It’s hard to do these Utah parks with a dog. Hardly any hiking trails allow dogs, so it really limits you to things you can see from your car. There are good reasons for this: dogs can be nuisances to wildlife, other guests, etc., but evidently the more important reason is that dogs can easily run away, fall down cliffs, get lost, etc. When this happens, their owners run off trying to find them, and get themselves lost or hurt. This has not been much of a problem for the parks we’ve been to so far, but Arches has lots of, well, arches, that you can’t see unless you hike to them. Because of this and Comfort Inn’s 11am checkout time, we left out at 7am, and left Daisy in the hotel room.
Getting to Arches so early had its advantages – primarily because we beat both the crowds and the heat, but also its disadvantages – with the sun so low a lot of the views were backlit and we couldn’t get good pictures of them. We saw Balancing Rock (it looks just like it did in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons) and Delicate Arch, and hiked to Landscape Arch, which definitely wins the prize for best arch. Saw a bunch more arches (and a couple rabbits), then made it back to the hotel just in time for check-out.
After picking up the dog we went back to Canyonlands North. Canyonlands NP is a bit weird because there are two sets of roads: a northern set called “Island In the Sky”, and a southern set called “The Needles”. Both sets are dead-ends and don’t meet each other, and the entrances are about 60 miles apart, and on opposite sides of the Arches NP entrance. The northern roads, where we had been turned back yesterday by the thunderstorm, run along the rim of the canyon, and have mighty impressive views. Our original plans for this trip included the Grand Canyon, but we decided to cut that out early in the planning because it was too out of the way. The views here may have made up for that. Also, I saw what I’m pretty sure was a peregrine falcon diving after some prey. Very cool.
Canyonlands South was a different story. First of all, the entrance is about 30 miles off the highway, although the road itself snakes through a gorgeously scenic canyon. Second, the canyon rim here is not nearly as tall as on the north part, even though this is downstream from that. Thirdly, and most importantly, although this area is called “The Needles”, and is named after a really cool rock formation that we really wanted to see, you cannot actually see “The Needles” without a significant hike. So this place was kind of a bust. But if this is our biggest disappointment of the trip (which it has been so far), we’re doing pretty good.
I haven’t been wearing sunscreen. Strangely, even though I’ve been either outside or driving for the past week, today was the first time I got a little red. Not burnt really, just red.
We left Utah, and rolled into Cortez, CO about 7pm. Got a room at the Econolodge, which seems nice except for paper-thin walls. Tomorrow we go to our last national park, Mesa Verde. That’s another hike-in park, so we’re planning on boarding Daisy for the day here in Cortez. Then if we have time left in the day, I’m going to try to find a place to do some fishing, before we head to our planned destination, Albuquerque. We’re planning on being at Rachel’s brother’s house in Little Rock by Thursday night, which is 14 hours from Albuquerque, so maybe we’ll try to get a little farther tomorrow.
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