WOW! Our Heads are Spinning from all the Beauty Around Us.

 

Park Avenue, Arches National Park, Utah

Here it is early May and we are at our last layover campground before arriving at our summer destination.  But it is not a brief layover, no, we're here for a solid two weeks.  There is so much to do in this part of Utah that I am not sure two weeks is going to be enough to do it all.  But we're going to give it a go.

Everything within a day's drive is on our radar.  With that as a guide we are going to get to Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Colorado River Scenic Drive, and shopping trips to Moab and Green River, Utah and Grand Junction, Colorado.  We burned up a lot of  electrons taking pictures.  Hundreds and hundreds of photographs.  I don't have the patience and I don't think you have the tolerance to read my narration of these two weeks so I will instead make this a photo essay with a pithy comment here and there.  First post: Arches NP.

The bigger the screen you can use the better it is.

Arches National Park

May 4, 2023

On the road straight up from the Arches NP entrance (below) to the 
top of the plateau where all the "good stuff" is.  Moab is in the distance.

One of the first prominences seen is named "Park Avenue".
But a standard photo doesn't cut it, see the panorama below. 

Once you get on the plateau and up to Park Avenue it is nearly impossible to look in any direction and not say; "wow!".

Courthouse Towers

The Three Gossips

Sheep Rock

Balanced Rock
The rock on top is 55 feet tall and weighs 3,500 tons.

Turret Arch, center foreground.
As seen from Balanced Rock Trail.

Turret Arch, extreme right and Double Arch, center-left.

Turret Arch again.
Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Double Arch.
Really, there are two arches in there.

Double Arch
Hard to see in two dimensions but it is there.

North Window Arch

North Window Arch

North Window Arch

Next we hiked up to an overlook to Delicate Arch.  It is springtime in northern Utah and we found the high desert to be in bloom.

We hiked up to the Delicate Arch Overlook.
It wasn't a short walk but it was a well-groomed trail.

This is how far we had come.

And this is how far we had yet to go.

The hike to the overlook paid off with this view.
And no, I wasn't holding the camera crooked.
The surface of the earth had been deformed this far out of plumb.

Delicate Arch
It may be delicate but it is not small.  Those aren't ants on
the ridge to the left.  Those are people.

The arch wasn't the only view from the overlook.

Skyline Arch

The view looking out from Skyline Arch.

From here we were on the return leg of the drive.  The skies had cleared and we were seeing things from the opposite direction with very different lighting.  It was almost like a completely different park.  There are many more pics of already captured formations but in varying degrees of broken-cloud light.  I may post them at a later date.

Net post:  Canyonlands.

Destination for the Summer In Sight

 

We've had a grand time in Colorado but it is getting time to get closer to our summer gig location, Dutch John, Utah.  We're right on schedule and will be able to do our planned stop in Thompson Springs, Utah (a tiny berg just north of Moab) and base camp there to explore the southeast portion of Utah.  Meaning Arches NP, Canyonlands NP, Capitol Reef NP and Moab.

But first we have to get there.  It is a heck of pull through mountain valleys, passes, switchbacks, 8% grades (both up and down) and narrow two-lanes.  Thanking my lucky stars that I was able to replace my '06 truck, Big Gulp with Chief, a '22 F-550.  Big Gulp's motor was just too tired to ever have been able to make the grade.  Chief didn't exactly make it effortlessly, I used every drop of horsepower getting up some long inclines.  With my foot on the floor I topped out some of the climbs at a mere 35mph.

Besides being a little white knuckle-ish, the drive was beautiful.  I kept radioing Cyndee and telling her it looks like Radiator Springs and Lightning McQueen are going to be around the next mesa.  We passed through Moab and joined a long line of all kinds of recreational equipment heading for I-80.  Once we got to the interstate we hopped on for five miles and then took the exit for Thompson Springs.  But I'll be dog-gone if it wasn't the spitting image of Radiator Springs!

Thompson Springs, UT spread out in front of a couple of the 
many mesas in the area.  Ballard RV Park made up about 80%
of the town.

That does it, I just know Lightning McQueen is around here somewhere.

Ballard RV Park in Radiator Springs, I mean Thompson Springs, was our base camp for the next couple of weeks.  We have LOTS of sightseeing to do and this off the beaten path campground is a perfect choice and way, way below the $125+ a night crowded campgrounds around Moab.  When we make reservations for a campground we always disclose that we have truck-trailer and a chase vehicle that is also towing a small cargo trailer.  Some campgrounds won't allow the extra trailer, sometimes for aesthetics, sometimes because they literally don't have room to put it anywhere. But in Ballard's case they told us they had something just for us.  And boy did they.  Our site was a generous 150' long pull-thru.

Looonnnng gravel site. No grass, it is the desert, Utah after all.
No picnic table, the one seen is our neighbor's, a permanent resident. 

Like I said, looonng site.  Truck, SUV and cargo trailer all fit, easily, at rear of camper.

As it has been all along our route this spring, Thompson Springs was recovering from a hard, heavy snowfall winter and frequent spring rainstorms that are accelerating the melt runoff.  We were told that our site had just had a refreshing of its gravel the day before because it had become a deeply rutted mud pit in previous days.  And I believe them because when I drove over it both the truck and trailer sunk up to their rims in what must have been a foot deep gravel.  I had to use four wheel drive to pull up the last couple of feet.  It didn't help that the sight was not level, I was pulling in uphill, not much but enough that it made a lot of difference.

Speaking of level, getting the rig leveled was a pretty good workout for the leveling system.  The slope from front to back was pretty significant but it was also diagonally unlevel.

Getting level took some doing.  Leveling jack on the left had to be nearly fully retracted while the one on the right is extended almost a foot and a half.  The jacks in the back almost ran out of stroke before they got the backend up to level.

Getting the rear of the coach up enough to achieve level
lifted the rear axle wheels off the ground.

All level with a pleasant view out the rear window.

Now it is off to Moab for fuel for Chief and some local fare for Cyndee and I.  Moab has a Smith's supermarket, which is a Kroger property, which we have loyalty cards for, which gets us discounts on fuel, which is ludicrously high here.  So it is back on I-80 west for 5 miles to Crescent Junction, the Moab exit.  At Crescent Junction there is absolutely nothing save Papa Joe's Gas and Go.  It would be generous to call Papa Joe's "rustic" but there was a smidge of commerce going on.

As we slowed coming down the exit ramp adjacent to Papa Joe's we spotted a familiar face at the gas station.  I knew Lightning McQueen was around these parts!

Chief meets Lightning McQueen.

After the meet and greet at Papa Joe's we got on down to Moab and got fueled up and something to eat.  The heavy duty touring begins tomorrow.

Childhood Dream Lived

 

From a very young age Cyndee has been intrigued with Puebloan dwellings, Mesa Verde in particular.  We're as close as we have ever been to Mesa Verde here in Ignacio, CO.  Our time in Colorado is drawing to a close but we are going to use every bit of the time we have left in this first week of May.  It is off to Mesa Verde and more and fulfill a childhood desire of walking where the ancients dwelled.

From Ignacio it is about an hour and forty minutes to Mesa Verde.  It is a large National Park and we want to make a whole day of it so we got an early start.

The drive up to the top of the plateau afforded us a four state view; Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

While the view is really nice, we came for the main attraction, Puebloan dwellings.  And the park did not disappoint.

These are but one of several cliff dwellings in the park.
Probably the most recognizable as they get used in all 
the literature and documentary TV shows.

Two dimensional photographs just can't do this place justice.

Normally this place (down below in the photographs) would be crawling with people.  But we are here when the park is barely open.  In fact, seasonal rangers were being trained at this very spot for doing guided tours down to the dwellings.  Since there are many, many steps and lots of ladders this group of 10 to 12 trainees were composed mostly of young knees and young backs.

Access to the dwellings being closed was not a disappointment for us, Cyndee's knees would never have gotten her down to the dwellings, little alone back up.  And it is easy to tell from the ear to ear grin that she is really enjoying this place.

Besides the big house in the above pics there were other dwelling sites scattered throughout the park.  We drove about 75 miles inside the park going between sites and revisiting others.  Only one disappointment though, they were repaving one of the branches of road, the one that lead deepest into the park, and it was closed.  So we didn't get to see all the different cliff dwellings but the ones that we did....wow!

A day that won't be forgotten.  Of all the ancient dwellings we have toured the past month this one touched us most deeply.  We are super glad we had this place on our must-see list and that the weather cooperated to let it happen.