Moab, Day 2

Gosh, another busy day. Right now I’m taking care of the little things, doing laundry and charging the cell, but earlier I was hiking, driving and thinking. (Or perhaps I should say, hiking and thinking, and driving and thinking, but then again, sometimes I didn’t think either.)

So the hiking. First climbed the Moab Rim trail for a full view of the Moab Valley. I saw the tire tracks but really find it hard to believe mountain bikes and jeeps make this climb. Looks like one jeep must have ripped a hole in its gas, or oil tank because right after this really steep part there was oil all over the rock. But none of that while I was there. Just a nice early morning 2000ft rise over the Colorado River.

After that headed North to Canyonlands National Park. Which is basically (once you’re at the park) a 21 mile drive out a mesa that gets progressively narrow until at some points it is only as wide as the two lane highway. Swerve and you do a Thelma and Louise down a few thousand feet. (Being here you can’t imagine how they decided which cliff to have them drive off, the options are endless.) I took a couple of side hikes and some great photos, although the camera will never do the scale of this place justice. At the overlook there was a short 1 mile jaunt further out on the point which was amazing. Speaking of the camera, there is something here, something that just defies my sense of time, distance and scale. Looking back along the distance covered in that 1 mile hike, it seems so much further…but the time taken is right, and then yesterday the hike up the Canyon seemed so long, but really wasn’t. And over all things just seem too darn big, but really you can get from here to there without much trouble. While on the point I looked south to the Needles, where I’ll be tomorrow. It looked a hundred miles away, but the sign said 15.

You really got to wonder what Powell was thinking.

After Canyonlands I took a leisurely drive along the Colorado River and accidentally discovered what I call “Rock Climber Alley”. The road runs between the river and a shear red stone cliff that has people hanging all over it. Okay, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration but there were several climbers there. I tried to get a few in the photo, but again scale, etc…

And now I’m doing laundry.