Western US Trip – Day 16

Natural Bridge National Park, Glenn Canyon National Rec. Area, Capital Reef National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park

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We woke up before dawn by the Colorado River. We wanted to get an early start so we could make it to Bryce Canyon today. We had a quick breakfast of oatmeal (Les) and Total Raison Bran (me) and headed for the Moab system.

In Moab we stopped to make phone calls and get gas and ice, then headed south for a wide loop that would take us to Bryce Canyon. Our goal was to avoid being sidetracked by the scenic beauty to the point where we didn’t make it. There were some significant risks here including Canyonlands, Natural Bridges, Glen Canyon, etc. etc.

The first diversion was Hole ‘N the Wall, a house someone built inside one of the buttes. That one was fairly easy to skip. The next diversion was Wilson Arch, which we stopped at long enough to photograph but didn’t actually leave the car. Then we headed down the road. It wasn’t marked scenic on the map but it was pretty nice. Rocky buttes and red rock formations. But compared to what we would see, I guess it wasn’t really scenic. On the way we passed 4000 miles on the odometer. We stopped for a brief ceremony. We took pictures, and Les poured water on the hood of the truck. It was the best we could think of at the time.

We passed a junction for Hwy 666. This didn’t seem right in a state as religious as Utah. We of course named it the Highway to Hell, even though it was actually the highway to Cortez (who was hell on the Aztecs anyway). Before reaching Cortez it passed through Pleasant Valley and Dove Creek. Clearly the people on this highway were deceiving themselves.

The road took us to Natural Bridges National Park. Here we determined that there were 3 bridges and “only” 9 miles to travel. We also discovered that natural bridges look an awful lot like arches. The key difference is how they are created. Natural bridges are formed by rivers eroding the rock. Arches are created by wind and rain. Other than that, they are interchangeable.

We weren’t going to hike at the first bridge, but the trail offered stairs and ladders. We couldn’t pass it up. I’m glad we didn’t. The trail ran along the canyon wall as it dropped down, so the wall got higher and higher on our left, while there was still a significant drop on our right. Les discovered if we both stood next to the wall about 100 feet apart, and spoke softly, we could still hear each other clearly. The sound traveled down the face of the wall.

The ladder was made out of logs but it was sturdy. We went about half way down the path below where there was a good view of the bridge. We passed a semi-circular pile of rocks about two or three feet high, up against a cliff wall. A couple was speculating whether it was Indian ruins or not (clearly not, just rocks someone had piled up). Les suggested to them that it was an Anasazi Indian gun emplacement. It looked like one too. We figured they would have a good field of fire to hold the bridge and maintain control of the valley. The probably needed it to keep out the Russians and Germans who once again seemed to be everywhere.

We were now officially behind schedule so we high-tailed it back to the car and headed for the next bridge. We had a quick drive by shooting on that one and headed for the last one. The last one is the longest and thinnest. We hiked down to it, and under it, into the dry river bed of the river that formed it. Very cool. The arch is so big I couldn’t really get it all into the viewfinder of my camera.

We followed 2 German women and an English women back to their van (driven by Australians) and headed down Hwy 95 at 80 miles an hour. We had computed that we’d need to average 30 miles an hour to make Bryce Canyon by sunset. We were currently averaging 11 miles per hour. Not good. You’d be surprised how long you have to drive 80 miles an hour to make up for 2-3 hours of 0 miles per hour.

At this point the scenery really picked up. I mean, we had seen red rock canyons a lot in the last few days. Some really spectacular stuff too like the Colorado National Monument, and Castle Valley, not to mention Arches National Park. But the next stretch of road was unbelievable. Red rock canyon galore. Buttes, spires, piles of rocks, yellow rocks on red rocks, black rocks on yellow rocks, all kinds of interesting patterns caused by erosion. Red dirt, red plateaus, you name it. Then we hit Glen Canyon. It wiped out the scenic beauty shields completely (Scotty, transfer all power to the scenic beauty shields. Captain, she can’t take no more. The shields are buckling!).

Glen Canyon is filled with Lake Powell (thanks to the Glen Canyon dam). This was the first water we’d seen all day and it’s pretty big. It’s surrounded by red rock canyon walls multi-hundreds of feet high along with some yellow rock stuff too. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like before they dammed it. The road meandered through the canyons, looking for a way out. We’d routinely look up ahead and have no idea where it was going to go. It would just disappear into the canyon walls.

Finally we found our way out and the landscape changed to red, yellow and or gray buttes with mud/rock cascading down the sides like kids had been dumping sand over them. We never did figure out if it was mud/sand, and therefore soft, or mud/sand that had turned to rock over time. I think it was actually rock judging from the water tracks eroded on them. But it just looked like God’s sandbox.

We followed the road towards Hanksville. I mentioned before that southeastern Montana was the remotest inhabited area I’d ever seen. Well, this road blows it away. No houses, no animals, no fences, no telephone poles, nothing. Completely empty. We’d actually passed through a lot of areas like this in the last few days. Southeastern Montana still wins for places that people actually live, but this place wins for places where they don’t.

We passed some bikers at the bottom of a hill. We commented on how they had a big hill to go and it was hot, etc. What we didn’t realize, was the hill basically continued until Hanksville. About 15 or 20 miles. These people were making a big mistake.

Anyway, we headed into Hanksville. A thriving metropolis of probably at least 50 people, where we bought gas, and where the gas station store is built inside a butte, much like the Hole ‘N the Wall house (but with no admission fee).

From there we headed east into Capital Reef National Park. Neither Les nor I had ever heard of this park. But, it’s (you guessed it), red rock canyons, buttes and spires, eroded by wind and rain into fascinating formations. We hardly slowed down for it. We couldn’t take it any more. It’s really pretty but, geez, enough already. We did stop to see the Anasazi petroglyphs (and the petroglyph of Irving somebody who had carved his name there in 1937), and we stopped at one or two panoramic points to try to take it all in.

We also noticed a weird thing. All along the flatter rock formations, were black volcanic rocks. They looked like they’d just been scattered around there, like someone had spilled a big bag of them. They had no business being there. We hadn’t seen volcanic rock for days. It was all sandstone and shale and other flat stuff. The rocks hadn’t been anything but red, yellow, white and the occasional gray for days either. The looked really out of place. As it turns out, they had been dragged down there by glaciers from the mountains we were heading into.

We headed south onto Hwy 12. We’re now only 112 miles from Bryce Canyon and it’s only 3:30 or so. The road heads into the Dixie National Forest (where we cut down the trees, and you get to pay for it). The landscape changed to mountains and fir trees, the largest we’d seen since western Montana. As we got higher up, it turned into aspen. The aspen had turned to a brilliant yellow and orange for fall. For miles and miles we passed through thousands of aspen. We could see whole hillsides of them. Mixed with the fir trees they made patterns on the mountains. It was a welcome change from red rock canyon, but the scenic beauty circuits were already severely overloaded and were beginning to break down.

We crested the mountain at 9400 feet. The highest we’d been on the trip. Down the other side were 270 degree panoramic views of the buttes and canyons we’d just passed through. The air here is the clearest in the US (according to the sign). You can see for 150 miles (and we caught a clear, cloudless day). It was like being in an airplane. Up the hillsides behind us were golden aspens and green firs, and everywhere else were multi-colored rock formations, canyons, dry riverbeds, and all kinds of geological wonders. We
only stopped once for pictures. We knew it would never fit in the camera anyway, and we couldn’t take in any more regardless. Whenever we saw “Scenic Turn-out” signs we wanted to change them to Scenic Burn-out.

At the bottom of the mountain was the town of Boulder. There they have a state park that is an Anasazi Indian ruin. We thought it was cliff dwellings, but as it turns out, it’s a small museum and about half an acre of the rock foundations of mud huts. It was apparently, the largest Indian city in the area, supporting over 200 people. At the moment, the area only has about 100 people, so they were doing pretty well. There wasn’t much to see but we dutifully trudged through it and in fact it served as sort of a sorbet to cleanse the scenic beauty palate for Bryce Canyon.

We headed on towards Bryce. The road went through an area very similar to the Badlands only the mounds were wider. In fact, the road went out over one of them. It was very narrow and there were drop-offs on both sides. It was very much like when we walked across the top of the Badlands but with a truck. It wasn’t clear that the road got down from there. Les was driving (luckily for me) and he was gripping the steering wheel pretty hard.

There were lots of little side roads that tempted us about every 5 miles. Hell’s Backbone road, Escalante Petrified Forest, all kinds of little gravel roads to various scenic wonders. But we had a goal and we managed to stick to it. It was probably the only thing that kept us sane. Between driving like madmen, scenic beauty on overload, and a certain amount of dehydration and hunger, we were basically gibbering idiots. Luckily we figured out it was happening, had some Gatorade, some snacks, slowed down a little, and managed to recover.

We arrived at Bryce Canyon just before sunset. We headed in and stopped at the first viewpoint, appropriately named Sunset Point. As we reached it we saw why. It’s a bowl, filled with colored limestone spires called hoodoos. As the sun sets, it lights up rows of the hoodoos across the bowl, finally lighting the mountains in the distance, then disappearing below the horizon. We arrived just as the last mountains were being lit, then it went dark. Half an hour sooner and we would have seen it. Bummer.

Still, it’s an impressive sight. It seems to have been created much like the Badlands, only it’s farther along and the insides of the things being eroded seem to be harder than in the Badlands, because they didn’t wash away.

We wandered around there for awhile, then headed up the road to Inspiration point, which is a viewpoint of the same area off to one side and much higher up. Very impressive too. At this point though it was pretty dark. We’ll have to see it again tomorrow. We decided to check out the rest of the road so we’d know where to go when it was light. About 5 miles down the road we hit road construction and the road was closed. 4000 miles to get here and we can only see half of it.

Behind the road closed sign was a big (20 feet?) pile of dirt to ensure that people like us didn’t try to drive around the barriers. We figured that just behind it was a perfectly good road. As we were muttering about that we were both struck by the same thought at the same time. How do the construction guys get in? Well, we figured it out. There was another little back way in. Just to prove the point (we couldn’t see anything by this time anyway), we drove down the road for a couple of miles. It was dirt, but perfectly good. In fact better than many we had been on. We figured in the morning the workers would be back and we wouldn’t be able to do it again, but I don’t see why they couldn’t have kept it open.

We headed back to Tropic, a little town we had passed on the way in to find a motel. It had been four days without a shower and we needed one badly. Plus, being Monday night, we wanted to watch the game. And besides, I needed to recharge the PC. We found a little place, stopped into the restaurant for dinner, then had our showers. Minnesota trounced the Giants by 17 or so and ruined Lawrence Taylor’s jersey-being- retired ceremony.

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