Saturday, October 4, 2014

Most importantly for the day - Happy Birthday, Jon!

As Sam and I walked around the park this morning, we saw the Jeep parade getting ready for the day's ride.  There were ten Jeeps which I thought was pretty impressive, but I was told there were twelve headed out the day before.

We drove to Canyonlands National Park with no plans for hiking so we could take Sam with us.  We really just wanted to get a feel for this rather large and fairly new park.  The park is celebrating 50 years as a National Park this year.  

The park included three distinct regions, each bounded by the rivers through the park.  We visited the Island in the Sky, the most popular (and most accessible) area of the park.  It was bordered by the Colorado River to the east and south and the Green River to the west and south.  The Maze, west of both the Colorado and Green Rivers, is only accessible by high clearance, four-wheel drive vehicles so we won't be driving it.  The Needles, to the south and east of the Colorado River, will have to wait until we are camped in Monticello, UT (50 miles south of Moab).

There were a lot of restored Model A's in the park taking part in a driving tour.  It must have been just about perfect weather for these old cars with no A/C. 

After watching a short movie about the park in the Visitor's Center, we listened to Ranger Nathaniel talk about desert bighorn sheep.  He went into a lot of detail about their tracking programs to understand their lives and migratory patterns.  He said he once saw a herd of eight animals.  I wanted to say something about our sighting at Zion, but someone else beat me to it and had pictures.  Nathaniel said we would likely not see any animals in the park today, so maybe we should just drive over to Zion (he sounded just a little bitter, but I'm sure he was kidding).

Yet another ranger talk was scheduled, this time at the Grand View Point Overlook.  Ranger Gretchen did a very nice job of walking us through the 200 million years of deposition, uplift and erosion that created the park features seen today.

The intermediate floor in the picture below was about 1,400 feet lower than our overlook and the Colorado River (not visible here) was another 600 feet below that.

The Green River was a beautiful sight off to the west from the overlook. We could just make out (with the rangers help) where the Green and Colorado Rivers meet.  Aerial pictures in the Visitor's Center made the confluence look amazing as the brown and green waters swirled and mixed.

Back at the Visitor's Center, I had to stop for one last parting shot of the La Sal Mountains as a backdrop at the Schafer Canyon Overlook.