The Grand Canyon

Duh.

I’ve spent more time at the Grand Canyon than most people I know. Not only did I work there, flying helicopters over for an entire summer, but it’s less than 40 miles from my place at Howard Mesa. We occasionally go up there — sometimes just for lunch.

The Grand CanyonPhotos of the Grand Canyon do not do it justice. The place is magnificent. The view from every lookout point, from every spot along the trail, is different. Best of all, it can be enjoyed by everyone in whatever dose you’d like to take. Drive up to a spot on the rim for a look. Take a hike all the way to the bottom. Fly over in a helicopter or airplane. Take a raft down the Colorado River.

Reminds me of a story I heard at the grocery store in Tusayan when I worked at the canyon. It was after work and I was picking up a few things to take home. They had some calendars of the Canyon at the checkout counter, a kind of of impulse buy item. The cashier told me that a tourist from Europe was paging through the calendar and suddenly exclaimed, “There’s a river in there?”

Uh, yeah.

If you’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, go. Plan your trip to arrive before sunset and watch the sun set from one of the lookout points. Get a room at a hotel along the rim. Have dinner at El Tovar. Then, when it gets dark, walk on the path along the rim. (Don’t worry; there’s a wall there so you won’t fall in.) If there’s no moon, you’ll experience the odd feeling of walking beside a dark abyss. If there’s a full moon, you’ll see a monochromatic version of what you can see during the day. In the morning, wake before sunrise and watch the sun rise from a different view point. Or the same one. Be sure to take in the art exhibit at the Kolb Gallery and either hike along the rim trail or take a shuttle bus (or your car, in the winter) to Hermit’s Rest.

Grand Canyon, Arizona, photo

The Old Grand Canyon Airport

I finally find it from the ground.

Two years ago, when I was in training to fly helicopter tours at the Grand Canyon, I made daily trips to the Grand Canyon’s old airport out by Red Butte. I don’t know much about the old airport except how to find it from the air. I don’t think its two runways were ever paved.

Oh, yes. It has the remains of a big old hangar on the west side of where the runways were.

I love exploring ruins and remnants of the past. I remembered the hangar last week when Mike, Jack, and I were doing some back-roading in that area. I think we passed near the end of the main runway while driving out toward the Coconino Rim.

Yesterday, while back-roading with Jack southwest side of Grand Canyon National Park, I remembered the old airport again. And since I had to drive right past that area to get back to Howard Mesa, I figured I’d try again to find it.

Old Grand Canyon AirportI won’t go into details about the roads I tried and the wrong turns I took. Suffice it to say that I finally homed in on it. After driving down a two-track road that cut diagonally across the main runway, I parked my Jeep right in front of the gaping hangar door.

It’s a neat old building with a dirt floor and not much else. The shelves are stripped bare and rooms that could have been living quarters show signs of vandalism, including a burned door. There was a picnic table just inside the main door, offering a shady place to have lunch, surrounded by the ghosts of aviation past.

One room in the back corner had fairly new saddle racks attached to the walls; that same room had a Private Property/No Trespassing sign on it from the outside. (Oops!) I guess someone had used it not long ago to store horse tack. There were other buildings nearby that appeared to be in better condition; all of them had the same Private Property signs on them so Jack and I stayed clear. Still, it didn’t appear as if anyone was living there. Since the old airport is in the Kaibab National Forest, I find it hard to believe that anyone would live there. But who knows? The owners of the buildings could have been grandfathered in when the government bought the land.

The Hangar Door at Old Grand Canyon AirportOne thing is for sure: visiting the old airport and looking up at the faded paint over the door spelling out “Grand Canyon Airlines” has given me a real thirst for knowledge about the place. When I’m finished with my road trip book project and trip to Canada (for work), I might start doing a little research.

It would be great to talk to someone who had actually flown there.

Before leaving, I snagged the coordinates with my GPS. Next time I want to find it, I won’t have to wander around until I stumble into it.

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]

Howard Mesa

My windsock.

As I’ve written extensively elsewhere, Mike and I own 40 acres of land at Howard Mesa, which is about halfway between Williams and Valle, Arizona, 5 miles off route 64. If you’ve ever driven from Williams to the Grand Canyon, you’ve passed within 3 miles of it (as the raven flies).

Howard Mesa WindsockThis photo shows my windsock at the top of the property, with a dead tree in the foreground. It was probably taken during the summer; that’s a thundercloud in the making in the distance in the background.

I occasionally land my helicopter not far from the windsock on a gravel pad. It’s a three-hour drive from our house to the property but only an hour by helicopter. We sometimes fly up just for the day — usually to do some work in the shed or check on things.

The dead tree is a whole other story. Here’s the short version.

Imagine a whole lot of land laid out in one square mile sections called…well, sections. The sections are colored on some maps like a checkerboard, with private squares and state land squares. The private squares were owned by cattle ranchers. They contracted with the state to graze their cattle on the state land as well as their private land in what’s known as open range.

Cattle eats grass. The ranchers got the idea that more grass would grow if there were less trees. So they came onto their land (but not the state land) with bulldozers and knocked down all the piñon and juniper pine trees that grew there. The trees died, but since the ranchers didn’t take them away, their carcasses littered the rancher’s land.

The ranchers were wrong. About the same amount of grass grew.

Years passed. New trees grew in place of the old. The ranchers had another brainstorm. They realized that they could make a bunch of money by selling their land to developers. Best of all, with Arizona’s open range laws, they could still graze their cattle on the private property that didn’t fence the cattle out. So they could stay in business without actually owning the land the cattle grazed on.

The developers split up each section of land into 10-, 36-, and 40-acre lots. We bought one of them.

So now you know why we have dead trees like this one on our land.

The good thing about all this: there’s no shortage of firewood.

Howard Mesa, Arizona, photo

Water, Anyone?

I haul water for the first time.

“Off-the-grid” is a term that applies to property without access to public utilities like electricity, gas, telephone, cable television, and water.

By this definition, our home in Wickenburg is only partially “on-the-grid.” We have electricity and telephone but live beyond the range of cable television and town water lines. (I don’t think gas is available anywhere in town other than in tanks.) We have Dish Network, so we don’t need cable. (Ironically, Internet is provided wirelessly through the local cable company.) And we get our water from a well we share with the house next door.

Our place on Howard Mesa is utterly and completely off the grid. We get electricity through a small solar system Mike installed on our shed. We get gas delivered to a tank on the property. We use our cell phones for telephone service. We don’t have any kind of television or Internet. And water…well, it has to be hauled up to the property.

While it is possible to dig a well for water, this area of Arizona is notorious for its low water table. A well might have to go down thousands of feet to hit a good water source. It’s just too darn expensive to dig that deep. So most folks have water tanks and either hire a water service to keep them full or haul water themselves.

We have two tanks with a total capacity of 2,100 gallons. Because we don’t live up here full time, we only fill the tanks once every two or so years. Since we bought the property, we’ve had the tanks filled four times by water services (once because a crack in the valve drained a tank over the wintertime and once because I found a dead animal in one of the tanks). But when I called three different water services to fill the tanks sometime this week, none of them would come. (It appears that we’re not the only ones who have had bad experiences with the roads here.)

Not a big problem. Our friends Matt and Elizabeth, who live full time on the other side of the mesa, haul their own water. They have one of those water tanks that fit in the back of a pickup truck. It holds 425 gallons. They said we could borrow it, and the transfer pump we’d need to move water from the portable tank to our tanks anytime.

Loading the Water TankI picked up the tank yesterday. Matt had created a platform for it that made it level with the back of the truck. It was just a matter of sliding it off the platform and onto the tailgate, then lifting it slightly to get it over the wheel wells. Close the tailgate and it’s in.

Elizabeth also gave me their pump. It’s a black cylinder that stands upright in the bottom of the tank (on the inside). A power cord and a hose come out of the pump.

I went into Williams today to do some laundry, get on the Internet for a while, hit the Post Office, and pick up a few things at the local hardware store. I stopped at the water “store” — Running Water, which was also one of the water services that wouldn’t deliver to the top of Howard Mesa — on the way back. I pulled in behind a man with a pickup truck towing a trailer with the same 425 gallon tank I had in the back of my truck. I shut the engine, and got out.

“Mind if I watch?” I asked. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Sure.”

He’d parked his tank right under an orange, flexible hose with a 2 or 3 inch diameter. As I watched, he pulled a piece of black plastic pipe with a 4 or 5 inch diameter and stuck it into the top of his tank. He put the orange hose inside that.

“I use an extension,” he told me. “My tank is so low that sometimes the water pressure pushes the hose out while filling. The extension keeps it in.”

He walked to the machine the hose was connected to and inserted a ten dollar bill. The water immediately began gushing through the hose and the extension and into his tank. He put another quarter in.

“I like to fill it all the way,” he said. “This way the water doesn’t slosh around while I’m driving.”

We watched the water fill his tank. It was white and somewhat transparent and the water looked blue. While we waited, we talked about the price of water going up because the price of fuel had gone up. The water at Running Water is hauled to the site, probably from Flagstaff or Belmont. The more water you got, the cheaper it was. But not everyone could haul thousands of gallons of water. 400 gallons for $10 seemed to be the most popular quantity. That made it 2.5 cents per gallon.

The water rose into the neck of his tank and stopped just beneath the 425 gallon mark. The man inserted another quarter. A moment later, the water was overflowing in the tank, splashing all over the trailer. He pulled out the flexible hose, which was still flowing water, and his extension. He put the extension in the back of his truck and came back to fasten the lid on his tank.

“Have a good day,” he said to me. Then he climbed into his truck and rolled away.

I pulled up carefully, aligning the orange hose over the top of my tank’s fill port. Since my tank was high on the bed of the pickup, I wouldn’t need an extension. I got out, checked the position, then moved the truck back about six inches. I killed the engine. I took the lid off the tank and inserted the orange hose in it. Then I slipped a ten dollar bill into the machine. The water started gushing; the hose stayed in place.

While I waited, a woman pulled up in a pickup truck with a smaller tank on the back.

Although I didn’t want the water to slosh around in the tank, I also didn’t want to get water all over the back of the truck. I’d bought three bags of mortar and I didn’t want them to get wet. So when the water stopped flowing short of the 425 gallon mark, I was satisfied. I pulled the orange hose out carefully and let the water in the hose run into the tank. Then I pushed it aside, fastened the lid on the tank, got into the truck, and drove off.

Let’s do the math here. A gallon of water weighs about 8 pounds. I had 400 gallons, which totaled 3,200 pounds. I also had the tank itself, which probably weighed about 50 pounds, 3 80-lb bags of mortar, and a 20-foot length of 1/2 inch re-bar, cut into 4 pieces. So I was hauling at least 3,500 lbs of stuff in the back of that truck.

That’s why we have a truck. Because we haul stuff.

It was 10 miles back up Route 64 to the turnoff for Howard Mesa, then 5 miles up those nasty unpaved roads. The speed limit on Route 64 was 65, but I soon discovered that when I got my speed over 60 MPH, I could feel a certain amount of instability in the truck. I don’t know if I was imagining it or if it was because of the gentle sloshing around of the water, which I could watch in my rearview mirror. So I kept my speed between 50 and 60 MPH and signaled for my turn long before I reached it, letting the truck slow to 40 MPH before I got into the turning lane. I didn’t want to have to jump on the brakes. I also took it very slowly up the roads to our lot, keeping my speed between 10 and 20 MPH the whole way.

Pumping WaterI arrived without incident and backed the truck up to our small, 550 gallon tank, which I’d been using to keep the horses’ water trough filled. After letting Jack the Dog out to supervise and putting my lunch on the stove to reheat, I went out to transfer the water from one tank to the other. I started by lowering the pump into the bottom of the tank and running its hose into my tank. Then I plugged in the pump, using an extension cord from the shed. The pump started pumping, sounding strangely muffled from deep inside the portable tank. The water rushed into the other tank.

Elizabeth had said that it took 20 minutes to transfer a whole tank of water from one tank to the other. That sounded a little too quick for me. So I timed it. I also filled the horses’ water trough to make room for the incoming water. Whatever didn’t fit in the small tank would go in the larger one. But I was trying to use up all the water in the larger one so we could move it closer to the shed. Can’t move a 1,550 gallon water tank when there’s water in it.

I was standing by the tank, monitoring its pumping progress, when the pump sounded like it was trying to suck air. I unplugged it. My tank was nearly full. The portable tank was nearly empty. It had taken 38 minutes to make the transfer.

A lot of people think it’s some kind of crazy ordeal to haul water. I guess it would be if I had to do it every day. But this was the first time I’d ever had to do it — and we’ve owned our place at Howard Mesa for over six years. It wasn’t difficult at all. It wasn’t even inconvenient. I picked it up on my way home, then transferred it from one tank to the other while making and eating lunch.

I figure that between me and the horses, we probably go through 30-40 gallons of water a day. The horses are the big consumers; on a hot day, they’ll drink 15-20 gallons each. I don’t drink this water; I drink bottled water and we have 5 gallon water bottles we fill at home and bring up here for cooking. So this 400 gallons — plus the 300 or so gallons I had to start out with — should last about 20 days. With luck, we’ll have the bigger tank drained and moved before the end of the season. Then we can top off both tanks in three trips and be all set up for the winter (if we come up here) and next summer.

Next summer, I hope to put up a shade structure for the horses. It’ll have a gutter on the lower side of its roof to collect rainwater and dump it right in the horses’ water trough. With monsoon rains the way they are, the trough should stay full from the beginning of July through the end of August.

I will admit one thing about having to haul water: it really makes you conscious about how much water you use. You don’t let the water run in the sink when you know that every drop that goes down the drain is just another drop you’ll have to haul up one day in the future.

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]

water, tank, Williams, Arizona

Heat

Phoenix residents snicker.

A heat wave is spreading across the country, giving people in the west, midwest, and northeast a taste of what Phoenix residents experience from June through September every single year.

Heat is serious business in northern latitudes. Many homes were built long before central air conditioning became a “necessity” of American life. The “lucky” people in those older homes have window air conditioning units that they install and remove on the same schedule they use to store and unpack their winter clothes. In some areas of the northwest, air conditioning is rare — since serious heat waves are also rare. And in low income homes, even the window air conditioner isn’t an option since the occupants often can’t afford to purchase such a luxury item. People are being overcome by the heat, getting sick, and dying.

To make matters worse, air conditioners use power and the power suppliers in these areas aren’t accustomed to meeting the additional demands of air conditioner users. Brownouts and rolling blackouts are all too real. You know things are bad when the media recommends unplugging cell phone chargers and televisions when not in use to limit the amount of “vampire power” these devices suck from the grid — an estimated 10% of all power use.

Meanwhile, Phoenix temperatures are below normal, in the high 90s and low 100s. The other day, it was hotter in South Dakota than it was in Phoenix. How’s that for a switch? It has some people in Phoenix snickering. After all, we tease people up north about their snowfalls and low temperatures in winter and they tease us about our hellish summers. Now we can tease them about hellish summers, too.

I’m still up at Howard Mesa where I went to escape WIckenburg’s heat — which is slightly more bearable than Phoenix’s. It’s 20° cooler here — in the 70s every day lately. Relaxing in the sun is actually something I like to do here. The other evening, as I lounged reading a book, I kind of wished I had a little blanket to tuck around me. (My blood certainly has thinned out since I left New Jersey 10 years ago.)

Yet every day, as I listen to the news on NPR, I hear about the “sizzling” heat in one place or another and the emergency cooling centers and the efforts to check on elderly people living alone. Hard to think about such heat when you’re not experiencing it.

I remember those 80/80 days in New York — that’s 80° with 80% humidity. That heat was brutal and I’d prefer a spot of shade in Phoenix in August over that. Now it’s over 100° in New York. Those people must be melting.

One thing for sure: none of my family or friends back east are teasing me about the Arizona heat right now.