Editor’s note: Ocracoke Islanders Tom and Carol Pahl are on a trek around the United States (following 70-degree weather) and will report back from time to time their reflections. This is their eighth dispatch.

By Tom Pahl

Traveling through the western states, you can’t help but notice the many creative and colorful place names. 

Towns, mountains, mesas, arroyos, creeks, plateaus, canyons, rivers: I picture the settlers moving westward, overcoming unimaginable hardships in their little covered wagons and ox carts, growing more and more poetic with every hazard conquered. 

And also growing more unrestrained, becoming the wilderness, even as they conquer it.  Antelope Wells, Big Hatchet Peak, Dragon Mountains, Death Trap Canyon, Amarillo, Abilene, Alamogordo, Sierra Del Cabello Muerto, Rough Run, Tombstone, Terlingua, Study Butte, Dark Canyon Creek, Angel Fire, Highlonesome, Dripping Springs, Sangre De Cristo, Punkin, Skull Valley, Froze Creek, Dog Springs Arroyo, Poor Will, Whitewater Draw, Dry Gulch, Hell Roaring Mesa, Fool’s Gulch, Bad Water, Big Flat, Whitewater Baldy, Vermillion Cliffs, Willow Wash, Big Ugly Creek, Happy Valley, Suffering Wash, Deadman Mesa, Mollie’s Nipple, Painted Desert, Hackberry Canyon, Cad’s Crotch, Mexican Hat, Meander Canyon, Dead Horse Point.  There is a nearly endless supply of poetry on a map of the western states.

Without planning it, a good part of our travels has involved crossing, re-crossing and following the Rio Grande.  In retrospect, it should have been obvious that rivers would guide our meanderings across the southwest, because rivers have always led travelers through the wilderness, literally and metaphorically. 

Many of the roads through Texas and New Mexico and Arizona, and Utah are former cart paths and before that they were hunting trails which followed migrating game along the great rivers of the west. 

As we travel the highways, Texas Route 170 along the Mexican border, Interstate 25, connecting Los Cruces and Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Utah Routes 163 and 162, New Mexico Route 64, we are following ancient river routes that are tens of thousands of years old.

Carol was the first of us to cross the Rio Grande, in Big Bend National Park at the Port of Entry at Boquillas.  Boquillas is a little town just over the border which I only saw by standing on the north bank of the river, looking through binoculars, because Tom failed to bring his passport on this trip.  And so, Carol crossed alone, in a little skiff which was pulled across the river by rope. 

It was there, as the story goes, that she had “the absolute best mini-tacos and margarita ever,” at a colorful little café on a sandy road in Boquillas.  I benefit from hearing the story re-told (and dare I say, “embellished”) whenever we eat at any other Mexican restaurant that’s not in a dusty border town only accessible by rope-pulled skiff.

Not to be outdone, I also crossed the Rio Grande at Big Bend.  One hot afternoon, I was exploring along the river and found a shallows, where I waded through water about knee deep and visited Mexico briefly “de facto,” as opposed to Carol’s more satisfying and noteworthy “de jure” visit.  

And again, a week later, we found a hot spring along the river, also within Big Bend National Park, which had the benefit of naturally occurring, comfortably warm water, just deep enough for a relaxing sit. 

And if you wanted to cool off, it was easy enough to slip out of the hot spring into the river for a swim. It was such that I made my second de facto visit to Old Mexico, and, cumulatively, our third crossing of the Rio Grande. Little did we know that we would end up crossing the Rio Grande dozens of times more before we finally bid adieu to the great river.

We followed the Rio Grande through Castolon, and Terlingua, and Lajitas, and Presidio, through the Big Bend Ranch State Park and through some of the most spectacular high desert scenery anywhere. 

Finally, after crossing and re-crossing the river in Los Cruces, we left the Rio Grande behind for a couple of months while we explored Arizona and Utah.

Other rivers guided our travels, though. We crossed the Santa Cruz several times, which flows north and west out of Tucson. Though “flow” is a poor description of a mostly dry (dry as scorpion spit) riverbed that lies in anguish for an end to the years-long killing drought that is afflicting the Southwest.

Further north, the Salt River originates in the Superstition Mountains that straddle Fort Apache Reservation, east of Phoenix. The Salt River actually does flow with water, cutting through ancient lava fields and the Salt River Canyon.  

The water of the Salt River spreads out behind a dam at Roosevelt Lake where we camped for a week of spectacular desert views and one incredible sky-on-fire sunset. Then it flows westward through Phoenix to join the Gila River and then the great Colorado River on its southern passage where it finally empties into Mexico’s Gulf of California.

The Colorado is, of course, best known for having carved out the Grand Canyon. It originates in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado, where snow and glacial ice melt above the tree line and start a journey of geologic wonder, south and west through some of America’s most breathtaking landscapes.  We first joined up with the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon and then followed it upstream to Lake Powell, Antelope Canyon and Glen Canyon.

Though the flow of the Colorado River is only about 60 million years old, the river cuts through basalt, granite, and sandstone, exposing outcroppings that are among the oldest known rock in the world, some of it, according to geologists, nearly two thousand million years old. 

 At Glen Canyon, the San Juan, another of the southwest’s great rivers joins the Colorado.  Continuing our upstream journey, we camped along the San Juan in Southern Utah and then followed along its shores where it defines the northern border of the great, 17-million-acre Navajo Nation.

In the Navajo language this land is called Naabeehó Bináhásdzo, or Diné Bikéyah.  The first is a delineation of the land itself; the second referrs to the concept of the Navajo Nation. The word Diné translates into English as “The People.” Much like the word “Pueblo,” Diné is a concept that deeply reflects native history when tribal groupings described themselves by those things that defined them most closely: their community, their language, their means of survival, as opposed to their borders.

Today, the Diné Bikéyah has around 330,000 members and the Diné Bináhásdzo about 175,000. The Navajo language is called Diné Bizaad. It is spoken by some 170,000 Navajo people, and within the community it is forbidden to teach the language to non-Navajos.  This, and severely restricting outsiders’ access to Navajo land, are defenses, maybe too little, too late, but understandable, nonetheless.

Further east, we landed in Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque.  There, at an urban campground, we stayed where we could once again see and hear the river water of the Rio Grande. We visited with good friends Tammy and John who we first came to know in Ocracoke, as I had the great fortune of designing and building their house. And for the first time in almost four months, we got rain.  In fact, it rained off and on for four days and it wasn’t long before we began to complain (tongue-in-cheek) that “all it does here is rain,” while we watched the water rise in the Rio Grande.

From Bernalillo, we moved just a few miles north and spent two sunny weeks in a campground on Cochiti Lake. The lake was formed by construction of a huge dam on the Rio Grande in 1965, within the Cochiti Pueblo.  The natives of Cochiti Pueblo unsuccessfully opposed the construction of the dam, which takes up over 20% of their 50,000 acres of ancestral land. Lawsuits and political wrangling have gained them little in return, save a small financial remuneration and an official apology from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.     

Going in and out of the two campgrounds, visiting Albuquerque to the south and Santa Fe to the north, we must have crossed the Rio Grande another 20 times, at least.

Most memorable among those many crossings, though, was one by hot air balloon.  It was early morning.  We had received this ride as an adventure-gift for Christmas, months before, and it couldn’t have been more beautiful.  We rose up into a pale Albuquerque morning sky with only the occasional “whoosh” of the burners keeping us aloft. Otherwise there was just peaceful silence.  After a time, the Rio Grande came into view and our skilled and daring pilot not only brought us across the river but lowered the balloon down so that the basket touched the water before we lifted off again, just brushing the treetops on the north bank, as we rose away.

From Cochiti, we followed the river upstream to Taos, where we spent a week exploring the Taos Pueblo and the city of Taos, including a trip a few miles east to see the Rio Grande Gorge. 

Nearly 1,000 feet across, the gorge is the result of the ongoing collision of the Pacific and North American plates, creating a volcanically active rift valley some 29 million years old. Unlike the Colorado River, the Rio Grande didn’t so much carve its gorges and canyons as it borrowed them, when the land opened up from tectonic movement.

Crossing the gorge is a famously high and photogenic steel bridge, the seventh highest such bridge in the United States. If this kind of thing is bothersome to you, be forewarned: You can feel the bridge sway as you cross it 600 feet above the Rio Grande.

After four months in the southwest desert, it was with some trepidation that we headed north into the mountains of Colorado, having come to favor the dry desert environment. We knew we were in for a change, but even the knowing wasn’t preparation enough for the sudden shock.  

That evening, as we set up in our first alpine campsite in the Wet Mountains of San Isabel National Forest, at an elevation of around 8,000 feet, we felt like we had been transported to an alien planet.  It was cold and soggy.

The road was muddy, and the spruce trees dripped from a soaking rain earlier in the day. Clouds clung to the mountainsides and the following day, returning late from a day trip, we came through a snow squall that dumped four inches of icy slush on the road. 

It was, in fact, the mission of that day trip for us to bid adieu to the Rio Grande.  As it turns out, the headwaters of the Rio Grande are located in central Colorado, in the aptly named Rio Grande National Forest, about one hundred miles from our campsite. 

On the way, we followed Route 149 deep into the San Juan Mountains, along the Rio Grande, crossing and recrossing our old friend a dozen times.  The river was surprisingly robust, considering how close we were to its origin, but as we followed deeper and deeper into the forest, the river began to slow, and the banks grew closer. 

Of course, the actual origin of a river gets to be less obvious the closer you get to it. So, we were relieved to come to a National Forest sign designating a marshy, mountain meadow to be the headwaters of the Rio Grande. 

From there we part company with the river that had been so much a part of our journey.  And now, on to the alpine chapter of our travels: Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana. We count our blessings, and we’ll keep you posted.