Canyonlands

This is the biggest park in Utah. It’s full of spectacular canyons and other geological features. It’s also got many dirt roads, used today by off-roaders like jeeps, dune buggies and macho tour vehicles such as humvees.

The roads predate the tourist trade and were built to service the mineral extraction industry. Uranium was discovered as early as 1910, but it was the discovery of a rich lode in the 1950’s that created the mining boom. This was the cold war era at its most intense and the population of Moab tripled between 1950 and 1960.

The photo shows a low-level and a high-level dirt road. The high-level road runs just below the canyon rim with an unprotected 1,500 foot drop. The off-roaders are welcome to it!

But all the mining roads seem to contain a suicidal section. This safe looking low-level road on the left of the next photo heads straight for the edge of a canyon within the main canyon. It’s got a name, “White Rim Road”, which describes its course precisely along the edge of the rim, and it runs for over 100 miles.

The lower canyon is carved by the Green River, which flows 700 feet below the White Rim Road, and is a spectacular sight in its own right.

Looking deep into some of these canyons with binoculars reveals some odd structures, columns hundreds of feet tall that could almost be made of brick. They aren’t, of course, just jagged, chaotic shapes carved over millions of years.

We did see a some creatures, not many with all the tourists around, but there were quite a few chipmunks that moved too quickly to photograph. This one obliged.

Some of the groups of grasses and pieces of dried wood grouped together almost into a formal garden.

 Now we’ll leave Canyonlands (doesn’t it sound like a Disney theme park), and follow the Colorado River upstream before it reaches Canyonlands. The scenic drive is a regular road next to the river with pulloffs to admire the views. The 1,450 mile long Colorado is a big river even here, 1,000 miles from the sea. 

And it still manages to have carved out a canyon through which it swiftly flows.

So it’s a good river for the adventurers as there are sections of rapids for the rubber boats to negotiate. They don’t seem to be too challenged here, though. Easy to say that when you’re stood on the riverbank.

Tomorrow we leave Moab for Monument Valley. There are many more locations we could have visited, but we are close to gobsmacked overload.