Friday, April 6, 2018

PARADISE


It was a white-knuckle drive across the high plains of Wyoming this morning. Fog, snow blowing sideways, drifts, low-teen temps, near white-outs when passing trucks, actual white-outs behind snow plows.

Crossing the Red Desert, I couldn't see much due to the weather. It's a little-known and poorly-protected expanse of grasslands, sagebrush, remote canyons, archeological sites, and antelope. I got up close and personal with the Red Desert on a visit fifteen years ago with leaders of the environmental group where I worked. The threats are in plain sight -- a terrain already pocked with drill rigs, pipelines, service roads, and oil storage facilities.

Wyoming has this backwards attitude that they don't want any more land protected by the government. Period. So I doubt much has been done to guard the Red Desert. Parts of it should be a National Monument.

Despite the lousy weather, I watched through swirling snow the great, dark silhouette of a golden eagle, wings outstretched, flap low over the hills. It was one of several I would see this day.

I had looked for one yesterday during my tour around Fort Collins. Becky took me to the prettiest places, especially the canyon of the Cache la Poudre River, where I watched a fly fisher land and release a small brown trout. It would prove quite a contrast to weather a day later.

Becky and her husband, John, moved to Colorado from Ann Arbor two years ago. They seem transformed with happiness in their new lives. It's quite a wondrous thing. Their enthusiasm for their new geography is understandable -- spectacular mountain scenery and none of the dreariness of Michigan winter. Plus, a nice town, from what I saw.

Everywhere I've gone, people have proudly shown me their own paradises. A wooded subdivision in central Florida, the backyard of an East Lansing home, the lake-studded glacial hills of southeast Michigan. Even downtown Houston, of all things. And Fort Collins. Paradise is where you find it.

I found a break in the nasty Wyoming weather about the time I hit Green River, so I pulled off to have lunch on Expedition Island. This is the spot that many famous expeditions have launched to float the Green River down to the Colorado River and on through the Grand Canyon. Most famous was the Powell Expedition of 1869, which was the first-ever such trip.

On the third day of our last raft trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, we bobbed in the surreal-turquoise-colored water of the tributary Little Colorado River. One of our friends sighed, and declared, "Except for the fact that we're surrounded by atheists, you might'a thought we'd died and went to heaven." Paradise.

I dipped the toe of my sneaker into the Green River. The backdrop of sandstone mesas and cliffs, and the namesake color of the river, would have been the same in Powell's day.

On this last night of my four-week road trip (I'll be home tomorrow night), I'm camped alongside another river, the Snake River in Idaho, in a deserted BLM campground. White pelicans are spending the night on rocks across the river.




Day-before-yesterday: EAST-WEST
http://wayneaschmidt.blogspot.com/2018/04/east-west.html

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