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Canyonlands National Park, Utah
And they keep moving at a glacial pace, turning circles in a memory maze
Not all arches are in Arches. Canyonlands is another separate and sprawling national park near Moab, with the Island in the Sky Mesa section being the easiest to visit and far and away the most popular section of the park. The Island in the Sky Mesa starts with quick, fun roadside attractions and ends up with impossibly broad views across the Colorado Plateau, views that look right over the kind of places that are almost too remote to believe.
The first Canyonlands roadside attraction I visited on my (short) journey started at the quick loop trail to Mesa Arch, not necessarily the biggest but easily one of the best sited arches still in existence. It sits right on the edge of the mesa, with quick and sudden thousand foot (or so) dropoffs just a few feet beyond that woman over there.
Ignoring Whale Rock and The Neck and the truly wrong splendor of Upheaval Dome, we're headed right for the mesa's rim. The Island in the Sky Mesa is at an elevation around 6000 feet, about 2000 feet higher than either the Green River (on the mesa's west side) or the far better known Colorado River (on the mesa's east side). The advantage of such height is unobstructed views about as far as the desert's clean air and the curvature of the earth will allow. Of course such distance and height are almost always totally scaleless, there are so few people or buildings or roads or trees to reinforce just how far down really is.
This is the view from the trail at Grand View Point, a place which starts to explain a bit of Canyonlands geography. The Island in the Sky Mesa is about a thousand feet above the desert, with the canyonlands part of Canyonlands another thousand feet down from there. Meanwhile in the distance are the same mountains viewable from the shadows of Delicate Arch, although here they're just a bit farther away (about fifty or sixty air miles away on the Utah/Colorado border).
A somewhat better feel of the mesa's precipitous and totally unguarded edge. The trail at Grand View Point spends the best part of its existence hugging such edges and providing almost continuously good places to stop, sit down at the edge, let your feet dangle off and try and imagine what the world is like all those thousands of feet below.
Finally some scale- that impossibly thin line across the bottom is a 4x4 dirt road. Canyonlands allows a limited number of 4x4 drives on the canyon's rim, trips on the hundred mile White Rim Road take about two or three days and require a reasonably priced $30 permit. If you decide to take your sport utility vehicle on the journey be sure to bring along lots of supplies, bring some extra gas and drive as carefully as possible- the National Park Service estimates towing services start at approximately $1000, somewhat more expensive than that otherwise reasonably priced $30 permit that got you there in the first place.
Lizards! Sure they might not be as exciting as last year's grizzly bear photos, but in their defense there sure were a lot of them. On every trail, at every turn, suicidal daredevil lizards did their best to run across the trail just underneath my potentially crushing Lowa boots, cheating and laughing at death as they once again narrowly avoided another clumsy giant.
And those speedy little bastards were near impossible to photograph. Except for this one cleverly hiding among some dead branches and waiting, just waiting for the right opportunity to almost be crushed by my big giant boots once again.
