Las Vegas and into Arizona

I imagine that many people who have never been to Las Vegas just think of it as ‘The Strip’ and the neon but of course there has to be a whole city infrastructure to support the workers and their families and the workers who support them and so on, which is why the population is about two-thirds of a million.  Flying in over the desert that appears to be Utah there’s the sudden appearance of Lake Mead which is all Colorado River water held back by the Hoover Dam.  To give you an indication of size, the lake is said to have a shoreline of over 700 miles and without that lake there would be no Las Vegas.  I doubt that it would take long to shrivel up in the desert heat.

Las Vegas is everything you might imagine, garish, gaudy, wildly over the top and heaps of really bad taste.  It also has many tremendously impressive pieces of free outdoor entertainment from the Hotel Bellagio’s spectacular dancing fountain show every 15 to 30 minutes to the Mirage’s ‘volcano’ going up every hour through the evening until midnight.  I won’t write a travelogue that any of you could find easily on the net but I’ll mention a few of the most impressive sights.  One whole block looking like the New York skyline, including the Statue of Liberty and a roller coaster.  There’s the Venetian Hotel with a Doge’s Palace, Bridge of Sighs and gondolas.  The Luxor with a huge black pyramid and Sphinx and then there’s The Eiffel Tower and Caesar’s Palace.  That’s enough I think, but I’ll add for anyone who doesn’t know that these are not models but full size structures.  The whole place is rather wonderful in its awfulness, it doesn’t pretend to be what it isn’t and I liked it.  To my great disappointment though, we were a day too late for the Gay Pride march which in Las Vegas style must have been quite something.  Everywhere here has one-armed bandits, even in the arrivals hall at the airport and the whole place is designed to part visitors from their money.  City motto “Your dollar is our dollar” perhaps?  The gamblers must know that the house always wins in the end so I suppose the rather dangerous mindset must be something like, I’m gonna win but all these other suckers round the table are losers.  The sleazier side isn’t all tucked away either, people on the street hand out cards and vehicles drive around, both with “Girls delivered to your door in 20 minutes” written on them.  I daresay if you called up and then asked the girl to do a bit of light dusting and to run the vacuum cleaner round, you’d find that it wasn’t in the job description.  Unless of course those are euphemisms which are not in common usage in Milton Abbas.

Our vague plan was to have a couple of days in Las Vegas and then head south east through Arizona and New Mexico, then back to Las Vegas where we were to meet up with our Massachusetts friends Bonnie and Newt before heading into Utah.  Unfortunately, health issues have forced them to stay at home and our plan has become even vaguer because we’re not meeting up with anyone else.  Actually we’ll head northwards into Utah from New Mexico.  At least that’s what we might do.

Only 30 miles or so in a vaguely south-easterly direction from Las Vegas is Boulder City, built to house workers for the Hoover Dam in the 1930’s and apparently still the only sizable town in Nevada without a casino.  It would have distracted the workers.  It is a delightful little place (for a day or so) and we stayed in the National Monument Historic central hotel, built as long ago as 1933.  Unusually for the time all the rooms were built with en-suites and our room had original 1930’s furniture according to the notice outside the room.  That’s a good thing in case you think a little sarcasm had crept in there.  The hotel even had a very impressive Hoover Dam museum, 20 minute video of the construction, artefacts and personal stories.  $2 entrance but free to hotel guests.  The video/film was narrated in the classic, somewhat dramatic delivery that is typical of the American documentaries of the time, and for those of you who know the Peter Sellers piece, I half expected to hear “Bal-ham, gateway to the south”.  We had chosen this part of the states in mid September because according to the guidebooks it was starting to cool down.  When we arrived in town at 5.00pm, it was 98F.

The dam itself is extremely impressive, straddling a narrowing of the Colorado canyon with the waters of Lake Mead piled up behind it and appearing to be 100 feet or so below the full up line showing like a tidemark on the canyon walls.  For me, it was more impressive to have learned about the construction, the sizes, the quantities of material involved and the techniques that had to be used.  As an engineering project in the 1930’s with no computing power to hand the slide rules must have been running red-hot and the dam was completed under budget and two and a half years early.  What I haven’t found out and would love to know is how long it took to fill up.  The river can’t have been dammed completely or all the farmland and river life downstream would have been destroyed so the flow must have continued at a regulated pace.  I suppose it was a bit like trying to fill a bath with the plug out.. 

After driving past the dam, we cover miles of bleak, parched and savage looking countryside, so dry that we didn’t even go through any of those ‘blink and you’ve missed it’ towns.  Today the thermometer in the car registered 100F and we end it back on Route 66, part of which we were on in California last year.   At Williams, gateway to the Grand Canyon South Rim, Route 66 is an industry.  Actually, Route 66 is an industry everywhere around here.  In Williams main street, naturally enough on the route itself, there are three businesses adjacent to each other, all with Route 66 in their name.  Shops are full of Route 66 signs and brand new ‘memorabilia’.  Cafes and restaurants have Route 66 in their name and driving the route is considered to be a trip in itself.  The speed limit on a lot of it is 65mph and I am genuinely surprised that it hasn’t been made 66mph.     

Having heard about the crowds at the Grand Canyon South Rim, we were thinking we’d only go to the considerably more isolated North Rim.  As it turns out, this would have been a huge mistake.  We had a 60 mile drive from Williams and arrived at the canyon by 7.30 am to find it almost deserted.  Then we walked over to the rim.  Wow ! wow ! and thrice wow ! is the most restrained way I can put it because it is bigger and more spectacular than the impression given by any film or photograph I have ever seen.  It is truly jaw dropping in its immensity.  Where we stood it was about ten miles wide and three vertical miles below us, mostly unseen was the River Colorado, flowing at about the same altitude as the top of Snowden.  That’s the mountain in North Wales not the Lord.  The canyon is 277 miles long but how big it is near the ends I just don’t know.  At 7.30 the sun was still low and at over 7,000 ft it was pretty cool.  Colours and shadows changed by the minute, the shape of the topography is literally high lighted by the low rays of the sun coming from our right and as it warmed us the air was full of the scent of pine resin as the trees also warmed in the early sun.  We just strolled westwards being more and more impressed, breakfasting at about 9.00 on what was going to be our picnic lunch.  Big birds were now using the thermals, gliding effortlessly back and forth.  Full marks to The National Park Service which has done a really good job here, the area is planted with local vegetation so it looks completely in keeping, the paths are well maintained and there are three free shuttle routes so you don’t have to walk the full 12 miles or so that is available at this point along the rim.  Very handy when the sun is scorching and temperatures are in the high 80’s.

By about 3.00pm we felt we had had a full enough day but felt compelled to make a second day of it, getting up at 4.15 the following morning to be back at the rim by dawn.  Nothing but more views but I could sit and look at this for an awful long time.  Something we’ve found at other National Park sites in the States is that as a captive audience, we’re not fleeced by high prices so that when we had breakfast in a lodge within a stones throw of the edge (not recommended) we had a cooked breakfast each with coffee for a total of about £11.  We did do a short walk of a couple of miles down into the canyon but certainly not down to the river and back.  There are notices in a number of places warning not to try it in a day.  Remember this is five thousand or so feet of descent and ascent at altitude in dangerously hot conditions.  One notice rather brutally had a photo of a 26 year old girl receiving medical attention after she had collapsed from heat exhaustion.  She died.  At another viewpoint, there was a don’t litter notice saying that a Californian Condor (a very rare and enormous vulture) had ‘euthanised after ingesting a coin’ which strikes me as a ridiculous, inaccurate and cumbersomely ugly way of using a fine language.

With all the travelling we’ve done and all the sights, both natural and man-made that I’ve seen, The Grand Canyon is number one on the list, if there was a list.  If this canyon was discovered now it certainly wouldn’t have such a mild moniker as ‘Grand’.