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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Putting Down Roots for the Winter

Image
  October 2024 Okay, so the above pic is not our winter home, except in our dreams.  However it (The Biltmore) is just a stones throw away from where we are setting up housekeeping. As planned, our departure from Dumplin Valley RV Park in Kodak, TN was early with only about an hour-and-a-half traveling time to our destination in Candler, NC, a western suburb of Asheville.  But it wasn't quite as easy as it sounds.  The last four miles was like running a gauntlet. As soon as we took the I-40 exit to Candler a four mile obstacle course began.  The roads were just barely wide enough for two sedans to pass one another without taking a wheel off the edge of the pavement.  But that would be ill advised as steep and deep trenches lined both sides of the road.  Getting an eight foot wide and sixty foot long truck and trailer combination down these winding mountain roads was an altogether different drive.  Many of the turns in the road required me to pull ...
Read more
Image
 Since October it has been hard to tell that we are full-time RV travelers.  We dropped anchor at our daughter's family home and that's where we've been ever since.  We're starting our sixth month without moving.  But it's all going as planned.  We sought to spend the winter with our grandkids in close proximity and that has been accomplished.  And as luck would have it we had relatively easy access to replacement equipment our rig was in sore need of.  Some of it we knew about, some we didn't. The first thing to crop up was a bad circuit board on our water heater.  It was the "brains" of the water heater and we could not run on electric or propane, it was totally down for the count.  Most places we have been it wouldn't have been a big deal but in our North Carolina location the well water coming to us was running at about 35 deg F.  That's uncomfortable to wash hands in, let alone take a shower.  I didn't waste any time in getting...
Read more

Looking Ahead - Distant Destination

Image
  Not much happening since last post other than routine life.  Doing things with the grandkids and old people doctor visits.   Except! We have been applying for winter volunteer jobs for 2024/2025 and have been officially accepted as campground hosts for Furnace Creek Campground, Death Valley.  My first communications for this position date back to about three months ago.  There was a lot of waiting between the first few communications but the pace has really picked up in the last three weeks.  We have had phone interviews and signed volunteer agreement forms via encrypted communications.  And as of six days ago of this writing the medium level background checks were begun and completed.  We were told that they could see we had many background checks showing in the system from our past positions and that facilitated rapid progression through the system for this one.  All we have to do now is show up for our October report date. Maybe "al...
Read more