Canyonlands...You would think by now we have seen every interesting red rock in the state of Utah. Wrong! There are a lot of red rocks here, and thanks to Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir and a number of other selfless lovers of preservation of the natural world, we can see them today as they have evolved over millennia. But the parks and national monuments and national forests we have visited, red rocks or no red rocks, are all individual and unique. And every one of them is worth seeing. Today it was our luck to visit two of them, leisurely since we enjoyed a rare two nights in the same hotel. Canyonlands National Park has the distinction of being so unbelievably large that it has four sections called districts. Each has its own entrance and no two of them can be visited successfully in the same day. Here's what the the Island in the Sky District, which we visited, looks like:
Note there are three layers of canyons here.
Mary Frances holds a tuft of grass to keep from falling into the abyss.
One of several huge canyons in Canyonlands.
Mesa Arch...
OK, we're not as young as we were once, but the hike to Mesa Arch, listed as a half mile or so in the guide, but closer to a mile by the reckoning of our joints and my pulmonary brachia, and sneakily three-dimensional, was worth every ache and wheezy puff:
The Mesa Arch
Mary Frances at the Mesa Arch
The Mesa Arch, interrupted.
Mary Frances and a bristlecone pine which probably existed when King John signed the Magna Carta.
Buck Canyon...
This is perhaps the largest canyon of all in area, and an interesting feature of it is the huge canyon at the base of it. Of all the wonderful places we visited in Utah, this one most deserves the adjective: vast.
Buck Canyon, Island in the Sky District, Canyonlands National Park.
Buck Canyon, Island in the Sky District, Canyonlands National Park.
Mary Frances at the Buck Canyon overlook.
Fences made from the fallen branches of ancient bristle cones.
So big...
How big are the three major canyons in Canyonland? This big: all of the things ever manufactured by man, every building, every highway, every bridge, every ship, every artifact ever made could fit into any one of them. The pyramids, the acropolis, the coliseum, the great wall of China, and all of the concrete, asphalt and cobblestones that created every road in the world since civilization began. These places are beautiful and ancient and huge. Do I feel small and insignificant now, exposed to all this? Hell no. As a sentient being, just the opposite. I feel sorry, I suppose, for the inhabitants of this place, the antelope and big horn sheep who eat the grass but cannot, as we, contemplate the long geologic history of this place. But for us, I feel joy, that we have such beauty to embrace, such wonders to study, so many wonderful clues to the evolution of the world under our feet and our own nascence. Driving away from such a place I feel larger myself, and happier that all the silly wrangling of politics, all the nonsense of entertainment, all the selfish positioning of economics about which we humans fret and worry, will be long gone and forgotten, but these magnificent places will remain.
Once again, Mary Frances is sick of getting her picture taken.
Arches National Park...
The fat kid about to enter the last of the great Utah parks on this tour.
The three magi? The last of them is peculiarly feminine.
The Courthouse - Arches National Park.
Balance rock...
Mary Frances at Balance Rock. What keeps it there is beyond me.
More arches...
Windows arches.
Mary Frances at strange formations.
Sand Dune Arch...
The "fins" of Sand Dune Arch.
Mary Frances next to a "fin" wall at Sand Dune Arch.
Mary Frances and the "hole in the wall gang" at Sand Dune Arch.
Lazy old guy resting in the shade between the "fins" at Sand Dune Arch.
The Skyline Arch, Arches National Park.
Mary Frances, down the hill from the Delicate Arch, Arches National Park
We enjoyed two National Parks today, the last of our sojourn across Utah on the tour, and equally majestic as Zion and Bryce, Capitol Reef and the Red Canyon and all the incredible geography of the Escalante/Grand Staircase.
A nice dinner at Slickrock Cafe and a walk along the art and souvenir shops of Moab finished the day, and tomorrow we'll leave this wonderful state for a crossing of Colorado. We'll let you know what we find there.
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