Colorado National Monument, Castle Valley, Arches National Park
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Brisk this morning but not cold. How refreshing. It’s so nice to wake up not freezing. We had a good breakfast of eggs, potatoes, and kielbasa and packed up.
We followed the rim road which, not too surprisingly, follows along the rim of the canyon for about 20 miles. Plenty of red rock spires, cliffs and formations. We found a tunnel under the road that we explored. It was maybe 50 yards long. It started at 6 feet in diameter and ended at about 4.
We stopped at Ute canyon where Les, as he has apparently done many times before, sang Day-o with the echo. It was perfect. The echo was about a second and a half (which means at least 1100 feet across). Day-0 (pause), Day-0, Day-ay-ay-o (pause), Day-ay-ay-o, Daylight come (pause), Daylight come, and me want go home, etc.
We headed for Cold Shivers point. Along the way we kept scanning for Bighorn Sheep, but no luck. Sheep and bears were the last major land animals we hadn’t seen yet.
At Cold Shivers point there was an overlook of a canyon probably 1000 or 1500 feet down. Off to one side was a rock formation with a balancing rock that just begged for a photograph of someone standing on it. Les went out there and I took his picture. A woman on a bike offered to take one of the two of us so I had to go out there too. Nothing like two people standing on a 3 foot rock overlooking a 1500 foot drop.
When we got back, the biker told us that some kids had recently gone out there drunk and fallen off. Thanks a lot.
We left the monument and headed for Grand Junction to send postcards, get gas, money and make some phone calls. Then we headed down the interstate for Utah. Our time on the interstate was mercifully brief and we turned off for Cisco. Cisco is probably population of 3 if you count the pickup trucks. Once a thriving community consisting of gas station and 15 houses, it now looked like one house operational, and no gas station.
We followed the road across the prairie towards some mountains in the distance. As we approached the mountains we headed into the Colorado River valley and some really spectacular red rock canyons. There were people rafting down the river. It was moving very slowly. Looked like fun. We resisted the urge to go swimming because we really had to keep going to hit everything we wanted to.
The road twisted and turned through the valley and finally opened into Castle Valley. We thought the previous stuff had been pretty nice but Castle Valley was amazing. It was filled with major rock formations and monuments. It looked like a John Ford western. There was mouth open gaping scenic beauty for 360 degrees. Really amazing.
We continued through the canyon another 15 miles or so. This is a major mountain biker area. They were everywhere. Practically every car we passed had multiple bikes on it. And we passed more bikers on the road. They were the Mountain Dew commercial guys. They had all the fashion trappings and really serious looks on their faces. You know, been there, biked that, sort of looks.
We came out of the canyon area near Arches National Park. Our brains were on scenic beauty overload before we even hit the park. It just got worse as we entered the park. More red rock walls, spires, balancing rocks, formations, etc. Even petrified sand dunes. For sheer beauty it wasn’t as good as the Colorado National Monument or even the valley we had just come out of, but for quantity it won hands down.
Suddenly there were tourists everywhere. We couldn’t figure out where they had come from. We had had the parks to ourselves pretty much for most of the trip. Now there were cars everywhere and people crawling all over the scenic beauty like ants. We had planned to camp at Arches but the campground was full. Lucky we hadn’t tried to reach it the night before.
Arches National Park is basically one road with two offshoots. At the end of each offshoot are trails to where the arches are. The first road went to Delicate Arch. That’s the one on the Utah license plates. It sits way up high on a mountainside. We decided it was too long a hike for just one arch when the other road had multiple ones at the end.
The other offshoot ended at Devil’s Garden. Here there were lots of arches. We hiked over rocks, sand, trees and all kinds of stuff. We saw Tunnel Arch and Pine Tree Arch, then headed back up the trail to Landscape Arch. Landscape Arch is a huge sucker, high up on a hill. I’m sure it’s called Landscape Arch because it fills the whole landscape. It’s cracking and may not be an arch all that much longer, at least in geological terms. You could hike up a serious hill to it but we decided we wouldn’t make the end of the trail if we tried it, so we pressed on.
The next one we saw was Wall Arch, which was my personal favorite. Then we proceeded over 2 more miles over thin rock tops, gullies, and crevices to Double ‘O’ Arch. This was the second best one. It’s one arch over top of another one (hence the name). All along the way we passed non-English speaking tourists and at this arch, we ran into a group of Russians of all things. One of the Russian women climbed out on top of the arch (oh, about 50 feet up).
On the way back we saw Dark Arch (which is) but had to pass on 3 or 4 more so we’d get back to the car by dark. It was too bad. I would have liked to see some more.
Well, now we needed a campsite. We thought about heading towards Moab, where there was supposed to be a KOA campground but Les remembered that we had seen tents set up along the river as we exited the canyon. Not really a campground but what the heck, so we headed there.
There were actually camping markers but the sites were “undeveloped”. What undeveloped means is no tables, no water, no bathrooms (pack out your poop), no anything. Just a reasonably flat sheltered place to stick your tent with a not too unreasonable dirt road leading to it. We got set up just as it got dark. Since we had no chairs, Les sat on the cooler and I sat in the back of the truck. In fact, I’m typing this sitting in the back of the truck. Les just saw a fox. It ran away before I could see it. Earlier we saw bats.
We are behind schedule and are trying to figure out how to see Bryce, Zion, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, and Yosemite in 6 days. Gonna be tough.
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