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Grand Canyons of the West

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A tour of America's canyon country is a visit to our Valhalla. It's the abode of Indian gods and outlaw heroes, of Mormon preachers leading their people into violent mountains, and of cavalrymen slaughtering Navajo sheep in the name of President Lincoln.

One should really cross these parched miles on horseback, or on foot, and feel the epic difficulty of travel -- the way sagebrush claws at skin and heat clamps onto eyelids. But even driving on paved roads and hiking on tended trails, America's rough century seems still close.

My wife, Ariella, and I, and our intrepid 8-year-old, Milo, began our pursuit of this strange nature in the nature-abhorring town of Las Vegas. From there, we drove the 150 miles northeast to Zion National Park, then followed a 3,000-mile Z across four states, east across Utah as far as Colorado, back through Arizona to the Grand Canyon, then east again to New Mexico and the urban oasis of Santa Fe.

We threaded our way through the Southwest's national parks -- Zion, Bryce, Arches, Canyonlands, Mesa Verde, Petrified Forest, Monument Valley, the Grand Canyon -- all those dry escarpments sculpted by rare but overwhelming water.

We started hiking shortly after dawn in Zion National Park in Utah. The air was cool, the still-shadowed mountains beckoned, and there we were, standing at the head of the trail to Angel's Landing. So we climbed it -- a 2 1/2-mile series of calf-stiffening switchbacks up to a rock that looks like a stegosaurus scale. The final yards along its ridge, flanked by plunging walls and fitted out with a steel cable handrail, are famous for inducing previously unsuspected fear of heights. "View" is a pale word for the spectacle you see from here.

Far below, a single road ribbons between giant stone altars, now mercifully out of bounds to cars in summertime. Instead of spending hours in traffic that once choked animals and shrouded cliffs, visitors now board electric buses that run every few minutes.

The air has cleared, animals have returned, and the trip to the trailhead is pleasant and quick. From the top, the bus looks minuscule but somehow comforting, a little technological nugget amid the expanse of savage rock. A hiker who preceded us had brought his violin. He steadied himself against a tree and sent a Bach saraband lilting slowly into the abyss.

By the time we were ready to descend, the sun was flowing into the valley, slapping our ankles as if with hot iron rods. By lunchtime we were sprawled in the shade of a generous tree next to the visitor center. We spent the afternoon splashing in the swimming pool of the Desert Pearl Inn in Springdale.

Graceful, aged letters

The Utah landscape requires some mystical explanation. The mustard and magenta cliffs make sense of every visionary, zealot and spiritual huckster who ever marched through them. Some of those bullheaded pioneers left their mark on the cliff walls in Capitol Reef National Park.

As you hike along the dry riverbed of Capitol Gorge, with curtains of rock on either side, you keep an ear cocked for thunder. A distant storm can send a flood barreling down the channel in seconds.

If the Mormon families who pushed their wagons over this "road" made it safely to the narrow passage just before the canyon opens out into a fertile valley, they would scratch their names into the sandstone. "M. Larson" came by on Nov. 20, 1888, still with enough energy to form graceful letters and give his capital "N" a genteel tail.

Even in the days when a cattle trail was luxury, this was restless land. The Sundance Kid swept in and out of the now sweet town of Torrance, Utah, and retreated back into a maze of secret gulches. His raids carried him regularly as far as Hole-in-the-Wall, near Buffalo, Wyo., 700 miles to the northwest, and Winnemucca, Nev., 550 miles in the other direction.

In the evenings, I read Zane Grey's "Riders of the Purple Sage," and on the trail each day I would regale my family with the story of the beautiful female rancher surrounded by predatory Mormons, a mysterious gunslinger dressed in black, and a young cowboy who finds an Edenic valley hidden behind a narrow canyon passage.

It was easy to believe in secret landscapes. On a scorching afternoon in Arches, a ranger guided us into Fiery Furnace, where a labyrinthine trail twists through a Gothic complex of corridors, spires, vaults and flying buttresses, all fashioned by erosion. We were never far from a parking lot, but it felt as though, left to our own navigational skills, we might have wandered for months without finding it.

Even Bryce Canyon lurks. We arrived in the muted light of evening, checked into the lodge and strolled through scattered pines, puzzled at the lack of drama. Then we came to the ledge. Spread out below was a glowing field of melted candles and rippling slabs.

The next day, as I eavesdropped on a guide explaining how geology had conspired with wind and rain to give this uncanny landscape the brush of life, I kept thinking how improbable it was that brainless forces had produced such violent beauty. I understood now why the French composer Olivier Messiaen had come here and responded with a huge, joyous symphony full of iridescent chords and exuberant percussion, "Des Canyons aux Etoiles" ("From the Canyons to the Stars").

Mythology haunts the land. Monument Valley, its mitten-handed mesas familiar from John Ford movies and a million cowboy dreams, looks too much like itself to be believed. When we were there, white clouds obligingly gathered into a purple backdrop for russet rock, orange light and a storybook rainbow. Cut! Print!

Raining in Mesa Verde

Monument Valley belongs to the Navajo reservation, which sweeps across a vast landscape ringed by lore-rich landmarks, stretching 250 miles from the southwestern corner of Colorado, across Arizona to the Grand Canyon. It even enfolds another nation: The Hopi homelands, with their clustered mesa-top stone villages, so much more compact and eternal-looking than the shambling Navajo settlements. Outsiders are barely tolerated here. The highway skirts the base of Second and Third Mesas, and only grudging, dilapidated signs point up to the old Hopi hamlets.

To try to make sense of what we saw, we triangulated between "Book of the Navajo," an explanatory classic by Raymond Friday Locke, and the mysteries of Tony Hillerman, in which a Tribal Police detective, Joe Leaphorn, cruises the reservation, dispensing sociological commentary along the way.

It rained the day we visited Mesa Verde, and for an hour or so the 30 people in our group crammed themselves into crevices and caves while sheets of water coursed off the granite overhang and a ranger stood stoically shouting explanations over the roar.

The Hopi claim an ancestral link with this place, and the blocky stone houses they build today resemble the ancient habitations built into the cliff.

It would be hard to romanticize the hard lives once led here. The ancestral Pueblo Indians ("Anasazi" is no longer considered correct) smoked themselves to death in their apartment cubicles and ceremonial kivas; you can still see the scorch marks from their fires in the stone. But the storm made the settlement suddenly seem cozy.

Back across the Arizona border, close to the village of Chinle and not much else, lies Canyon de Chelly National Monument, the ravaged heart of Navajo cosmology. The canyon is a long, jagged cut in the Arizona plains with a soft, green valley floor.

We arrived from above, taking the only open trail down from a parking lot, along flaxen walls, molded and textured with hairlike whorls, that plunge 1,000 feet and have served at various times as protection and trap.

The ancestral Puebloans lived there first, and the remnants of their village, dug out of rock, still cling to the base of the cliff. When they left, the Navajo moved in, putting up wood-framed, mud-roofed hexagonal and octagonal hogans.

The enormous double column called Spider Rock rises out of reach from the canyon floor. This is the Navajo Mt. Olympus: Its pinnacle is the home of Spider Woman, who taught the nation how to weave and who devours naughty children and seeds the peak with their bones.

The canyon's documented history is equally melancholy. In January 1864, while the Union armies in the East were fighting in the name of human rights, Kit Carson's cavalry stormed the canyon bottom, burning villages and fields, killing some Navajo, and rounding up the rest for deportation. Eventually, they returned -- sort of. Today, the tribe that made its stronghold here is represented by a scattering of homesteads, a few lonely sheep and an occasional pickup truck jouncing along a dirt track, carrying a handful of tourists and their Navajo guide.

We looped south, then west, the direction the cowboy always rides just before the final credits. We stopped at the Petrified Forest, which is not a forest but a field, over which downed ancient trees lie, in eerie, jewel-like colors: garnet, topaz, sapphire and amethyst.