The Wild West. Epic scenery. Pioneers. Route 66. Red Indians. Ghost towns. Two-mile-long trains.
With so many themes, is it hard to know where to begin a blog about the USA's South-West?
How about this?
The very first person I met on our trip was friends with the sister of Butch Cassidy, the Wild West's most successful outlaw.
WESTERN MAGIC
I've loved Westerns since I was a kid. Thanks, Dad.
I've loved history – particularly exploration of new lands – since a round-the-world trip 15 years ago, at age 27.
So I was cooing with delight when sitting in a rocking chair in the actual cabin of the sheriff who rescued Mormon pioneers stuck in snow in 1856.
And when my son Leo, 3, and I climbed onto a real hooped canvas wagon in a restored 1880 village, all my dreams had come true.
Within five minutes of arriving for my first taste of the Wild West at Salt Late City's Mormon Pioneer Museum, I was rubbing my jetlagged eyes with disbelief when, while leafing through a Butch Cassidy book, the elderly librarian told me she was a family friend. (and Cassidy's sister gave her a wedding present).
Constance Hutchison, the librarian, insists Cassidy was not killed in Bolivia – as shown in Paul Newman & Robert Redford's movie – but escaped and returned to Utah, died in 1937 and is buried within a day's ride of his hometown Circleville.
Constance's surprises just kept coming. She's also a direct descendant of the 1620 Mayflower's crewman John Alden.
NOW SIT DOWN, IT'S ALL MADE UP
Now make sure you're sitting down, Western fans.
The Wild West as you know it is a complete fabrication. Hollywood movie directors made the whole thing up.
Only a handful of face-to-face gunfights ever happened (eg OK Corral), and none at high noon.
Gunmen, who didn't wear cowboy hats and didn't wear holsters but kept a gun in their pocket, did not wait for an opponent to draw first, did not shoot from the hip without aiming, did not shoot accurately, and did not shoot from distance but close-up.
The fabrication about gunfights comes from sensational novels written after an 1867 newspaper article about a rare real gunfight involving Wild Bill Hickock. These novels were the inspiration for Hollywood westerns.
There were plenty of murders though, and gunmen were happy to shoot someone in the back, as Jesse James' cousin did to him to claim reward money.
And Native Americans were not the bad guys. They helped pioneers (who were stealing their land) navigate and plant crops, and traded with them.
Pioneers didn't circle their wagons to protect against Indians, but to prevent their cattle wandering off.
TUMBLEWEED & GOLD
But a two-foot wide ball of tumbleweed really did blow into our car one day.
The wind really does make a swish sound as it blows through scattered trees.
And the sheriff still posts $1,000 reward notices in saloon windows for a burglar.
Inside that saloon – the old stagecoach stables in Chloride, Arizona, population 420 now but 5,000 in the 1870s gold and silver strikes – a cowboy sung and danced to Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire.
We walked with only moonlight and a creaking hotel sign to guide us between restored wooden buildings in Oatman, population 70 but boasting 13 hotels and a suburb of tent brothels when $1 billion of gold was mined in the 1910s.
The next day, as a rattlesnake chattered, I found miners' century-old tins of oysters in gullies and peered between 20metre-high collapsed wooden mineheads down shafts, some 400m deep.
PIONEER SPIRIT
The California Gold Rush of 1849 had fanned the rush west.
The astonishing fact is that 500,000 pioneers made the five-month journey of up to 2,000 miles from the Mississippi over the Rockies for a new life in the West between 1830 and 1870 – and all those over age five walked. The whole way. Barefoot (Most were too poor to afford shoes).
Wagons were full with 1,200kg of dried food and equipment. Extra weight would slow the mule/ox, and the path was too narrow for wagons behind to overtake.
One in 10 pioneers died on the way, mainly due to disease, often cholera from polluted water, sometimes rivers accidentally polluted upstream by other pioneers.
Incredibly, 6,000 Mormons didn't even use wagons. The man of the family simply pulled a mini-wagon 'handcart.'
To understand why they did it, you need to understand how appalling conditions were in Europe.
The Industrial Revolution had turned cities into slums.
Poor factory workers met Mormon preachers and swopped 16 hours a day in a factory for a new life in the USA's West.
So when the pioneers finally made it to the West, what awaited them?
Racing to build a log cabin before they froze to death in winter.
TINGLES FOR ROCKS
I'd always loved Australia's scenery the most. But sorry, Bruce and Sheila, the US is now in first place.
It's just so big and expansive. Salt Lake City's valley is a whopping 18 miles wide, boasting epic Utah skies and wispy clouds kicked up by the Rockies.
But to bust some more misconceptions; Arizona and around is not desert.
Parts have green bushes, parts have cattle ranches and even crops, and the Grand Canyon is rimmed by a beautiful gnarly pine forest with red soil, 8ft elk (we almost hit one), and tarantulas (actually harmless).
Most remarkably, snow-capped mountains are visible in June – even from Death Valley.
Feeling like a pinprick is easy at the mile-deep, nine mile-wide Grand Canyon, looking down at rocks almost two billion years old - half the age of Earth - then gazing up at the sparkling Milky Way, shooting stars and satellites.
The power of nature is everywhere, especially when you realise the Canyon was created in just six million years, a blink of an eye in geological terms.
Note the Grand Canyon National Park is actually more of a valley, as it is not sheer-walled. Other parts of the Colorado River do have vertical cliffs, such as the Grand Canyon image you probably have in your head right now (thanks to google photo results), 400m-high Horseshoe Bend, 100 miles away; and the 300m-high spot where Leo and I swam in water surprisingly tepid given it was snowmelt.
That was at adventure sports and RV ('recreational vehicle,' think caravan the size of a house) capital Moab, boasting rock arches, some of the world's top dinosaur sites, and a Wrangler-sponsored rodeo with all the locals brilliantly in jeans, Stetsons and check shirts.
But for me the scenery was all about Monument Valley, arguably the world's most iconic natural wonder thanks to John Wayne westerns starring the 400m-high rock stacks made of compressed sand dunes beside an ancient sea which split the USA 270 million years ago.
My tingling anticipation sensation in the days before visiting was comparable only to the days before seeing Machu Picchu and the Northern Lights.
And the immensity of USA vistas was summed up by the view made famous in Forrest Gump: a dead straight road to an horizon with silhouettes of Monument Valley.
13 Navajo families live in the valley itself.
NO “HOW,” NO TEEPEES
Now to quash some Indian myths.
They don't raise their hand and say “How.”
They don't live in tepees.
And a wigwam is not a teepee.
Only the Sioux said “Howgh,” and didn't raise their hand.
Only the Plains natives lived in tepees (up to 6m high, with nine poles representing the nine months of pregnancy, covered by 15 buffalo hides).
A wigwam is an igloo-like dome of skins over thin sticks.
Natives in the South-West lived in – and some still live in, such as the grandparents of several Navajo people I met – a hogan, a thick timbered dome caked in adobe earth on walls and roof.
Some lived in stone houses hid by cliffs.
Hundreds of tribes lived in America before Europeans arrived in 1607.
They hunted and gathered, and traded and fought with their neighbours, scalping them, gruesomely especially prising the scalps of women and children (Demonstrating they had entered the heart of their rivals' camps).
Their culture's transformation by the horse is viewed as arguably the biggest transformation to occur in any culture.
It was obtained from Spanish Mexico in the 1600s. Previously, to catch buffalo – their main food – they had to drive herds off a cliff or don a wolf hide and creep close enough to spear them.
But the USA's greed for gold and land (eg increasing the size of the country by 50 per cent after deliberately provoking war with newly-independent Mexico in 1848) meant the native population plummeted from between two and 15 million to 250,000 by 1890.
European diseases were the main cause. Indian Wars saw General Custer appallingly boast of easy victories after murdering women and children. Forced marches to detainment camps killed thousands.
No wonder the Hualapi people we met have brochures and posters calling their treatment genocide and terrorism.
Living standards today on reservations (semi-autonomous Indian land) are far lower than the general population.
60,000 of the 180,000 Navajo on their reservation have no mains electricity or water.
More than half of all deaths on the Hualapai reservation are alcohol-related.
But traditions remain.
All main life ceremonies are still held in hogans, including healing ceremonies as medicine men drizzle coloured sand on the floor to create stylized art symbols, wiped away before sunset to represent healing.
The biggest celebration in woman's life is for her first period, when 200 extended family members demolish a 5ft-wide cake. There's no typo.
Weddings – not allowed to someone within one of the foour clans each person has, and disproved of to a white person – attract 500 guests. All male guests must arrive by horse. Really.
Many Navajo speak their language as their first language. (and taught me, eg yaaheth = hello, dejunier = beautiful)
Most live in modern homes, but we saw elderly folk in a town dressed in stunning red and blue traditional clothes, even for a trip to the local supermarket.
And young adults share traditional beliefs – such as that rare tornadoes this year were punishment for the Navajo's current generation losing their culture.
SACRED TARMAC, TITANIC TRAINS
We followed the road of dreams down Route 66.
Tens of thousands of families in Model T Fords emigrated to California down the now-sacred Tarmac after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and 1930s Dust Bowl Great Plains drought.
Coming-of-age, Chicago-to-LA, 2,000-mile road trips followed in the 50s and 60s – and then the towns died overnight in 1984 when bypassed by new highways.
Now, Route 66 nostalgia is rescuing the towns with a tourism boom, especially in Seligman, Arizona, time-warped in the 1950s with neon signs and the famous Snowcap ice diner with old pick-up trucks parked in the garden with painted-on eyes on the windscreen – a significant inspiration for animated movie Cars.
The problem with a diner from 1953 is you have a 1953 menu.
We muddled our way through the menu, which included milkshake (a meal in itself), malt (1950s milkshake loaded with malt barley), float (ice cream in fizzy drink), root beer (fizzy sugarcane) and sundae (milkshake with ice cream).
The big attraction on Route 66 for Leo was not the road, not the milkshakes, and not the motels (hot tubs, ice machines and king-size beds blitzed preconceptions of low standards).
It was the freight train line, running alongside the road for...100 miles.
Leo's favourite activity on our trip was giving train drivers and lorry drivers the horn gesture (fist above head, pull arm down to shoulder level, shout 'naaah naaah,' leap with delight when driver lets blast).
First we counted a train with 109 wagons. We thought that was a big one. Then we got 128. Surely we couldn't beat that.
Then, one epic day, Leo and I leapt from our car at a level crossing as a train passed at 40mph. Over three minutes later - I know, I videoed it - a 272-wagon monster had passed.
Each wagon held a shipping container. They are 12m long. Plus coupling makes 15m per wagon x 272 wagons = 4km-long train.
Oh, and every wagon was stacked with two shipping containers. That's 530 shipping containers on one train. 40,000 tonnes. Half a cruise ship.
So that's why the train had nine engines.
And guess what? It overtook our car at 60mph later in the day.
Who goes to a place with such colossal sizes of road and rail?
People making colossal journeys of their own, of course.
An elderly couple in a glimmering red 1938 Buick with an immaculate dashboard pulled up next to us at a garage. They were doing a 2,500 mile return trip in three days each way.
Rock band AC/DC's Austrian bouncer gave Nati a spin on his Harley Davidson. He was doing 7,000 miles in three weeks.
But a guy I saw walking into a supermarket in a yellow shirt stole the show. Robert Cleave is 16 months into an 18,000-mile, 18-month round-the-world cycle. So how old is the fit fellow? 64 – he's just retired.
YES WE WENT TO VEGAS, NEW PERSPECTIVE
Our meagre 1,200 miles was accompanied by my exploding Spotify account's playlists of road trip rock, 50s and 60s, country, western movie themes, Aaron Copland's hoof-racing Hoedown (imagine the Oklahoma land rush as a five-minute classical epic), Native American flute – and house music classics such as Utah Saints, The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds, and Power of American Natives.
There's a tiny time window to visit the USA's South West if you don't want to be frazzled or frozen.
Route 66 had snow two weeks before our 30C visit in early June.
Vegas, which has 4C spring nights, leapt in nine days from 22C to 38C - and is staying that hot every day the three months.
It's down to the 1,000-2,000 metre Colorado Plateau's altitude, and the desert.
Vegas, virtually single-handedly popularised by mobster-friendly Frank Sinatra by the way, is not a Dubai-esque futuristic metropolis in the desert. Two blocks off the main drag could be any other city (My attempt at performing the Levi's advert in a launderette was cut short by Nati).
But it's exciting to see the famous hotels (some with 16,000 beds; that's four cruise ships), Bellagio's fountains really are beautiful, 1950s Fremont Street's four-block long video ceiling is mesmerising, and the 1950s neon signs scrapyard is fun.
Salt Lake City is Vegas' antithesis. The near-sober, immaculate, blue-skied home of the Mormon church, is bursting with green grass and super-sized houses below the snow-capped edge of the Rocky Mountains.
It's super friendly, five-kid families are standard, and, walking down the street at sunset on Memorial Day, I was invited to a neighbours veranda barbecue and plied with hotdogs and amazing toasted marshmallow-and-cracker sandwiches.
They are great people, so they're not Trump supporters, of course. Wrong. They're all massive Trump fans.
The USA's South-West is not the land of fake news however, it's the land of no news. It was impossible to buy a newspaper. They're just not sold in shops any more.
As I was flying from Europe to the west of the USA for the first time, I expected we'd fly west from London, right?
So I was increasingly staggered to pass my home town of Lincoln, due north of London; then Edinburgh; Greenland's ice and fjords, and; Canadian Hudson Bay's five-mile wide icebergs drifting down the North West Passage.
The reason is the world's countries are not as we see them on the standard Mercator Projection world map, but actually, as the Peters Projection shows, droopy like wet washing on a line, so arcing north is shorter than flying west in the straight line you would expect on the Mercator Projection.
An appropriate start to a trip which also corrected my perspective on the magnificent Wild West.
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