Topskys Out West

What a great town. It's a lot like a beach town--lots of cute shops and locally owned restaurants. We found the perfect breakfast spot, the Jailhouse Cafe. Jeff and I shared ginger pancakes with apple butter. Yum. Now on to the Rockies and cooler weather,  so we hope.

Every once in a while, we've met other tourists who offer to take a photo of the four of us together. Here's one from yesterday at Canyonlands, when we were all relieved that we were at the top of the overlook rather than on the rugged four-wheel drive road in the canyon below.

It seemed as if everywhere we looked today, we saw another arch, so I'll share one other photo.  We got to Arches National Park around 7:30 am, so the light for taking photos was just right.

Jumping back briefly to our drive to Moab yesterday. We hadn't planned to visit Capitol Reef at all, so it was a treat even to get to drive through. The drive wound past large, red sandstone rock formations - a largely arid landscape until we entered the Fremont River Valley. This river valley was the home of a Mormon settlement called Fruita that was established in the late 1880s. The park service has restored the Gifford Farmhouse as well as the tiny 1-room schoolhouse. As you drive along the river, you pass the orchards the settters planted over 120 years ago.  That green doesn't last long once you leave the park. The drive east of Capitol Reef passed through one of the most desolate landscapes I've ever seen: we drove past gray piles of earth that looked like every living thing on Earth had been burnt to ash.

Canyonlands is the most remote and inaccessible of the parks we've visited. Most of the park can only be accessed via a 4-wheel drive vehicle on rough roads, and it's a raw, forbidding, and arid landscape. A lot of the activity here seems to involve off-road driving and river rafting - you would need to be a seriously self-sufficient backpacker to hike very far in this wilderness. We spent most of the afternoon driving through the Island in the Sky, the northern portion of the park. Island is a large mesa bounded by the Green & Colorado rivers, which come together further south.  What impresses about Canyonlands is its scale as well as its wildness. From viewpoints on the top of the mesa, you can look down 1,200 feet to the sandstone layer of the White Rim; the rivers have carved canyons another 1,000 feet deep below that. The air here is pristine; from the mesa, you can see almost 100 miles to the horizon.   Even the limited walking we did...

This afternoon we traveled to Canyonlands National Park. We went to many overlooks and saw many beautiful sights. At one overlook we saw a road with such steep turns you had to back up to turn. Fortunately, we did not have to drive on it. At another one we saw the Green River. In the middle of the park the Green River and the Colorado River meet, one brown and the other green. Above is a picture of the Green River in the middle of a flat plain.

We had a great morning hiking at Arches. The plan was to be out early and back to our room by lunchtime, which allowed us to hike before the worst of the afternoon heat. The drive into the park winds through a jaw-dropping series of red sandstone formations, huge slabs of rock like tables tilted on their sides. These are accompanied by monoliths that jut out of the earth like fingers and hoodoos that look like boulders stacked on top of each other.  We decided to hike in the Windows section, which has the park's highest concentration of arches. This was a fantastic hike that took us by Turret Arch and the North and South Windows. Our final destination (above) was Double Arch, where twin arches soar far overhead. Once again, I'm struck by the scale of all this - not only the arches themselves, but the vast landscape they inhabit. Looking at all this, you can't help but feel very small.  On our way back, the trail passed through a sandy...

Ah, world, sometimes you are so good to me. Ever since the Grand Canyon have I been promised wild cows, and ever since them I have been denied them. But yesterday, while driving here to Moab, I hear the glorious shout of: COOOOOWSSS!" In the forest! Wild! : )

This morning, we decided to avoid the highway and take the longer and (so we heard) more scenic route along Highway 12 to Moab. This turned out to be a great decision - today's drive was long but took us through a wide variety of incredible landscapes. Shortly after leaving Bryce, the road took us into the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monent, a 1.9 million acre preserve that is one the largest and most pristine wilderness areas in the US. The road here really has to be seen to be believed: winding in short, sharp turns along breathtaking views of the gigantic, rounded boulders that dominate the landscape. A breathtaking but sometimes nerve-wracking drive.  Then it all changed. After leaving the National Monument, we entered the Dixie National Forest and began to climb, eventually reaching the summit at 9,800 feet. Within minutes of driving through the town of Boulder (no, not that one), we had left the rocky landscape behind and were driving through a pine and birch forest so...

Amazing hike down into the Bryce amphitheater this morning. The Navajo Loop Trail winds down into the canyon, so you're often walking at the foot of the hoodoos that tower overhead. The hoodoos are tall, thin spires of rock that have been carved by wind and water into fantastic shapes. The Paiute used to tell a story that the hoodoos were bad people that Coyote turned into stone, and it's easy to see the figures of people and other things (including poodles and reclining cats) in the stone shapes What makes Bryce so amazing are the vivid colors in the rock - softer and more delicate than at Zion. When the light is right, the rocks glow with pink, orange, red, and white. The trail ends with a narrow passage between the sheer cliffs of Wall Street - a location that Caroline especially wanted to see. Below, the kids stand by the twin pines that mark the entrance of the passage. This is an amazing and special place that almost seems too wondrous to be r...