We headed south on the I15 out of Vegas, aiming for Williams, Arizona (yup, another Williams), where we planned to stay the night before heading up to the Grand Canyon. It was going to be a long day: we had at least four hours of driving ahead of us, not counting any time we might spend at the Hoover Dam. It was, therefore, fairly irritating to realise that having driven south from Vegas for more than twenty minutes, we were on completely the wrong road. It was doubly annoying to have to wait another another ten minutes for an exit to appear so we could finally turn around and drive right back the way we came. Not the best start to the day.
The correct road out to the dam took us through Boulder City — the dormitory town built to house Hoover Dam workers, and one of only two places in Nevada where gambling is illegal — and onto a road high above Lake Mead. It was a videogame landscape out here, a fractal-seeming rocky desert devoid of vegetation, set off by the solid turquoise of the lake and the searing blue of the sky.
Ash was sceptical about our need to stop. “We’ve already seen one dam,” she pointed out. “And it’s really fricking hot out here.” She was right on both counts, but I was driving, and I drove us right up into the multi-storey car park beside the visitor centre. The heat was ferocious once again and leaving Ash in the meagre shade from the 11 o’ clock sun afforded by the visitor centre, I took a few pictures before we beat a hasty retreat back to the car. I was less taken this time than previously; the sheer enormity of the Shasta Dam back in California may have spoiled my ability to appreciate concrete engineering on anything other than mind-boggling scales. The Hoover Dam is an incredible piece of work, but it’s…well, it’s just small by comparison.
We crossed the dam and drove up out of the canyon, its broken, rocky terrain persisting for a few miles before the horizon opened up once again to reveal a scrubby plain. The road ran in relentless straight lines, south-south-west for an hour then veering eastward at Kingman to join the I40. We drove on autopilot with the roof up, the air-con at full blast, the radio burbling* and the cruise control keeping us at a steady sixty-five plus ten percent: one hand on the wheel and one eye on the road was all it took to keep our mobile isolation tank shiny side up and heading in the right direction. Dust devils whirled in and out of existence off in the distance, faintly ominous as they did so. The road went on.
Stopping after a couple of hours for petrol in a one-horse town of rusting corrugated iron and bowed wooden porches, we realised we’d hit Route 66, because the name of every shop in the place was prefixed with “Historic Route 66”: “Historic Route 66 Gift Shop”, “Historic Route 66 Barbeque”, “Historic Route 66 Guns & Ammo”, that sort of thing. We filled up and would have burned rubber out of there had the traction control not intervened to limit our progress to ‘rapid but orderly’.
The light was failing as we arrived in Williams. It was the terminus for the Grand Canyon Railway and was a quietly thriving little town, slightly run-down in places but otherwise a world away from our previous nameless pit-stop. We’d booked a motel room here before leavin Vegas and after checking in and dumping our gear we walked back into town for the evening. Williams did not disappoint: we ate (where else?) in a diner named Cruiser’s Café 66 then decamped to play pool and get hammered in a cowboy bar called the Canyon Club where a fight was always just around the corner. Perched at the bar, we talked to a railwayman named Travis who could almost have been a latter-day Steinbeck character: escaping from a drug habit in California, he lived in an RV park at the edge of town and took shift work on the railway to fund a quiet life at this junction between Route 66 and the Grand Canyon tourist trail. We left very shortly after a minor fight did break out and walked back to the motel through the back streets.
Our visit to the Grand Canyon the next day was anticlimactic. We’d underestimated some of the distances involved in this last leg of the trip and would have to drive straight from the canyon to Phoenix so that Ash could catch her flight home the next day. With this in mind we were up at the canyon by lunchtime and on the road again less than an hour later. Ash had been not unimpressed as such, but underwhelmed; I’d been here before, of course, and so the impact was dulled a little by familiarity, but still I struggled to rise to the occasion. Too many days of plumbline-straight desert roads were taking their toll and the inexorable daytime heat made us sluggish and irritable. We walked down into the canyon a little way, hugging the rock to let a horseback expedition pass, took a few photos and left. The ‘Grand Canyon’ box had been ticked.
We shot south as fast as we reasonably could; Phoenix was two hundred and thirty miles away and even pushing the bounds of legality it would take us at least four hours to get there. Ash drove first, taking us down the 180 towards Flagstaff. I was in awe, yet again, at the vastness of the land we were covering. The road travelled through — in fact, the Grand Canyon, Williams and Flagstaff all lay within — the Colorado Plateau, a gigantic state-sized geographic area drained by the Colorado River, and our corridor through it was marked by wide-open plains and, later, forests of short pine trees. The towns along the way sprawled out without any planning; after all, with the plains carrying on for miles in every direction, there’s no shortage of space. The comparison to the crinkled landscape of Scotland with its towns crammed into glens and huddled along the coast is stark.
Rolling through one of those woods near Flagstaff, I noticed we were about to veer off the road.
“Ash! The road!”
“Shit, sorry,” she said, steering us back into the middle of the lane. “Did you see the wolves? The wolves hypnotised me!”
We laughed. I’d seen the wolves too, padding around at the forest edge and watching us as we drove by.
“Maybe I should drive now?” I suggested, and we swapped over at the mouth of a fire road a half mile or so further on. Checking first for lupine observers, of course.
We stopped briefly in Flagstaff, almost deserted on a Sunday evening, grabbed a sub and hit Interstate 17 to Phoenix. We had 145 miles to go (along with a drop of almost a mile in altitude) and the pink clouds of the sunset combined with the endless blacktop and red rock canyons to lend an oddly post-apocalyptic air to the proceedings. Cue Terminator music.
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