More Travels 4-This Is Wild America

This Is Wild America

The car temperature read 55 degrees when we started out for Canyonlands National Park at 8:15 this morning. Newscasters had predicted gorgeous weather, and a bright sun warmed the high dessert.
"Brrrr," I said, getting into the car.
"Don't worry," laughed Andy. "In half an hour, you'll be comfortable. By the time we get to Canyonlands, it will be hot."

The Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands stands
high above the surrounding countryside.

Canyonlands National Park preserves three geographic areas of the Colorado Plateau: The Maze, Island in the Sky and The Needles. Separated by the Green River and the Colorado River, these sections each have their own features. Although the sections share a common primitive spirit and Wild West atmosphere, they are vast and very different, largely untrammeled with mostly unpaved roads, primitive trails and free-flowing rivers in its 527 square-mile total area.  In fact, most of the territory had never been seen by white men until the 1860's and 1870's, when Major John Wesley Powell first mapped the Colorado River. Even then the land wasn't touched until the 1890's, and no real development occurred until uranium was mined in the 1950's.
Canyonlands in southeastern Utah is wild America.

From Grand View Overlook, the views are magnificent.

The center section, Island in the Sky, offers vistas one hundred miles distant. This uplifted portion of the Colorado Plateau was cut thousands of years ago by the Colorado and Green rivers. An overlook near the park entrance gave us views of the valley in the morning sun--spectacular western shots at 9:45 a.m. but hazy vistas to the east.
At Grand View we took the two-mile trail out to the point and back. The elevation was 6,000 feet, but the trail only recorded a 100-foot rise from beginning to end.

Buck Canyon Overlook warms
as the sun comes up over the Plateau.

Thank goodness for Andy! He takes me places I would never go and challenges me to do things I wouldn't dream of doing. At the tip of the Plateau at Grand View he urged me out onto the rock overhang, a place I wouldn't crawl much less step.
"It's easy," he said. "It won't fall down."
Of course, rock falling beneath me is not the issue. It's me falling on rock, but this time I ignored the nagging fear of edges and inched forward for the Grand View. With the world beneath us, we looked out into space and time, and it was grand.

Bikers follow a dirt path far
below at White Rim Overlook.

Couples lingered at the Buck Canyon Overlook at 6,240 feet, some speaking German and French, some dressed in bike jerseys, some young and holding hands, most older and balancing with ski poles and walking sticks. I guess we fit in the middle!

Andy crosses the rock gap to
the extreme point of White Rim.

White Rim refers to the layer of
Navajo Sandstone that lines the canyon.

A one-way mile-long trail took us out to White Rim Overlook. Fourteen hundred feet below a group of bikers outran their sag wagon that labored along the dirt road of the deeply incised canyon. It was at least another 1,400 feet below that to the Colorado River bed. Not a cloud in the sky, the day unfolded in layers around us.

We join the collection of old
farts at the edge of White Rim.

At Mesa Arch we climbed the half-mile loop trail to the canyon rim. One stretch along the path was covered with "living dirt," soil crusted over with a coating of microbes and microorganisms. So delicate, even the footsteps of hikers can kill these living things. Interpretive signs at the Visitor Centers had warned us not to walk off the paths, but here there were no warnings for inconsiderate hikers. For millennia Mesa Arch has clung to the edge of the canyon top, framing a picture window of the Colorado River Gorge. Under it thousands of feet down flows a tributary of the Colorado.

A window into the landscape and a window into the past,
Mesa Arch reveals history.

  "It's easy. It's actually wide," coaxed a woman, who had walked across the stone arch to pose at the half-way point. "Just don't look down that side." She motioned toward the gorge. Andy had already set the stage and returned.
"No thank you," I told her. "I'm quite happy here." I clutched the rock edge a little tighter. But the view with the La Sal Mountains and the Sand Mountains of Arches National Park in the distance was stupendous.
Edward Abbey wrote, "It is possible from here to gaze down on the backs of soaring birds."
From Mesa Arch we did just that as two crows swooped and glided beneath us.

Mesa Arch seems immutable as a walkway back into time.

At Shafer Canyon Overlook we watched a car weave down the dirt road of the cliff face.  "Don't worry. I won't try it," said Andy. "This was the road we took 25 years ago and almost got stuck in the stream bed crossing. It's Shafer Trail Road. It comes out at the potash plant near Moab."
Shafer Trail Overlook provided a huge capped rock outcropping, mushroom-like, where a group of young German tourists gather and chatted. They laughed and joked, standing far out on the most extreme point over the 1,400-foot deep canyon. Their rock meeting place was separated from the mainland by a one-foot gap in the rock wall. It all seemed so improbable.
Huge clumps of yellow flowers bloomed along the fence at La Sal Mountain Viewpoint, like mums by a mailbox. How ironic for mid-September in the high dessert at 6,000 feet.
At the Visitor Center we watched a video about Canyonlands called Wilderness of Rock. It explained that this national park was actually 300 million years of accumulated sediment sliced and molded and shaped by water.

Several brave drivers head down Shafer Trail Road
into the canyon and beyond.

Outside the park in a Bureau of Land Management pullout, we photographed two red sandstone buttes called the Monitor and the Merrimack after a short walk to the canyon rim. A biker stopped in the shade of the interpretive sign to refresh. "I have plenty of water," he assured us.Back in Moab, we drove in along the river to the potash plant to see where the rugged Shafer Trail came out of the mountains. Dessert varnish--manganese and iron--covered the sides of the red rock cliffs. "That potash plant has been here a long time," said Andy, "at least 25 years since it was here when we came down Shafer Trail 25 years ago."
Climbers and their lookouts lined Route #279 on Friday afternoon as we drove back out along the river. Some were part way up the cliff, adjusting their ropes and swinging freely or grabbing the red rock wall.
Nearby signs said, "Indian Writing." We stopped. Etched in the dessert varnish, we identified big horn sheep and a huge bear, the written history of American Indians from years and years ago.

South Window glows in the final rays of
daylight on almost the final day of summer.

After dinner we headed back to Arches. The rangers were still collecting admission at 6:30 p.m., people still turned in the main gate, and we learned the park is open 24-7. I wonder what a government shutdown would do to that!
Andy headed toward the turnoff to the Windows, and tonight we found a parking place. The sun dipped low as we walked up around Turret Arch and headed toward North Window and South Window. People sat in the openings of the rock windows, watching the sun slip lower and lower. Others set up tripods to shoot the arches, glowing in the disappearing rays. We took lots of pictures and then headed around the back of the megaliths on Primitive Trail, which led back to the parking lot right next to our car. It wasn't hard to imagine how difficult it would be to get caught in the dessert in the dark.Twilight moved in very quickly as the last glimmers of daylight faded. I breathed a sigh of relief as I climbed into the car.  I for one wouldn't like finding my way in the dark. We waited around for the moon, but we never saw it until an hour later at the motel.

Nature-made rock megaliths look
like Stonehenge in the last glow of day.

Although John Steinbeck never visited Arches National Park with his dog Charley, he wrote, "The dessert is a good school in which to observe the cleverness and the infinite variety of techniques of survival under pitiless opposition. Life could not change the sun or water... so it changed itself."