'Who are those guys?'

Four days, four incredible experiences in the awesome Southwestern desert. On Saturday, the weather having sufficiently improved, we made the bold decision to venture to the Grand Canyon. When we first arrived, there was a layer of mist obscuring it from view, which, though quite atmospheric, was more than a little irritating; fortunately, we stuck it out, the fog rapidly rolled away, and we were treated to a simply unbelievable view. It really is as amazing as everybody says it is. It may not be the biggest canyon in the solar system (that coveted honour, as I'm sure you don't need me to remind you, 

belongs to Valles Marineris on Mars - can you tell we went to an observatory the other day), but credit where credit's due, Mother Nature surpassed herself here. As I said in Yosemite, I don't fully understand the geological forces required to transform the earth in such a way, all I know is that I'm grateful to them.

The canyon is almost too big to properly get a handle on mentally. At over one mile deep and stretching across practically to the horizon, it is an overwhelming expanse that stands apart, intangible. No photograph can truly do it justice, but I have to take pictures because I don't know what else I would do. Imagine discovering it for the first time - you're walking along, hands in your pockets, whistling a happy tune, and then suddenly you turn a corner and the earth opens up in front of your eyes. Bizarre.

What else have we done? Well I'm glad you asked. On Monday we met up with our pilot friend James, who we met on the train (43 hours turns out to be a long time to get know someone when you're on a vehicle you can't get off), and some of his pilot pals (who demonstrated themselves to be pilots through and through by arranging to meet us at an airport) in Sedona, a town situated in the heart of Red Rock country. There's no denying it, the rocks really are quite red. We had a whole lot of fun at Slide Rock state park, where the undulations of a river over dips in the rock creates a kind of natural water park. It was a bit like the flumes at Beau Sejour, only faster, colder, and in the desert. 

You can almost become desensitised to the landscape here once you get used to it, particularly when you're travelling through it for hours, but occasionally I am still struck by the astonishing incommensurability between here and home, and driving amongst the arresting rock formations around Sedona was one of those times.

Another one was when we went to Monument Valley, a stark landscape of sandstone pinnacles, and a place that demonstrates that rock can be more beautiful and more varied than you might imagine (some of the formations included 'Snoopy' and 'The Dragon', and really looked like them). These towering monoliths, rising imposingly out of the drifting red sand, are incredibly familiar, largely because producers of Westerns, notably John Ford, quite rightly recognised that this would be an ideal spot for shooting, in both senses of the word, and consequently they have become perhaps the archetypal Wild West image.

The feeling of timelessness that swirled around us as we stood beneath remarkable windows in the rock called things like 'the ear of the wind' and 'the eye of the sun' was accentuated by the beautiful, mournful flute music played by our Navajo guide. They can probably be forgiven any melancholy.

Straddling the borders of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico, and encompassing Monument Valley, the Navajo Nation today consists of around 300 000 inhabitants, making it the largest Indian reservation in the States. The people may be fully immersed in American culture, but to a reasonable extent it does feel a bit like another country. In 

1864, the Navajo were forcibly and systematically relocated to New Mexico, and although they were permitted to return to their ancestral lands a few years later, it understandably fostered a resentment that persists in some form to the present day. There are many shameful episodes in American history (the 1984 invasion of Grenada springs to mind), but few are more regrettable than this 'Long Walk', which formed part of the broader 'Trail of Tears' that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Indians.

On a less depressing note, we were afforded a fascinating glimpse into indigenous history at Canyon de Chelly, where the people whom the Navajo call the 'Anasazi', or 'ancient ones', constructed a number of elegant cliff dwellings that have so far survived the ravages of time. 25 Navajo families farm the canyon floor today, continuing where their forebears left off - the Anasazi's abundant harvests of corn and squash provided them with the resources to build their mysterious cliffside villages. Canyon de Chelly, though still enormous, is not nearly as big as the Grand Canyon and therefore, in a way, perhaps even more beautiful, if not quite as extraordinary. I actually felt more trepidation standing near the edge there than I did at the Grand Canyon, because the latter is just so deep that it scarcely seems real.

I apologise for the unnecessarily long, and long-winded, entry today, but we've done so much in the last few days and who knows when we'll have the internet again. Right now we're in a 'town', though really it is just a couple of motels and a gas station, with the hilarious name of Mexican Hat, and we're about to set off for the national parks to the west, beginning with the Capitol Reef, which sounds just about as incongruous as it gets in the Utah desert. I'll be sure to keep you, quite literally, posted.

Utah-kin' to me?

- Adam