I could just make out where one of the fawns was hiding, but it was the doe that woke up first. She ambled around a bit and then started feeding up the wash, moving away from me. I got a few photos of her, but nothing great. The first fawn quickly followed her out of sight, but the second fawn moved out of the brush into a clearing in front of me.

In Gaelic they used to call it uisge beatha, and that turned into the Old English word for it, which is usquebaugh. In Latin they called it aqua vitae. In all three languages it means the same thing: Water of Life.

Today we call it whiskey.

This is the final post in a series called Blitzing Arizona, that chronicles a vacation Vicki and I took in the second half of July. We covered central Arizona from top to bottom, landing in Tucson and flying out of Las vegas the following week. The previous posts in the series can be found at the links below.
Part 1: Sabino Canyon
Part 2: Bisbee & Tombstone
Part 3: Archeological Sites
Part 4: Sedona
Part 5: The Craters
Part 6: The Grand Canyon
Part 7: Hoover, Vegas & Home

We left Grand Canyon Village on the morning of July 21st. You head back down towards Flagstaff, hook a right on I-40, over to Kingman, then another right to take you north into Nevada. Ugliest country you’ve ever seen. Trust me, we looked at a lot of desert on this trip, and that part of the world is just desert without any of the redeeming virtues. No dramatic scenery. No beautiful mountains. Nothing but scrub brush, sand, and piles of rocks. You drive through mile after mile of this relentless wasteland, then you go over a hill (the first hill in hundreds of miles) and there’s the Hoover Dam.

I think seeing the canyon at dawn was probably my personal highlight of the entire trip. You stand on the rim with an endless ocean of black beneath you, and an indigo sky slowly lightening overhead. The sun breaks over the far rim, and the next hour you watch as more and more of the canyon is illuminated, more and more of that black sea is dispelled. It’s kind of like a stripper gradually showing off the good parts, only that’s a horrible analogy and I’m a bad person for thinking of it.

So you get there and park, and then you wade through the ticket booths, struggle through successive layers of increasingly obnoxious gift shops, bypass the restaurant and the ice cream stand, fight your way past a dozen pseudo-educational displays and dioramas, resist the temptation to pay even more money to see the 3D Surround Sound METEOR CRATER MOVIE EXPERIENCE, and finally wind your way down the cattle chutes to see that it’s just a big hole in the ground.

I simply don’t have the words to describe these kinds of places. Muir could, but even he had to draw on all sorts of mystical bullshit to pull it off. There are just some places that are so beautiful, so striking, that they touch something inside you. Something that forces you to smile. Something that makes you happy just to know you live in a world where sights like that exist. Glacier National Park, the wildness of the Linville Gorge, dawn in the New River Gorge, walking across the Athabasca Glacier, the night sky over the Mojave, the windward shore of Cozumel. I’m sure that everybody could make a list of places that had that kind of an impact on them.

I tend to think the same thing probably happened at Waputki, Walnut Canyon and Montezuma Castle. “Sure, it’s nice camping under this ledge, but wouldn’t it be better if we had a wall here to block the wind?” A few hundred years of this, and you have what for all practical purposes is a city. Or a castle. No plan. No efficiency, the way we look for it. Just something that grows almost organically over time.

Now, if you’re like me and you’ve never bothered to do much reading about the state of Arizona, then you probably suffer from the same misconception that I used to have. If I thought about it at all, I guess I thought Arizona is really high and mountainous in the north around Flagstaff, and that it gradually kind of slopes downward as you go south, ending in some kind of miserable sea-level arid desert down along the Mexican border.

The profusion of wildlife was pretty amazing. Hawks, doves, woodpeckers, prairie dogs, snakes, jackrabbits, lizards, owls, and desert quail (I loved the quail) were everywhere. I didn’t get nearly as many wildlife photos as I would have liked – desert fauna seems to have an uncanny knack for knowing when I’ve got the wide angle lens mounted, and they never show up when I’ve got the 400mm telephoto ready for them – but just seeing so many of them made it well worth it.