Westacular

Have you ever noticed that Utah license plates don’t say “Utah”, instead they say “Utah!”?  I’m starting to see why, there is some amazing stuff to see here and we haven’t even gone off the highway yet.

After going through Mexican Hat, UT which is named for a rock formation that looks sombrero-ish, the red rock whose dust we’ve been breathing for the last few hours is gone and the geology has been replaced by something entirely different.

Then you’ll go up a canyon and then down into another that looks different again.  The topology, geology, geography or whatever is constantly changing and is good fun to look at.  The rocks some in some pretty neat shapes too, and right next to the highway!

We passed a lot we wished we could have seen, Needles, Natural Bridges, Valley of the Gods.  Plus I see all kinds of roads with Jeeping potential.  We are definitely coming back.

We decided to bail on Four Corners, we’ll save that for a future visit when we can see southwest Colorado and a time when Sarah Michael finds all this stuff more interesting.

We were about to drop down a steep grade on the highway when we were stopped by the Highway Patrol.  They were closing north-bound traffic while they let south-bound traffic use our lane on the grade to get past a slow-moving wide load.  We only had to wait about ten minutes but we were sure curious what the fuss was about.  I don’t know what that truck was hauling, but it was enormous.

About 30 minutes south of Moab we drove up on Wilson Arch and stopped to have a closer look.  How can stuff this amazing be so accessible?

You can climb right up into the hole in the rock, which we did. It is so beautiful!

We finally arrived into Moab at 7:30 and got into our RV park.  This is a beauitful area, I’m sad we can’t spend more time here this trip, but knowing we’ll come back and we have so much to look forward to is quite a comfort.

Today we left Arizona, the Grand Canyon is now just a memory.

One thing that really struck me about the area surrounding the Grand Canyon was how green it was.  The area is hot but it must get a lot of precipitation because the hills and valleys are just covered with greenery.  There are some times when driving on the park roads where if I didn’t know I was at the Grand Canyon I could easily believe I was somewhere along the Oregon Coast.

The night we arrived into the park we did see lightning as we drove in, and yesterday we saw clouds dropping rain somewhere, but we never got wet ourselves.

We left early-ish, at 7:20 and started making our way towards a one-night stay in Moab, Utah on our way eventually to Mt. Rushmore.

Much of the drive once we left the National Park was through the Navajo Indian Reservation, and there were some interesting geological features that we didn’t think to photograph. There are these huge mounds, for example, that look like gravel piles, but there’s nothing to suggest they are actually piles of gravel moved from somewhere else. They stand in stark contrast to the pervasive red rock that is just about everywhere else.

Just before Tuba City, AZ we came across signs advertising Dinosaur Tracks. We couldn’t pass it by without stopping.

We were guided by a local Navajo girl who explained the tracks were made by Raptors, Allosaurus, Pteradactyls and a fourth one I can’t remember.

There were also fossilized bones, a claw and lots of dino droppings.

In addition to offering tours of the footprints there were also women selling locally-made jewelry and other trinkets.  The place had the kind of grim sadness of a lot of the roadside Indian merchants.  The stands are rickety and quite spare, you can sense the desperation of the people.  We gave the tourguide a “donation” and also bought some bracelets.

It was a worthwhile stop, very fun to see dinosaur artifacts out in the wild.