I didn’t plan it this way, honest. I didn’t know the wildflowers would be so beautiful this time of year in the desert. I mean, I know in a general way that they’re supposed to be beautiful in Arizona, but I’d never heard anyone raving about Colorado and Utah wildflowers before now. They were so beautiful in Mesa Verde that I ended up buying a wildflower field guide before leaving the park, and they were pretty as we drove up through southern Utah to Moab. Today we went to Canyonlands National Park, and they crowded the roadsides. These are silver lupines, and another yellow flower I haven’t found in the book yet, across from the Islands in the Sky visitors’ center.
We headed on into the park and decided to just drive the roads and wait to be amazed – and amazed we were. We went first to Upheaval Basin trailhead and walked as far as we could out along the overlook trail until the trail markers petered out and started to be placed randomly on the slickrock in various directions. We eventually found some steps cut into the rock (probably by the CCC) that went down toward a staircase between two rock walls, then climbed up over the slickrock and up some more steps – sorta sporty, that – and finally up to the right onto a big dome of stone that overlooked the upheaval area. The whole place looked like a gigantic stone souffle that had suffered a cataclysmic failure. You could see distorted strata (stone layers) below the thick red sandstone. There were several theories about what caused it; one was a salt dome that got squeezed upwards through a weak spot in the overlying rocks, then eroded away and collapsed under the weight of the overburden; the other was some sort of above-ground meteor strike. There’s some dark stone in the center that sure looks like a lava or magma intrusion of some kind.
We had lunch at the picnic area after taking many pictures (and talking to Steve on the cell phone) and had a nice chat with some people from Oxfordshire – later we noticed what had to be their vehicle while we relaxed in the shade and ate our sandwiches. They seemed to be having a good time – even the “mule,” who was carrying all the water. They had evidentlyh stinted on washing their car for a while, no doubt saving the water.
Then we went to Grand Overlook on a whim, when we thought we were on our way out of the park. Everywhere we turned, there was a gorgeous view.
Really, there are so many images (we’ve taken hundreds of pictures) will have to wait to be picked over and culled for the galleries they’ll eventually reside in, but I wanted to get some of them “up” for viewing.
We didn’t go to each and every view pullout, but we stopped at most, and walked the rim trail for a ways at Grand Overlook and chatted with a ranger about conditions. Then near the exit road, we stopped one last time near the Neck Spring trailhead and encountered a couple of funny things; one of them was a view of a jeep road that looked exactly like the ones in the Roadrunner cartoons, and the other was a friendly Frenchman who was overwhelmed by the views. We stood and watched a white SUV negotiate the road far below, headed to some campsite or on an adventure tour, and the Frenchman exclaimed “(something explosively fricative) fou!” Then he turned to me and made the universal sign for “that guy is totally INSANE” by whirling his finger next to his temple and said “I’m sorry, in French we say ‘fou!” I laughed and agreed “Oui, c’est fou! He’s crazy, eh? Tres bien!” or words to that effect. There’s a tiny white square on this road that represents a rather large vehicle. YMMV, but that looked totally INSANE to me. We shared the international symbol for laughing our asses off at such lunacy. That was good fun.
When we got back to the hotel, the only thing we could possibly do was jump in the pool and cool off. Tomorrow we think we’ll drive some of the unpaved roads in the area in search of some more rock art to photograph.
