Another long day enjoying the beauty that is Utah…
We started with Dead Horse Point State Park. This park in on one of the many mesas or plateaus, with steep cliffs all around dropping precipitously into the canyon below. At the bottom of the canyons is a river. In the case of today’s parks, it is either the Green River or the Colorado River…
One of the fingers of the mesa sticks our as a point or peninsula, connected to the main mesa by a narrow neck, about 90 feet wide. Legend tells the story of cowboys who rounded up a herd of wild Mustang horses. They herded them onto the point and blocked the neck with rocks and branches. It made for a natural corral. But these cowboys took the horses they wanted, and left the others penned up on the point to die… Thus the name. I don’t know if the legend is true, but it just may be apocryphal…
We do know that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the various points were used as natural corrals for herds of sheep from time to time…
Anyhow, we drove out to the park. Along the way we stopped off to see the Monitor and Merrimac…
I don’t always get the images some people see in the rocks, but I’ll take their word for it…
We stopped at the Visitors Center… Quite a nice building, by the way…
We hiked from the Visitors Center to the viewpoint of the point. It is hot this time of the year in Moab – about 100 degrees…
This is the point, with the narrow neck…
And so we pressed on – lots of territory to get through today…
Canyonlands National Park has three sections, each separated by steep canyons. Island in the Sky, Needles, and The Maze. You cannot get from one to the other unless you hike, or have a 4WD vehicle and you drive the steep gravel roads cut into the sides of the canyons. While we do have 4WD in the big red truck, we chose to confine our visit to Island in the Sky…
Our first stop was the Mesa Arch. It was a short walk off the road. What is so special is not only the view through the arch, but the fact that the arch is literally on the edge of the mesa. Walk through it and you will drop over 1,000 feet to the canyon below…
The drop is precipitous…
The view through the arch is fascinating…
The views all around show the rugged canyons below…
Walking back to the big red truck we found it interesting that the park service builds cairns or Ebeneezers to mark the trails…
We stopped at several overlooks and viewed the canyons below…
We found these posters interesting in that they explained why the canyons and mountains look like they do…
But it was time to go. We headed back to The Villa and relaxed. It was close to 100 degrees, so we huddled inside with the AC on. We had a little Happy Hours and light supper.
This evening we had another Fandango, meeting new friends. We had met all the folks already, but we still enjoyed learning a bit more about their lives.
After the Fandango, when we returned to The Villa, we found that college football was in full force. Great games were aplenty…
Florida was beaten by Kentucky for the first time in, like, a millennium. Big Bad (over-rated) Clemson barely survived Texas A&M, LSU and Alabama both beat up poor Jr. College gimmie games that are so much a part of their soft schedules. Stanfurd played U$C, which is always difficult for us, because we want them both to lose… U$C scored the fewest point against Stanfurd in 86 years, and didn’t even score a touchdown. UCLA got walloped by another mediocre school for the second time this season, and Colorado beat Big Red Nebraska.
And, 190 miles north of here, in Provo, Utah, Cal beat BYU ! Go Bears!
And an enjoyable time was had by all…
And an enjoyable time was had by all…
About 4 miles in we turned off into Castle Valley, a semi-residential area. This valley is unlike anything we have seen in Utah. All green – even the rock-faced mountains…
Adventures in the Villa 