Day 28 - Page, AZ to Lee Vining, CA

Another early morning, another day of many miles. After our debacle the previous day, we woke up early to make sure we would get to the eastern edge of California with enough day left to cook the rib-eye steaks we had hoped to have the night before. Today's drive would take us through some desolate lands. Here was the route:


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Page, AZ is directly adjacent to Glen Canyon Dam, which we crossed shortly after dawn. The pics are a little fuzzy because of the low light, but hopefully you can get a sense of the enormity of the dam and the brilliance of the surrounding rock.


After crossing the dam, we headed north back into Utah with Zion in our sights. Zion National Park, that is. Like everything else on the trip, it is spectacularly beautiful. The road enters the canyon from the east and slowly descends into the enormous gash in the ground. Some first formations you see have odd horizontal and vertical lines on them. Turns out that the horizontal lines are the result of the hardening into rock of sand dunes--the dunes hardened into stone while the winds continued to push the sand around, creating alternating and inconsistent layers. The vertical lines are then caused by fractures in the resulting stone along weaknesses in the rock.

From there, the road enters a ridiculous tunnel, which we discovered after emerging from it that it seems to follow the contours of the cliff face. That is to say the tunnel curves with the cliff mere feet behind its edge. Below you can see one of the holes in the cliff face used to access the tunnel during its boring out.

From there, the road enters the main canyon at Zion. Stunning.









After Zion, we ate at a greasy spoon in Cedar City, UT and pointed the truck west into Nevada. We hit some of the hottest temperatures of the trip in Navada, with the highest being near the aptly named town of Caliente: 104 degrees.

Northwest of Caliente, we joined Nevada State Highway 375, aka the Extraterrestrial Highway. It is so named because it passes by Area 51.

Driving across Nevada basically looks like this, over and over again. Mountains, alluvial fan, mountains, alluvial fan, mountains, alluvial fan, etc, etc, etc, for 300 miles.

However, the drive does occasionally present a welcome gem. This was in Rachel, NV.

After many hot miles across, Nevada, we finally spied the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada. California--and hopefully cooler temperatures--was not far. From the east, the Sierra are distinguishable from the mountains throughout Nevada because they present a seemingly impenetrable blockade, a several hundred mile long wall of mountains, whereas the mountains in Nevada tend to come in clusters of maybe a couple dozen miles in length.

We found a nice campsite in Lee Vining, CA, where we promptly got our steaks over an open flame. Delicious. Tomorrow the plan is Yosemite and into the Bay Area.