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You've heard about the place where the road ends.
In the Arizona Strip, that almost uninhabited area
north of the Grand Canyon, the road ends at the Bar
10 Ranch.
The Bar 10 is a working cattle ranch, with 500 head
at home on the range, 10,000 acres of hilly, wash-cut
range. The ranch sits at the top of Whitmore Wash,
just west of 7,702-foot Mount Emma. It is 80 miles
from the nearest town, 80 miles from the nearest
paved road, 80 miles from the nearest telephone pole
and 80 miles from the nearest electrical line.
But for those who run the rapids through the Canyon
on Colorado River rafts, the Bar 10 is a haven, their
first opportunity in a week to take a hot shower.
For many people, the Bar 10, at river Mile 187, is
where their rafting trip - and their seven-day vacations
- ends. For others, the ranch is where they begin
a two-day float toward Lake Mead.
Only four paved roads interrupt the 14,000 square
miles (that's an area the size of the states of New
Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut, combined) that
comprise the Arizona Strip, and that pavement only
cuts across the Strip's northern fringes. Most people
who visit the Heaton family's Bar 10 Ranch arrive
by airplane, after a 100-mile sightseeing flight
from Las Vegas, or by helicopter, after a six-minute
climb out of the inner gorge.
Bob Kehoe, a writer from Oregon, and I arrive on
a Vision Air flight out of Las Vegas. We're been
shuttled by a sightseeing excursion that provides
commentary in English, German, Japanese and Spanish,
and detoured from its normal flight path to drop
us off on the ranch's oiled landing strip.
We are at the ranch not to start a rafting trip
but for our leg of the Cayenne Crossing Drive for
Hope. Cayenne Crossing is Porsche Cars North America's
initiative to use its new sport utility vehicle to
support efforts to restore and to maintain historic
auto roads and trails. Drive for Hope is a Porsche-supported
program that, with other corporate sponsors and private
donations, raises money --some quarter-million dollars
this year -- for The
Hope Foundation and its clinical cancer research.
The drive began with four Cayenne
Turbos departing Santa Monica, California and
making their way around much of southern California.
After a night in Barstow, an off-pavement crossing
of the Mohave Desert and a night in Las Vegas, the
Cayennes again put their low range traction into
action while traversing off-road trails across the
Arizona Strip to the Bar 10. The Heatons, who have
lived on the Arizona Strip for four generations,
have a cowboy dinner cooking in Dutch ovens and they
and the college students who work here in the summer
season are ready to treat our group to the dress
rehearsal of the country and western musical show
they'll do nightly for the guests who float and fly
in.
Although remote, the ranch isn't primitive. It has
a modern lodge with kitchen, dining area, showers,
rest rooms and a loft with dorm rooms and bunk beds.
Power, which is shut off around 10 p.m., comes from
solar batteries backed up by a propane generator.
The Heatons have satellite television at their house,
and a satellite Internet hookup in their office in
the lodge. There's a satellite telephone in case
of an emergency. But otherwise they're cut off from
the outside world except for their arriving guests,
helicopter pilots who shuttle folks to and from the
river and for their weekly grocery-shopping trip
to St. George, Utah, where most of the family lives
during the school year.
In addition to those bunk beds indoors, the ranch
has about a dozen covered wagons, each equipped with
a double mattress, sleeping bags and pillows. Even
though it's cold and very windy outside, I eagerly
opt for one of the wagons. The wind whips through
the gaps between the roof and the wagon's end flaps,
but the canvas cover has a warm glow on a moonlit
night.
Morning comes early. Breakfast is ready by 6 a.m.
and soon we're on the road, though we won't hit pavement
until around noontime.
Each of our Cayennes carries three people and their
gear and has a Thule car-top carrier that holds extra
tires, fuel, oil and water. Hanging off the back
of each vehicle is a new Aprilia Rally 50 scooter,
mounted on a Moto-Tote carrier that attaches to the
SUV's trailer hitch.
We estimate that each of the twin-turbocharged,
450-horsepower Porsche V8 engines with its 457 pound-feet
of torque is moving around 7000 pounds. But even
the steepest and rockiest sections of the BLM trails
we travel pose no problem for the Cayennes or their
Pirelli Scorpion A/T tires.
We follow a roundabout route up and down hills and
along shelf roads before reaching a flat plateau
and the historic Mount Trumbull Schoolhouse site.
Next we cross Potato Valley and the Uinkaret Mountains
before turning south toward the Grand Canyon and
spectacular Toroweap Point with its unguardrailed,
3000-foot vertical drop off into the Canyon.
Some four million people a year visit the Grand
Canyon's South Rim. Only 400,000 make their way by
pavement to the North Rim. But only 10,000 accept
the off-road challenge and make their way to Toroweap
Point, where some crawl to the edge rather than risking
a false -- and fatal - final step.
Leaving Toroweap Point, the nearby Vulcan's Throne
and the Lava Falls rapids in the river below, we
head out through Antelope Valley on a sand and gravel
road that's smooth enough that we can switch off
the Porsche Stability Management system and let the
tail wag a little through the curves.
It's around noon when we finally reach pavement,
where the Cayenne carrying our off-road guides turns
left, toward California, while the others turn right,
to refuel at Fredonia, Arizona, population 1,036,
before heading south on U.S. 89A and more breathtaking
scenery, and even a few snowflakes.
U.S. 89A crosses the high Kanab Plateau, and at
Jacob Lake junctions with Arizona 67, the paved route
to the North Rim.
East of Jacob Lake, U.S. 89A presents amazing views
of the Vermilion Cliffs before making a wide, horseshoe
bend that has the Navajo Bridge across Marble Canyon
as its keystone. The Bridge, actually, there are
two of them, side by side, the old one, built in
1929, now reserved for foot traffic, was the only
way across the Colorado River in the 600-mile span
until the construction of the Glen Canyon and Hoover
dams.
Soon 89A is interrupted by U.S. 89 and we turn south
along the Echo Cliffs, Painted Desert and Cinder
Hills toward Flagstaff, where there's still snow
on Mt. Humphrey, at 12,643 feet the tallest of the
San Francisco Peaks, and the tallest in the state.
Just south of Flag, 89A again separates from the
main highway and winds us down through narrow Oak
Creek Canyon to Sedona, where the Enchantment Resort
hosts our caravan for dinner, which we eat outside
as we watch the shadows of Boynton Canyon work their
way up the red rock cliffs as the sun sets behind
us.
Enchantment lives up to its name, but there are
miles to go before we sleep, the last real sleep
the Cayenne crew will get for the next three nights.
We spend the night at the Scottsdale Princess resort,
and in the morning Bob Kehoe and I must give up our
seats to Porsche Club of America members who also
are cancer survivors. They'll join the Cayenne's
keepers, who are led by Billy Edwards, s whose 15-year-old
step-daughter's cancer has been in remission for
nearly 2 ½ years, on a round-the-clock, then
around and around again run across New Mexico and
Texas, then up to St. Louis, Nashville and Atlanta,
stopping long enough only for fuel, food and to spread
the word about Cayenne Crossing and the Drive for
Hope.
They'll finally spend the night in beds at the Cascade
Mountain Inn in Fancy Gap, Virginia. The next morning
they'll do another off-road section, then make brief
stops at Washington, D.C., and Baltimore before the
Crossing concludes in New York City.
They call Manhattan the concrete canyon, and the
view from the observation platform on the 86th story
of the Empire State Building is spectacular. But
you'd need to stack three Empire State Buildings
on top of each other just to reach the height of
the stunning North Rim vantage at Toroweap.
And Toroweap has another thing going for it: You
have to take a long elevator ride to the top of the
concrete canyon, but you can drive to the breath-taking
view of the Grand Canyon.
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