi breakfast - for us, that is.  The cats prefer their usual raw meat.  Vicky goes for their light breakfast - one egg, bacon and a blue corn fry bread, while I splurge and pay $2 more which gives me 2 of everything except the fry bread (one of those) and a bowl of chile beans.

Fry bread is a delicious specialty of most southwestern Native American tribes.  This is the first time we've had it with blue corn.  The traditional recipe calls for mixing wheat flour, baking powder, a pinch of salt and lukewarm milk or water.   You knead it, divide into balls and then flatten to a half inch thick, all by hand.  Let it rest for a while and then fry in lard, browning on both sides.  I guess the blue corn version mixes ground blue corn with the flour.  Certainly we both found it tasty, but judging from the size of most of the other diners in the restaurant, it's not something you want to eat every day!

Having eaten our fill and discovered that the Hopi museum is closed, we visit a couple of craft stores and some vendors with stalls outside.   Colorful rugs, turquoise laden jewelry and glazed pottery are everywhere, as well as the traditional Hopi Katsina dolls.  The Katsina are carved (from cottonwood) replicas of the spirit messengers.  One vendor tells us the story of each of his wares, but with little spare room in the RV we leave them for him to sell to someone else.

Quill and Cosette are ready to travel (yeah, right!) so we pack up the RV and hit the road.  Today Vicky drives the longer stretch..  First we have to come down from the mesa and then, as we continue to drive across the Hopi lands and eventually into the Navajo lands that surround them, we climb up and down several other mesas (mesae?), marveling at the other worldly rock formations and wondering how the Hopi manage to survive in the beautiful but barren lands.

After 60 miles or so we meet US160 and travel 10 miles to US89.  This, and the rest of today's journey, is a route we've journeyed on before, but never in the RV.  Route 89 eventaully leads to Lake Powell, created by damming the Colorado River, and a very popular boating area for Arizonans.   That part is still on our bucket list, but we discover anew the shifting colors of the mountains - now red, now pink, now orange.  As Vicky puts it: "I love this part of Arizona".  Me too!

Our destination today is Jacob Lake, a small town 45 miles north of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, at the start of the only paved access road to that rim.  To get there we detour on US89A which takes us across sagebrush country and eventually to Lees Ferry, a crossing point on the Colorado River.  It's the only point in more than 260 miles where the river is not hemmed in by steep canyon walls on one or both sides and in 1870 John Doyle Lee started a ferry service to help Mormon pioneers headed for Arizona.

The ferry survived until 1929 when the so-called Navajo ridge was built 4 miles downstream.  The current bridge carries route 89A, and the spot is the paunching point for raft trips through the Grand Canyon.  We don't stop today but continue through many more miles of sagebrush country alongside the Vermilion Cliffs, now a National Monument.  The name says it all.  Especially at sunset, the colors of the cliffs are stunning, with ever-changes hues.  Today it is partly cloudy and the colors are more muted, but it's still spectacular.

The road has been rising slowly all this time since we left Lee's Ferry at 3,110 feet elevation, but in the last 10 miles to Jacob Lake we'll ascend the last 3,000 feet, taking us from the sagebrush desert, first to an area with Juniper and Pinon Pine, and eventually to the Ponderosa Pine forest of the Kaibab (Mountain lying on its side) Plateau.  The highway gets steeper and steeper and finally, when we're only about a mile from Jacob Lake campground at 8,000 feet, the RV decides it has had enough.  It loses steam going uphill, jumps when it tries to change down the gear, and so I stop it - on one lane of a 2 lane road.  We put out cones and direct traffic around it and before long an ADOT van arrives.

The engine is not hot, so none of us can figure out what the problem is.  The ADOT guy suggests vapor lock, and I don't know enough to argue, although when I look it up later it seems that can only happen with an overheated engine, which we didn't have.  However, after about 45 minutes I start the engine, and the RV takes us up the hill to the campground, where we'll spend the next 3 nights.  A mystery, but it seems to be OK!

I check the weather forecast - clear this evening but rain and thunder for the next 2 days, so we unhitch the car and drive down to the North Rim right away, hoping to see wildlife.  We're not disappointed.  3 wild turkeys at the side of the road almost immediately and soon after we enter the National Park a large herd of beefalo.  We heard the story of these on a previous visit.  they're a cross between bison and cattle.  Inside the park they're protected but outside they can be hunted - and they know this so you always see them just inside the park boundary.  Today there are 3 on the road and 30 or more, with babies, at the side.

At the North rim we walk the Bridle Trail and are rewarded by 2 deer - a buck and a doe - close enough to photograph.  I also get some good shots of sunset over the Grand Canyon.  After a good dinner at the Lodge we attend a ranger talk and learn about the history of tourism at the North Rim.  It all started with a man named Wooley who saw the potential.  There were few cars, no gas and no roads, so he build all of the above.  Eventually the Union Pacific railroad, seeing the success of the Santa Fe's El Tovar at the South Rim, built the Grand Canyon Lodge and arranged transportation from the station at Cedar City (which is now a steakhouse!).  The present Lodge is the second - the first, made of wood, burned down in 1932..  The UP built the second one in 1938 and eventually sold it to the National Park Service for next to nothing after passenger train service died in the 1970's.

Another bit of history learned, we drive back in the dark, seeing (and bumping into) no wildlife on the way.