Canyonlands, Arches, & Capitol Reef National Parks

We're putting these together because –big mindstretching picture-- they are all part of the  Colorado Plateau, which is a chunk of North America bigger than Texas that somehow pushed up several thousand feet in one nearly level plane.   And then Nature's magic happened.

The Grand Canyon digs down through that Plateau. Canyonlands and Arches (literally next to each other) show other parts of its underbelly, while Capitol Reef shows more, Bryce Canyon (at which we just arrived) even more, and Zion National Park even more yet.  Each of these has rocks. but each has unique scenery composed of rocks.  We're not going to get real professorial here, just show you pictures.

It's just all so big!
This is right outside the Canyonlands visitors center:

Once  upon a time, less than 300 million years ago, there were oceans covering much of this area.  In the intervening times, the landscape changed to larger and smaller bodies of water, some of it fresh (as in Lake Bonneville that became the Great Salt Lake), and all of it supporting a bunch of plants and critters (if you don't mind calling T.Rex a 'critter').  The big story is the sand deposited on the sea/lake beds –thousands of feet of it.  Then whatever happened to cause the uplifting, made cracks/fissures; then existing rivers were augmented/changed by rain/snow; and there was wind, too, so–   Erosion happened.

And we get to see all the different layers of the cake.


It takes a car (luckily we brought one) to get around to all the different areas in the individual parks.  And then we get out and walk to observation points.  And we take pictures that cannot begin to describe the awesome magnificence of this gi-huge-ic landscape! Debbie says each picture we take needs a thousand words just to augment its meaning.

The Colorado & Green rivers
are confluent in this area.

The Green River is one of the shapers of the land.

We consumed one day at Canyonlands alone, went back to our coach on the BLM land where we were surrounded by more of the same (just not in an official National Park) and John literally was overwhelmed.  "Rocked out", he said, "No more.  No canyons, no arches, no boulders, cliffs..."
So after dinner he went to bed.   Still coughing.  That virus thing was wicked.

But Arches was right there, and the next day brought more sun, more sweat and sun-reddened skin with more summer like temperatures, and a bit less phlegm, so Debbie pried John from the coach to see what is said to be The World's Largest Collection of Naturally Occurring Arches.

   

There were other features, as well, things that we'd not seen at Canyonlands.  Like this really magnificent spire collection:

 And even the iconic Balanced Rock which may or may not have survived when our children can make this trip.

But they are still Just Rocks, so John picked up The Hobbit for about the 4th time in his life to finish re-re-re-reading it and criticize Peter Jackson's dragging this story out to three long feature length movies with his invented stuff that Tolkien never wrote including that unlikely love sto[this is a run-on sentence!] while Debbie drove on to Capitol Reef.





Luckily, he picked his nose out the book just in time to see the absolutely stunning scenery along Utah-24 for the last 25 miles or so.  And you drive right between these things!  And they are so variegated!  And we learn that Capitol Reef is a small National Park, but the change in scenery was invigorating!

Among them were sheer cliffs that obviously had been cleaved, leaving hundred-foot tall perfectly smooth sheets of rock.  In the first half of this "era" (A.D.), a native people scribbled their primitive art on the all-too-inviting blank rock. ["People in every time like to commit graffiti!" –unknown tourist female's wry reaction to these:]

Minimum 700 year old scribbled scratch art. 
{false color image so you can see these better}

Having a more reverent take on it, the NPS describes these scratched markings as "stories [that] present detailed information regarding geography, demography, economy and religion."  It then admonishes us that "Our collective goal must be to  preserve these expressions....for future generations."  Many Park visitors help with their cameras.

More closely associated with our own time, settler families occupied the narrow valley that runs more than a dozen-miles through the National Park (it is the only way to get around/through the "Reef", the sharply upthrust walls of rock).  The valley is, at many points, barely 100 yards wide, with the smallish river abundantly greening a flat, grassy area that became farming homesteads for a dozen families in our era.  It all feels so close and protected and secluded from the outside world.  The one-room school house that served the small population is smaller than our 2-car garage and was not shut down until 1941, the decade our births.  There are imagination-stirring opportunities to explore their fields and orchards available.  Debbie and I walked a way up The Grand Wash, a "dry" (for this day) deeply cut flash flood river bed. Here she is exploring a 'cave' that floods cut into the rock wall.  John divided his time between being awed by the high clifftops overhead, and studying every possible egress to higher ground –just in case  [as if this fat old man had any chance of outrunning a debris-bearing, fast-moving killer flood  ;-}} ].

Later that afternoon, we drove into what was described as a dirt road used by early motorcars (1915ish?).  There was also warning of a wash's tendency to produce fatal flash floods engendered by storms in the area.  We had scattered showers, but the violent summer storms are 6-to-8 weeks off yet ...we think.   So we ventured a couple miles down the road, Debbie quite verbally annoyed with each rock and shallow dip our tires encountered.  John kept pointing out that they were no worse than the condition of our neighborhood streets in February before Georgetown Township's plow trucks could scrape past the ice.  We think we're still friends.

Those cliff walls are high and many were adorned
with precariously balanced Honda-size boulders!

And we're still not done with our amazement over this park!  A very engaging, vibrant and educational "geology interpretive ranger" named Lori (we hope we remembered properly) made the colored layers in the rock walls come alive for us.  And clearly explained why Capitol Reef was so significantly unique.  We'll leave it up to the interested reader to google for "monocline".

She also helped, to Debbie's fascination, with an understanding of the seeming "dentition" of rock walls in a particularly noticeable reddish-brownish layer of rock that kept showing up all over this area, inside the park and out.  We would find more information shortly about the vertical

fracturing and weathering that might eventually turn some of these things into "hoodoos".  But, let us leave that for a future chapter in this evolving blog, if you're not too disappointed.








Debbie surprised herself by agreeing to a pork BBQ dinner at our RV Park just outside Torrey, UT, (whimsically named "Thousand Lakes" in this desert environ).   It was good!  (Maybe a little underserved for the $20/person price; we had to serve our own plates, fill and serve our own drinks, then bus the table and put the dishes "away" for someone else to wash {so John ignored the Tip jar}, but we walked the 150 feet back to our coach happily enough.)  And because we were in an actual RV Park with actual running water, 50 amps of actual electricity and an actual sewer hookup, we managed to get the red rock dust of the past week out of our hair and coach crevices.  Now all we need is a bountiful rain storm to wash down the past 2,200 miles of exterior road grime.

See you when we see you.