27/7: The Heard Museum is the anthropology museum in Phoenix. Our first real day in Phoenix, me, mom and Daniel went there to look at pots and statues.

It wasn’t as big as the anthrology museum at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, but they had some really beautiful and some really interesting exhibits. They also exhibited different things – different indigenous peoples and their art. The people of the desert had different cultures and traditions from the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, and it became so obvious in the differences in the art they made.

Visiting these museums, it becomes just how obiously absurd the idea that Columbus discovered the Americas really is. The Europeans are a really narrow minded and ignorant people.

26/7: Vladimiro drove us back to Pheonix through a different route. This time, the freeway took us through the hot hot desert.

There just is something about desertd that fascinate me. I can’t really pinpoint what it is. Maybe it’s the huge perspectives. The horizon. Maybe it’s the harshness, how life still has managed to survive. Maybe it’s the colours. Or maybe it’s the nakedness, how the landscape lies so bare for everyone to see.

26/7: One of the most visited spots on the southern edge of the canyon is the Lookout. Sometime, long ago, this was voted to have the most impressive and representative view of the canyon. So they built a tower and a museum there, and now there’s a never ending stream of touists climbing the stairs and looking through the stationary looking-glasses.

But, to be honest, even though the amount of people was almost scary, they couldn’t really distract my attention from the amazing view.

Seeing as water is a little special interest of mine, I found it very nice how they’ve handled the drinking water issue at Grand Canyon National Park. No bottled water is sold within the park. Instead, they have stations like these spread out all over, where you can fill your own bottles with the fresh, cold and very tasty fresh water from the Arizona plateau. Probably from some mountain stream. A very good initiative, in my opinion. Less bottled water for the people!

25-26/7: Living in Grand Canyon National Park means either camping or staying at a lodge. We stayed at a lodge, built right on the edge of the canyon.

It was huge, the hotel complex, but the interior design felt like it wanted to give a feeling of a hunting cabin in the alps.

After dinner, walking back to our rooms, we ran into three deer. Just standing there, eating of the irrigated grass and not minding one bit about all the people and their cellphone flashes. They were probably fed by the lodge staff, to give the guests a wildlife experience. It made me think of the lodge in the middle of the Bolivian pampas where they fed crocodiles by the kitchen, to give the tourists a thrill. Somehow, these deer felt like less extreme lodge mascots.

And in the morning, I woke up to this view. I have stayed at quite a few places with incredible views in my life, but, I don’t know. This might just take the prize.

A proud student of INK, the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, at Stockholm University. At one of the big geological wonders of the world.

25/7: I guess, in a way, Grand Canyon is the closest thing to a holy place that a physical geographer can come. There is something so extremely non-human over it. Just to imagine how a small river has managed to dig such a deep scar into the bedrock – the time it has required – that all the other landscape altering processes has allowed the fluvial processes to do their job, without interrupting with earth-quakes and glaciers – it makes my head spin.

The utter force.

It makes it so clear just how tiny we are, in perspective, that the Earth was here long before us and will prevail long after we are gone. It gives me hope.

But, most of all, it is beautiful. So breath-takingly beautiful.

This was Vladimiro’s special place, and in the beginning we were all by ourselves on this brink of eternity. After a while, three youths arrived, but still it was quiet and so harmonious. Not at all the intense pressure from all other tourists that was so overwhelmingly present at all the more famous spots.

And sitting there, with the wind caressing my feet, watching the sun go down. The rocks changing colour from brown to orange and red, to purple and blue. It was incredible.

Grand Canyon is an incredible place. It really is.

25/7: Vladimiro had been to Grand Canyon National Park before. Many times. He had a secret spot, and to get there you had to walk for thirty minute through the low and sparse conifer forest on the south rim of the canyon.

Along the path, there were several burned tree stumps. They were surrounded by healthy, living trees, so a wildfire didn’t seem likely. But oh, I was in heaven, in the company of a professor and a PhD student of physical chemistry, the discussion turned very scinentific. We ended up agreeing on that the burned trees probably had been hit by lightning.

Mom, on the other hand, was busy being worried about the cougars. There had been signs by the road, warning us about cougars. So, mom couldn’t stop asking about how we should act if a cougar attacked. Apparently, we were supposed to fight back. A human can’t win a fight against a bear, which means fighting back would probably only make things worse. But a cougar might actually give up, if met with resistance. So when we found this big paw mark in the mud, she got nervous and started preparing for the fight. Sadly (atleast in my oppinion), we never saw any cougars.

Then, finally, we reached the edge – and were met by this curious rock formation of sandstone.

25/7: Mom’s friend Vladimiro the university professor picked us up at the airport in Phoenix together with his PhD student Daniel. But we barely had time to sleep, before it was time to get back on the road again. This time, we were bound north.

We had lunch at an Amish diner. I got sauerkraut. I love sauerkraut.

And for deser, I had a warm pecan pie. I’m ambivalent towards the American cooking in general – but they do know how to make pie.

Arizona is an odd place. Not at all as I expected it to be. At 2500 meters above sea level, they had a pine forest. And even high, gangly birches! Not at all the desert I expected.

And in the middle of this, a tiny chapel. A calm place, with a wall-sized window facing the forest.

And on the other side – the grass.

But then, eventually, the landscape turned back into the kind of dry steppe that I had been expecting. Beautiful, this too. The sparse vegetation makes the mountains so bare. Almost as if they were naked. Deserts are like striptease for geology nerds.

24/7: On the way back from King’s Canyon, we stopped by another giant sequoia grove.

This is what they look like, the baby sequoias.

There were squirrels everywhere. Seriously. Everywhere.

Mom, walking through a hollow giant tree trunk.

And then the journey down the mountain started.

By the foot of the mountain, on the edge of the San Jaquin valley, the greeness of the orange trees gave a strange contrast to the yellowish grey soil and steppe grass.

At the Fresno airport, we left our lovely yellow Chevrolet. During our seven day roadtrip, it had carried us for 1078 miles. That’s 1735 kilometers. Pretty decent roadtrip, I would say.

An hour later, we boarded the plane that would take us southeast, down into the desert.