Expedition South - Episode 11 - Arizona to Canada

Welcome to episode 11. I start in the small Arizona town of Kanab, where I'll head east through Monument Valley and Colorado, then north to Utah to Arches and Canyonlands National Park. Continue further north through the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone, then further up to Canada and eventually Alaska. I start by visiting the cool site of the Glen Horseshoe Canyon, followed by a journey into the earth through some Navajo Slot Canyons. They are so beautiful as they are deadly during flash floods, The detail and beauty of this incredible sandstone is gorgeous. If you're lucky, you'll get the 10 minutes of sunlight that enter each day for a fiery and unique experience that will make your pictures come out incredible and unlike any other. I then continued through the warm and flat Arizona terrain to Monument Valley, another sacred Navajo area. Again, the beauty is unique and unlike any other in all the Americas and world, the most beautiful area in my opinion in the lower 48. Here I am Cowsurfing near Monument Valley in Northern Arizona, and our gracious host Charity here is taking us in her beautiful little jeep to Monument Valley. The couple from the Czech Republic. There you go. And they're surfing with Charity as well. I went back the following day with my Cowsurfing host and the couple from the Czech Republic to check out the place in the morning. Dude, there are way too many tourists here. Kind of ruins the whole effect. Talk about your typical tourist. So here's another example of a tourist trap. In this case, an American tourist trap. Or in this case, a Navajo tourist trap is Welcome to the Four Corners USA. This is where the four states of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah meet. And you got to pay like five bucks to the tribe to get in. So that's another five bucks. I'm not spending just a step on an imaginary line. So here I was just, you know, just doing nothing. And this biker comes up to me and he sees my stuff. And he says, what an amazing thing you're doing. Great trip. I talked to him a few minutes. And what? He gives me $80. He just gives me $80 absolutely. I love the way you're traveling. I love what you're doing. Keep it up. And he gave me 80 bucks. So that comes to show you the amazing generosity of just random people all over the world. It was an enlightening experience. I hope everybody gets that experience at some point in their life. So what's the big difference between Latin America and the United States is that when there's traffic jams like this, there's police and stuff that will cite you if you go around them or to the front of the line, which in Latin America you can do without an issue. And even the police encourage it because it helps smooth traffic out. So not in the States. Strict laws and stuff. People got to follow. There's a difference for you. I then made my way east to Colorado through the eeriest, most burnt area I've ever seen. It was an amazing contrast to see life and death separated by a black and yellow road. So welcome to the Mesa Verde ruins in southwestern Colorado. As you can see, they're pretty well kept and not much is reconstructed. It's all pretty much original. They have, it's pretty nice. It's, you can kind of walk around freely and enjoy the area and even have a nice little place called the Kiva downstairs, where it's about 10 degrees cooler than it is up here above ground, which is kind of cool. They used to use it for ceremonies. And the ruins are pretty cool. And here are the original cliff dwellers. Many more in New Mexico for those who are around the area. I then headed to the largest ruins with a mandatory tour guide, as I'm sure they don't like people roaming around alone, the climb and destroy these already old and fragile structures. The experience of being in such a vast and powerful place was a delightful and enlightening moment. One of my goals this trip is to not stay in any hotels, either couch surfing or camping or whatever, but no hotels just to see if I can do it. And unfortunately, last night I came at a huge price. It wasn't fun when the sprinklers came on at two in the morning, stopped at three in the morning. Wasn't fun when a bunch of trailers came by, I dropped off a bunch of merchandise, trailers parked and turned on, turned off, honking, people coming in and out like crazy. So I guess that's what I get for camping out at Walmart. Orange chicken with orange juice. The breakfast of champions. Welcome to the hole in the rock in Utah. It's kind of cool, kind of creepy, kind of neat. This place is nothing more than a rock with a hole and a bunch of old junk, which around these parts are very common, perhaps from the days of the old west. I however finally solved the mystery of Bigfoot and found it. Who knew Bigfoot was in the hole in the wall in Utah? I continued onward to Arches National Park, where the largest concentration of arches in the world is located, along with other unique towers of sandstone and rock that are very unique and take thousands and thousands of years to erode into their present state. Entrance over there with a circle and there's another arch over there that is a double arch they say, and it's also in the movie Indiana Jones. That's right, Indiana Jones, again. Okay, I'll stop now. So I think one of the more adventurous hikes in Arches National Park if not the most adventurous, is getting to the double o loop. It's not even a trail, you just make your own way through and you have to get to the other side, so it's pretty cool. We have the landscape arch in Arches National Park. And this is the partition arch. This is called the Navajo arch. And finally, this is the double o arch. So I just saved you about four hours of hiking. You're welcome. So guess what I find at the delicate arch? It's our wonderful friends. Again, my theory of small yet big world. There's everybody waiting for the pictures. Because lighting is the most important thing in photography, everybody waited till sundown, where it's a crazy experience to have everyone yell at each other to move out of the way of the arch for the picture. Up next was Canyonlands National Park. I highly recommend to try the off-road white ring trail, which will completely blow your mind with the beautiful danger as you'll drive through the rim of the Grand Canyon all the way down. And if you see my Facebook profile picture and wondered how I take so many of my amazing shots, here's an example. I have 10 seconds to run and make it happen. But the results are an epic, mind-blowing Facebook profile picture I'll have for life. Extremely scary. It comes out with a good picture though. So again, another aspect of traveling with a bike is you got to change the oil every 2,500 to 3,000 miles. And here I am somewhere in Utah doing what I call a chaconne field change, oil field oil change, just because it's quite literally in the middle of nowhere. There's an RV park, nobody around, and that's the way I like it. That way I can do whatever I want. I've been into Walmart parking lots and stuff before and I got in trouble for that, so I guess I'll do it here, huh? So welcome to Aspen, Wyoming, in the middle of nowhere, and welcome to the world's largest Elkhorn Arch. Fun sight for the road in America, huh? I then finish the day with a cool camp spot near a river. The next day, I continue my public relations by blowing the mind of this couple with my Argentina to Alaska journey, who apparently didn't know what a camera was. I finally hit the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, where I ran into other bikers starting their own journey. It made me feel a little old having started the same journey just a year and a half ago, and they were just starting themselves. So this is my new friends from New Zealand. They're going to tour from Alaska to the tip of South America from where I've come from, and we're just talking shop tour, basically, of how to travel and so forth. So there you go, hello. I saw a cool sign, so I pulled over. So I could say I was the cousin of the biker. I had some delicious food for lunch and headed to the most geothermic active area on Earth, Yellowstone, where you'll see amazing geysers do their thing, but you'll have to deal with a thousand plus people watching the same thing. It makes traffic unbearable, almost like Disney World on crack. You'll also run into bison from far and up close and personal. Don't you just hate it when you're driving and that damn buffalo just gets in the way? And you wonder why these bison or the cousins went extinct. They just sit there and just look at you. I wonder if they shot them all to extinction. So sometimes I wish that you could capture smell on the video, but unfortunately you can't. But here, because of all the sulfur and all the geothermic active stuff, it smells like a bunch of rotten eggs. But the good thing is that if you're ever near a group of people, you can fart and nobody will ever know. So again, when you have to work on the bike and stuff, you just got to pick your area, which in this case is my cool couch surfer's house or yard for this case, and you got to take the whole thing apart on the bike. And it really sucks because it takes a lot of time and you have to put everything back together. Air filter, oil change, rear tire, rewiring of some things. I put cruise control on, so oil, air filter, and it's a whole day's event. So always fun. Stay tuned for the next episode where I'll deal with the cold and snow. I'll visit the craziest town in all Canada. I'll dance and celebrate myself all the way to Alaska. I'll reach the Arctic Circle, run out of gas, experience the most amazing sunset of the trip along with the Aurora Borealis, and I'll defy all odds and everyone's predictions of not being able to make it over the frozen pass and mountains to make it to the top of Alaska and the Arctic Ocean in my most amazing moment of glory and achievement as the last rider of the year to Prudhoe Bay. you