High Speed Colorado Here We Are

Our trip started grimly with a middle of the night phone call from Dinah saying Tia, her horse, was colicing up at Davis, and might need surgery. Fortunately that didn't happen, but she's only leaving the Davis hospital today with a $3000 vet bill.

We had been planning on blasting up to Colorado in a day, but that slowed things down. We decided to take the Southern route, which we don't usually do, and spent the night in Monument Valley, at Goulding's Lodge, where Jon shot Searchers 2.0 last year.



Monument Valley is incredibly red and beautiful-- we took a tour through it the next day.




I had to have my picture taken here, since it's part of the Searchers 2.0 website. It was so odd to see all the locations after having seen them in the stills and the movie.




The sky was stormy and the earth so very red. Monument Valley is part of the Navajo Nation, and doesn't have all those stupid signs that you see in National Parks.

I was going to take a picture of Jon at John Ford's Point. He told me to get out and give some dog biscuits to dogs lingering around the spot. They were so keen to get more that I had to run to get back in the car. Then Molly started throwing herself at the window. The dogs were jumpint at the window. We tried to drive away and they were surrounding our car, leaping up. We got to a straight drive and put some speed on. They were still hot on our trail, leaping at the window. We put more speed on and they left us, in a cloud of red dust.

Later, as we finished the loop, we saw them lying in the parking lot where we'd first met up, and drove fast in case they recognized the dog biscuit vehicle.



We passed this motel relic in La Sal Utah. Someone went to the New York World's Fair in 64 and had to have a piece of it in Utah.



and we took a drive through Paradox, Utah, which we'd always driven by before. You reach Paradox out of La Sal coming down a plunging switchback two laner. The mysterious sign "Paradox 1 mile" is posted just as you reach the valley, where everything is suddenly lush and green. We drove in to this mysterious town. Passed a pheasant walking along the road. Everything in the small town looked clean and well kept, small neat houses with big gardens, no people seen at all. There was a post office and a school and two churches, one Mormon, the other unidentified. There were some weird farm industrial buildings that were abandoned, on the edge of town. One looked like a giant iron tea pot. There was not a single commercial building in Paradox, and it's at least fifty miles from any other town!

There's a well known cattle rancher in town, Redd Ranches, but the link doesn't give you a feeling for the mystery of the town. In the window of the building below there were giant cactuses. At the other end of the long valley is Bedrock, where a scene from Thelma and Louise was shot.


Paradox was lovely.



This morning the Wild Blue man came by on time and set us up. wondrous, after all these years.