New Bohemians | The Life Adventures and Creative Works of Bob and Claire Rogers

The Wave, and Beyond

It took us three days of lottery entries at the BLM Visitor Contact Station, but we got a permit to hike into The Wave in the Vermilion Cliffs Wilderness on the border between Utah and Arizona. The Trailhead is in Utah, and The Wave and environs are in Arizona.

Bob and Claire Rogers' lunch spot high overlooking The Wave

We had to drive our motorhome, Turtle about nine miles on a rough road, an adventure to tell at a later time. We leveled up and had wonderful evening light a great dinner and all the comforts of home; another million dollar view, for free.

The morning of our permit we awoke in darkness, ate a quick breakfast, were on the trail at first light, and had hiked two of the three miles to The Wave by sunrise, with lots of stops along the way for photos.

Chasm near The Wave

We spend most of the day scrambling all over the drainage that contains The Wave, which is itself quite small, and added another couple of tough steep miles. There is a small arch high on a cliff above The Wave, and we determined to get to it for our lunch spot. After a few dicey moves and an hour or more of climbing, and pausing for photos, we made it. The view of The Wave from the arch was spectacular. It appeared to get little use because of the difficulty in getting there. We took a second, slightly easier route back that led us to the Second Wave, and a spectacular chasm, nither of which most permit holders find, but we were able to pinpoint them from our raven’s roost high in the arch.

Claire on Steep Slickrock Backwards!

Strange Mars Like Formations Near The Wave

On the hike out in mid afternoon, we took a difficult slickrock side canyon high to some amazing fragile sandstone formations. I don’t have a name for them now, but will before I do the full post of this adventure in or new Turtle Chronicles, in the works.

How old is this tree?

No Motorhome Road!

These posts are meant to keep our readers informed of our travels, but of necessity must be short; we have been a week without Internet or cell signal. For each adventure you see here there have been three we haven’t been able to share yet.

Stay tuned.

Birthday Ride to Cape Royal

Greeting motorcycle friends on a hairpin turn at Grand Canyon North

Claire and I rode our road bikes to Cape Royal at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on my birthday. It was a hilly 45 miles ride all at 8000 feet or more. We were the only bicyclists on the road, but there were many motorcycles. One group of three guys from Italy were impressed that we were managing the ride.

I was also suffering from a dry socket after a tooth extraction earlier in the week, and was a little gumpy about that, and being so far from a dentist. It was a beautiful, challenging ride; unfortunately the visitor’s center personnel discourages cyclists since there is no paved shoulder. However drivers are so intent on the curvy road they drive slowly and respectfully. I went back and told the ranger to ask the simple question, “Do you consider yourself an experienced cyclist?” If the potential rider answers yes, they probably can handle it, but may suffer from the altitude as I did for part of the ride.

We stopped for some fun pictures at a convex mirror on one of the shart turns, just as our motorcycle friends passed.

Cape Royal has some of the best viewpoints in Grand Canyon National Park, and if you are a cyclist, and fairly fit, you would love the ride; just don’t expect to be as fast as you are at home.

Small is Beautiful: Beaver Dams

There were once millions of beavers across North America. The beaver pelt trade made us rich and facilitated the exploration of the continent. We nearly drove them extinct before the Europeans hunger for pelts waned.

What we are just now learning is how much the beaver shaped the landscape and how much we continue to lose by killing them.

I once wandered the plateau of Allegheny Mountain in wilderness area called Dolly Sods, in search of blueberries, huckleberries and brook trout. These forays alone, or with friends Steve Richards or Sull McCartney are some of my richest memories of the few years I lived in the beautiful Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia.

The meandering streams were punctuated by beaver dams that slowed the water and created meadows for large deer and bear, and habitat for those brookies, always hungry for a tiny dry fly. Fire had shaped Dolly Sods many years before, after the first cutting of timber, taking the soil away to bedrock in many areas, making them stony deserts. The beaver moved in, harvested the remaining trees, and built dams on most of the streams. These dams not only created habitat, but they trapped sediment that filled in the bedrock and reclaimed the mountain top.

One October I went backpacking on Dolly Sods alone, to try and catch some fall color; maple and aspen, and the deep green of the signature flag spruce. What I got was an early snowstorm, and a lesson in just how worthless plastic sheeting is for shelter. But the snow didn’t stop the beavers from their work until dark. A periodic slap of beavertail on water, reminded me I was a visitor, and they’d just as soon I leave. And leave I did, after taking a couple of rolls of film, with frozen hands and soaked sore feet, and a pocketful of memories, at least partly thanks of those beavers.

I’m not sure what has happened since I left the area in 1978, but I can bet there are a lot more trees than before, probably fewer blueberries, but a healthy young spruce forest.

For more on new thinking and research on the value of beavers go to: Voyage of the Dammed

A 1950’s Family Slice in Time

My family in 1957.

We tend to think of our family as being a static entity, a collection of individuals forming a unit in a space and time that we choose to remember. If we are lucky, our family unit stays together over a long period of time, changing in many suble ways, and yet remaining what we call our family. But amid this natural change, our family artifacts are static. Photographs show family members at a certain place and time, with a relationship to each other that will never repeat. Ultimately some members will die, others will drift apart, gain families of their own, change religions, change politics, change states.

Technology changes the artifacts from still black and white photographs, to 8mm film, analogue video, digital video, images shared through social media, all fragmenting the ability to somehow produce a coherent image of the family through time.

Perhaps it’s not important to have physical representations of family; memory has a flow and texture, a story enhancing ability that no physical media can replicate. But we want the record of our particular family to go into the future so others can appreciate the special manifestation of nature we represented.

Yet looking back at photographs from our grandparents and greatgrandparents era, we often have no idea who the people are in the browning photos; people who contributed to our genes, to our present and future. Some day that will be us; future generations wondering who those people were, what were their names, what were they like, what traits did we pass on to them. And so it goes. Someday you and your family will pass from this place forever, in terms of real understanding. It’s not meant as a sad thought, just a thought, an idea, to be considered as we live our daily lives.

The ephemeral nature of lives of families of time itself, is central to creation. How would life be for me now if the people in the collage above had never changed from 1957?