Monday, May 17, 2010

Reflections on sage

So, we spent 2 weeks driving around in the desert. And it smelled like sage and dust, which was totally awesome.

My first look at the Grand Canyon went something like this "wow I wish my Dad could see this, but he's blind and he will die having never seen it". And then I cried for a while. Now, some people cry at the awesomeness of the canyon, but me, I cried about the people I love who won't see it, or who never got to see it, like my mother in law. Then I named formations after them, like Cookie's Rock and Don's Wall.

After my maudlin display on the rim, which MaryGail missed because she was taking a million pictures of the actual canyon itself, we went for a lovely hike about a mile down the canyon on the Angel Fire trail or something like that. It was, for lack of a better word, awesome.

Okay, here are some better words to describe the desert in Arizona, Utah, and Nevada, and the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Park: amazing, astonishing, breathtaking, grand, impressive, magnificent, majestic, mind-blowing, moving, overwhelming, something else (really thesaurus.com, something else?), striking, stunning, stupefying, wonderful, wondrous. The places we visited were all of those things. And we have about 3,000 pictures to prove it.