Kari and I awoke this morning in the Holiday Inn in Grand Junction Colorado. The hotel was fabulous. It was the best to date on our trip. We both got a good night’s sleep. We grabbed a quick bite for breakfast and off we went. Shortly after leaving Grand Junction, we passed into Utah. We were headed west towards Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park. It was really interesting to see the terrain change so dramatically over a short distance. Mountains became canyons. Once we arrived at the entrance to Canyonlands, we stopped at a small information display to get any info we’d missed on the internet. We wanted to make sure that we were as informed as possible. Canyonlands in considered the most remote place in the United States. If you get out to hike and forget where the car is, you can easily walk for a week and not see a road or a person, so it’s really important that you know where you are going.
After gathering all the info, we headed down the road towards Canyonlands. We stopped at many beautiful lookout points along the way. The first two large rock towers we saw are named the Merrimac and the Monitor. They are named after the iron clad ships in which they resemble.
The shear scale of the whole area was amazing. You’d need to spend weeks in this area to really get a feel for its size. Driving is fun, but you’d want to get out and do hikes to really appreciate the park. We stopped into another small park called the Dead Horse Canyon. It was fantastic and offered us the largest scale view thus far of anything in the park. We were able to walk right up the edge of a shear drop of about 2000 ft. It was pretty fantastic. You could see for miles and miles.
After we finished up at Dead Horse Canyon, we decided not to actually enter Canyonlands National Park. It would have taken too long and we still wanted to visit Arches National Park before driving across the entire state to Cedar City, where we were going to stay the night. We plan on visiting this area again and will have to make a bigger trip out of just Canyonlands. So… we headed out of the Dead Horse Canyon towards Arches National Park.
Arches National Park was very cool. We both really enjoyed driving around it. There was plenty to see and lots of opportunities to get out and hike. We took advantage a few times. The first was to walk to the North and South windows. These were massive arches carved into the rock by forms of erosion of a very long time. They were spectacular to see. About 60 ft high in the archway.
Next we decided to get out and hike to the most notable and photographed archway in the park. It is called the Delicate Arch. When we pulled up to the parking lot to start the hike, we both put on sun tan lotion and Kari grabbed a bottle of water. The whole hike was only 3 miles and we didn’t think it was going to be that hard. Wow… big mistake. About 80 percent of the hike was uphill going to the arch. Then to add to the pain, the temperature was around 95 degrees. THEN to make things even worse, we were hiking on rock a lot of the time, which just adds to the temperature… and there was almost no shade the entire trip. By the time we reached the archway, we just wanted to jump in a swimming pool of cool water. We were dying of heat. I was just hoping that the 15 lotion I put on would hold up over this amount of time and exposure to sun. But, the actual archway was amazing. It was the biggest of all the archways we saw that day and by far the most interesting looking. It made it that much sweeter that we had to work that hard just to get to see it. After spending about 20-30 minutes at the arch, Kari and I headed back down. We found the trip to be MUCH easier on the way back down and did it in 2/3 the time it took us to ascend. When we got back to the car, you’d think we just won the lotto because we got to turn air conditioning on. The sun took its toll on us that day. I can’t imagine getting lost in one of these parks. You’d never be able to beat the heat. So… air conditioning on full blast, we headed west towards Cedar City.
We passed a turn off that we’d like to visit when we make our way out here again. We were told about it by a couple we met at Devil’s Tower a few days before. It is called Goblin Valley. Apparently, it is pretty cool to see. It is at the top of our list when we return. The road leading into Goblin Valley isn’t paved though, which means it time to rent a car. Don’t want to put anymore strain on the Nissan.
The drive to Cedar City was interesting. We gained a ton of elevation at times and then would descend for miles at a time. It seemed like a very large scale rollercoaster. The views were spectacular though. The sun went down and we pulled into Cedar City about 11pm. It was a long day and we were beat. That is why you are not getting the blog till a few days later. Its late, and time to crash. Goodnight.
No comments:
Post a Comment