The Long Way Down

This highway covers the three thousand two hundred feet between Desert View and Cameron, and you can feel it. The rule of thumb is five and a half degrees for every thousand feet you lose, so Cameron can run about eighteen degrees warmer than the rim. A day in the eighties at the Watchtower can be close to a hundred at Cameron. Heading east, you're driving down into that heat. Heading west, you're climbing out of it. The plants keep score. Ponderosa wants about sixty-five hundred feet or better. Pinyon and juniper hold the ground below, down to about forty-two hundred, so the trees tell you how high you are. To the east lies the Painted Desert, running from around Cameron and Tuba City southeast past Holbrook, about a hundred twenty miles by sixty. Its colors come from the Chinle Formation, siltstone, mudstone and shale holding iron and manganese. That's also where you'd go looking for dinosaurs. The canyon's rocks are older than the oldest known dinosaurs, so the canyon has no dinosaur fossils. The nearest are in the Chinle, on the Navajo Reservation and at Petrified Forest. In the late nineteen twenties the Fred Harvey Company kept up a primitive road from the canyon to Cameron, and its buses took visitors to the trading posts at Cameron and Tuba City. The highway was paved in nineteen thirty-six as the Cameron Approach Road, nine projects and a little over a million dollars for thirty-one miles. That road generally followed the Navahopi Trail, which Navajos and Hopis used long before there was a national park to drive to.