I Love the High Desert!

 

It's true, I do.  Cyndee, not so much.

Don't get me wrong, Cyndee is okay with the desert, she's just not as enamored with it as I am.  She has thoroughly enjoyed our arches and canyons tour.  Which brings us to today's adventure, Canyonlands National Park.  It's a big park so we're going to spread our visit out over two days.

Island in the Sky, Canyonlands National Park

May 9, 2023

Like the post about Arches National Park, I have lots of photos and narrating them with our travel story would probably come off boring.  So enjoy the pics and a few descriptive blurbs.

The above is Shafer Trail.  It hugs the walls of Shafer Canyon and drops 1,400 ft over a small distance.

Shafer Trail continues down the canyon floor and provides access to the White Rim Trail which is 100 miles long.

The white rim of the White Rim trail.  Our son drove it in its entirety last year.  Made it through some very narrow passages and rock crawls, coming out the other end without having banged up his truck.

Check out the petrified mud in these next two photos.  It is amazing to think this was the floor of an ancient shallow sea.

Off-roaders at a pull-out on the edge of the White Rim Trail.  Can't see them?  See next photo.

Zoomed in on the off-roaders.  The vastness of this place is awesome.

Air quality is an issue in Canyonlands.  There are signs about it in several places.

The white-rimed canyon kept drawing my attention.

Chief was in on the action for our Canyonlands tour.

It was a great day in the Island In The Sky part of Canyonlands.  And as is our usual practice we acquired embroidered patches from the visitor centers of the places we visited.  These patches are eventually sewn on to our "travel blanket" to chronicle the places we have been.  We'll accumulate patches for awhile and then for efficiency we'll get out all the sewing gear and attach several patches at once.  This time when we got home and added the day's patches to the holding bin it was a bit of an eye-opener.  I guess we have been pretty busy this past few months, that bin was bulging.

So out came the sewing machine and we set up a little sewing center in the rig and got busy.

Something else we noticed was that our blanket was getting pretty full.  It was difficult to find spots big enough to fit in many of the patches.  It is a blanket made for a double bed but we've run out of real-estate.  Thought about turning it over and continuing on the other side but that means stitching through the patches on the other side.  Don't know how that is going to work out.  We'll give it a try and see.

The Needles, Canyonlands National Park

May 10,2023

The Needles didn't have an entrance sign like Island In The Sky did, or at least I never could find it, so this story board is a substitute.

And Yep, The Needles look just like the story board says.

I began this post explaining that we were breaking this park into a two-day visit.  It's really big, 527 square miles big.  And another thing that makes it at least a two day visit is that the park is divided into two sections; Island In The Sky and The Needles, which neither one can be accessed from the other by any kind of road.  From our campground base in Thompson Springs, UT it was a 42 mile drive to the visitor center of Arches NP.  To Canyonlands Island In The Sky it was 48 miles.  But to get to Canyonlands The Needles it was 112 miles, just to get to the entrance.  We certainly had to plan for these long days but it was no inconvenience, the scenery everywhere we looked was just stunning.

  

It's May 11th in the high country and barely warm enough for this
fellow to come out and get a little sun.

Again with the ancient, petrified mudflow.

Signs of spring can be found in sheltered, south-facing features.

And of course Chief had to get in on the picture taking.

I have hundreds of pictures from Canyonlands but this is it for this post.  Next up, Capitol Reef.  It will be our last tour of southern Utah before departing for our summer gig in North Utah.