This guest post is by Tyler Williams, a local writer, photographer and adventurer with several published works under his belt. Check out more of Williams’ work at www.funhogpress.com.
Cresting the pass, we squinted, eyes searching for the blue dome of Navajo Mountain. That unmistakable hump hovering beyond the vastness provides me with predictable elation every time I spot it. Looking for the distant mountain is now unconscious habit, like a basketball player methodically running through his free-throw routine. I looked up, but the mountain was not there. Obscured by an atmospheric brew of smoke and dust and coal schmutz, the mountain laid fallow, along with the normally vibrant striations of the Painted Desert and Echo Cliffs, emasculated and hidden beneath an oppressive pall. Late June, and still the wind blew. Time to bail.
The nomad gene is inherent to Flagstaffians. Many of us landed here due to a breakdown or a snowstorm forcing us to halt, if only for a day or two. That day turned into a week, a season and for some of us, a lifetime. Yet as comfortable as this long-term stopover we call home might be, longing for the next best place is a nagging condition that comes with the territory. Why not go somewhere with bigger mountains, more water, better jobs? The call to greener pastures is sometimes heeded, but the dispersers often come rambling back, repelled by a too-long winter or an overwrought social scene or maybe they, we, are simply drawn back to the mountain that straddles deserts. Flag talons hook deep.
Yet I am a firm believer in absence growing the heart fonder, so we sailed into the dust storm, comfortable within our motor capsule, escaping the wind and familiar waterless scenes of home. Within a day, we reached a land where the water ran cold and the color green was no longer novelty. Our Southwestern surroundings were supplanted by steep endless mountains crowded with timber, clear tumbling brooks hiding in each dank draw. We drove past jagged peaks draped with snow, and rode that melting snow on the back of the restless surging Salmon River—undammed and true. Bears rambled. Eagles soared. Idaho became our world.
And we could have stayed, adopted the pulse of the place and run with the tide of summer. Life is good as a gypsy. Why not keep on going?—down into Clearwater country and up the Lochsa, with its translucent green-hued waters and dangling aromatic cedars, over Lolo Pass and on through Missoula. We could burn our own little piece of the fossil-fuel pie in road warrior revelry, cruising past the facade-like peaks of Glacier, on to the thundering falls of the Kootenai, maybe over the Cascades to buy a nugget of wild smoked salmon at Pike Place Market. Once there, why not take the bait and venture northward still, hope for a clean run through Canuck Customs (but most Canadians are so nice!), and pierce into the most beautiful of beautiful British Columbia, up the mighty Fraser, through the unexpectedly dry Okanagan, where junipers and prickly pear might cause a twinge of homesickness, only to be allayed by the promise of new mountains ahead, where the trees grow narrow and the days never end, rolling into another with long mellow dusks, an unending golden hour beckoning the next horizon.
But we had emails to check. There was a business to tend to, a garden to water and a life to lead, here in Flagstaff. So we turned south from McCall and swerved down the hill, out into the sage and the race of the interstate. At the Wasatch Front, we ran into the northern advance of the monsoon. Its tempests lured us homeward past Cedar City to Hurricane, Utah, where we took a left and climbed above the once-quaint town onto the Plateau.
It didn’t hit me right away, the over-the-top beauty of my homeland. But as we rolled through a roadcut east of Colorado City the land unfurled. A storm hovered gray over the Kaibab Plateau, sun spotlighted cliffs so bright and colorful they were shocking to the senses. We had just seen some darn pretty places, but this was unbelievable, truly stunning, unlike anyplace in the world that I’ve yet been. Sitting and talking with our friends in House Rock Valley before a surreal backdrop twinkling in storm light, I felt like a character in an Ed Abbey book. An hour later the mountain, our mountain, emerged ghost-like above the desert. By the time we neared those cherished Peaks, a brilliant double rainbow was peaking over the three familiar fence posts, painted animated faces cooing at the drama along highway 89. As Lisa said, I was “all blissed out.” And why shouldn’t I be? I live in Flagstaff.