On the way to Bryce Canyon UT

It was a long haul from Moab to Bryce: 234 miles. Yet the scenery alone justified the long hours behind the wheel. We left Moab and headed out across the dusty shoulder of the Colorado plateau. For two hours: nothing. Big wide open expanses of brown sand, beating sun, cowering shrubs, and gently rolling flats. The road was dead straight to the horizon. I followed the twin yellow lines and tried to whistle to some random country & western tunes on 97.3 fm.

Lunch time eventually came and went. And still I couldn't quite see the end of the road. And then as quickly as it began, it came to an abrupt stop. In front of me the earth's crust began to buckle and crack. Randy climbed gently, following the road's curvaceous bends, up through shale and sand stone. Desert shrubs mutated into stunted trees which morphed into emerald weeping willows. The shock of colour hurt my eyes. Water must be nearby.

Randy followed the river bed to the left, continuing his climb on into Capitol Reef National Park. This park, I soon discovered, is a geologist's wet dream. The "layer cake" of rock is astounding. Millions of years of tetonic activity, erosion and deposits, natural cataclysms and events just stultifyingly boring are all recorded right there in front of you. It's especially vivid at Capitol Reef: each layer of rock is a different density, alternative colour, and has eroded a different paces. The result is a strange crunching of the earth's crust that has created a dizzying patchwork of spires, fins, arches, and rubble.

The drive onwards to Bryce Canyon is no less impressive. Dixie National Forest is a stark wilderness of silver birches and pines. It seems dramatically out of place after the parched deserts in spitting distance over the horizon. Grand Staircase Escalante State Park is a cocophony of rocky out crops - completely improbable but there it is! There were so many jaw-dropping ahhh! moments, I lost count.

These long drives reinforce just how vast America's interior is. Miles of beautiful, yet somehow terrifying, nothingness. Who would want to live out here? What would you do? And why? It reminds me that this is where America's pioneer spirit was born. If you can conquer such vast wilderness, they why can't you send a man to the moon? or democracy to Iraq?