U.S. 89 Winter Wonderland

For the last couple of days, we helped our son Chris drive his car back from Austin, Texas to school in Provo, Utah. There is not an obvious best route from Texas to Utah, but one of our favorites in the winter (when you usually want to avoid driving in Colorado) is I-10 to Phoenix then US 89 from Flagstaff up through Page and then southern Utah.

Here is a map, courtesy of the US 89 Appreciation Society, showing how it runs the full length of the USA, north to south. We drove about a third of it, the northern half of Arizona and two thirds of Utah. It is a pretty spectacular drive. So if you are ever looking for a US highway to drive to see a variety of spectacular nature in the American west, you could do worse. We used to drive it to see friends in Phoenix when we lived in Utah, then made it part of our frequent ramblings from Texas to Utah, where we often have someone in school, and Idaho, where most of my family live.

It is pretty spectacular in both summer and winter. Oddly enough, it is frequently less snowy than Interstate 15, which parallels it on the other side of a tall spur of the Rocky Mountains. Often the snow falls heavier on the western side than the eastern side of the mountains. But we hit a couple of snowy patches along the way anyway.

Here is a shot of the Sevier River along U.S. 89 in the middle of Utah near Marysvale. The river runs along much of US 89. The prettiest part is actually a bit further south from Kanab to Long Valley, but we ended up driving most of that at night this time. That part is heavily forested, so the Utah section of US 89 sort of alternates between classic western forests along a river and the red rock bluffs and hills for which Utah is probably most famous.

You can see those red rock bluffs, with all their differently colored geological strata in the next shot of the mountains further north between Richfield and Salina on US 89/ I-70.

After the very pretty but much more domes- ticated greenness of Denmark, it is sort of fun to immerse in the wild and spectacular mountains of the American west. Having grown up there, some part of me craves it pretty deeply.