Today is the end of our third week journeying across the country. What a great three weeks enjoying the beautiful United States!
Left camp at 8 am in order to get on the road. We went back to Potash Road to look for the petroglyphs that we missed yesterday. We were able to spot them today and they were 25-30 feet up on the rock cliff. That means that when the Indians carved those onto the rocks in the 1600's they were on the shore. The water level is much lower now.
Went to Canyonlands National Park. Again, amazing views. Canyonlands is divided into 3 different areas called districts. Islands in the Sky, The Maze, and The Needles. The Maze was for serious hikers and The Needles was too far away even to fit into our schedule. We enjoyed Islands in the Sky. We first stopped at the Visitors Center where it was recommended that you take plenty of water with you as there were no places to buy it along the route. First stop was Shafer Canyon Overlook, where cowboys used to take their cattle down for the winter in the 1800's. The trail was steep and dangerous that cattle sometimes fell off. We saw a vehicle driving along the dirt road and decided that was a drive we didn't need to make as it looked only wide enough for one car.
Decided we would do a couple of short hikes. The first one was Mesa Arch. It was a half mile round trip hike and you could see it without going all the way to it. Dave wasn't going to go all the way down to it but another hiker suggested it was worth it. It sure was. It had a great view down into a canyon with the Arch as a frame. We then went up to Upheaval Dome, where we did our second short hike of 1 mile. From the brochure - "Geologists would probably single out Upheaval Dome as the oddest geologic feature on Island in the Sky. Measuring 1,500 feet deep, the dome does not look like a dome but rather like a crater. How was it created? One theory suggests that slowmoving underground salt deposits pushed layers of sandstone upward. A recent theory suggests that the dome was created when a meteor hit."
There are two rivers that are important to this area. The Green River and the Colorado. The rivers divide the area into the 3 districts.
Other viewing areas were Green River Overlook, Buck Canyon Overlook and we had our lunch at Grand View Point Overlook, which had beautiful mesas, towering mesas in the canyon. A Ranger at the visitor's center told Dave that Canyonlands is 1,500 feet deep. I hope you can get a sense of the depth and vastness from the photos.
Continued our journey to I70 to the junction of I15 and then south to Beaver, UT, where we are staying for the night. Dave was driving and he mentioned that it looked like smoke behind the mountains. Sure enough there were highway signs indicating a fire on the other side of the mountains. The radio said it was a 39,000 acre wildfire.
It will only be a couple hours drive to get to Bryce Canyon tomorrow.
Keep on Rockin!
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