Looking at the night sky on a clear, moonless night and trying to wrap your mind around its vastness is a similar experience. Basically, you can’t do it, but the attempt is worthwhile.
While there we saw a group of FLDS people being tourists, they are faux-Mormons who practice polygamy and drive boys away in order to have multiple wives. The women wear ankle-length plain dresses and a most unusual set of hairstyles. They live in northern AZ, no longer welcome in UT.
The drive to the north rim is a very pretty one, something I’d remembered from the last time I was here some 20 years ago. There are meadows and lots of pines and aspens, looking a lot like our part of Wyoming. We saw deer but none of the bison signs warned us to be wary of.
The altitude here is high, maybe 8000 ft. and the air is thin. Climbing a few stairs is enough to get out of breath. I even got a touch of high-altitude headache, which I first experienced full-force in Cuzco at 11,500 feet some years back.
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Tomorrow we leave for Zion NP in southern Utah; we’re taking the long way to avoid driving the RVs through the park’s one-way tunnel. It was dug nearly 100 years ago and has ‘windows’ cut in the side where light and air enter.
The tunnel is only tall enough for today’s tall RVs if they drive down the centerline. This necessitates blocking traffic and temporarily turning it into a one-way street, for which privilege they charge a fee.
The route we’ll use tomorrow takes us through ‘panhandle’ Arizona which is one of the places faux-Mormon polygamy cults have retreated to. Arizona doesn’t have a true panhandle in the sense OK or TX have, but the term is used because this land, north of the Grand Canyon, is cut off from the rest of AZ and there are few roads.
“Bitter-enders” like FLDS retreat to places like this, basically to hide from the rest of us. It’s their version of the Benedict Option.
