My husband, friends, and I sat huddled at a faux-marble-topped table in the lobby of our Utah hotel, looking down at a Google Maps route pulled up on my iPhone. We pinched and scrolled the screen as the breakfast buffet crowd hummed around us.
We were less than a week into a Great American Road trip — one that would take us 9,000 miles from coast to coast and border to border. Today’s agenda was to relocate from Moab, the gateway city for Arches and Canyonlands national parks, to our hotel near Bryce Canyon. But there was a problem:
Utah was on fire.
To the west of us, the Cottonwood Fire had burned through 94,000 acres of forest and mountain towns, making it the largest conflagration in the United States. To the east, the Jones Fire had just erupted near the ghost town Cisco, its smoke plume looming on the flat horizon, visible from our hotel room. In total, more than a dozen wildfires were burning across the state, closing roads and turning the skies an ominous orange. We had to find a safe way through.
“If we take Route 89, it takes us straight into the middle of the Cottonwood Fire,” said my childhood friend Jessie, who had joined us with her husband for the Utah leg of our trip.
“There’s Route 72 through Loa, but that isn’t much farther away,” my husband said.
We switched apps from Google Maps to Watch Duty, a real-time wildfire tracker, waiting for it to load our precise location. My kids shifted their attention from their stacks of chocolate chip pancakes to the screen, which was covered in fire symbols. My 12-year-old son looked at me, worried.
“The edge of the Cottonwood Fire is creeping toward Route 72, too,” I noted. We had to make a decision and get going.
Family and friends flew over from Europe in 1988 for a roadtrip that had been planned for years but was waiting on me turning 9 to be eligible to raft the Grand Canyon.
After hitting Bryce but skipping Zion for some reason, we headed north.
We had the better part of a week planned just outside Jackson Hole, Wyo., but Yellowstone was on fire, so we pretty much spent that time at the ranch.
From there, it was on to Estes Park, Colo., for some time up at a mountain lodge.
In college, I'd do summer roadtrips just generally meandering about the West. Gas was about a buck a gallon after getting off the coast, and I could coax 52 mpg out of my manual Civic, so it was absurdly cheap.
I can't begin to imagine what the college summer experience is like now -- let alone family road trips -- but it's very apparent that things won't improve moving forward.