Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument

This is another area of federal lands in Utah that are even less known than Capitol Reef – and the land mass is the size of the state of Delaware.  We followed a bit of the perimeter of the Park on the Scenic Byway – Highway 12.  We drove about 50 miles south from Torrey through Boulder and on to the Escalante River.  There are mountains, sandstone cliffs, canyons, unique rock formations and some serious grades on the road.

If you would like to see more of our pictures from Grand Staircase – Escalante, click on the following link:  https://picasaweb.google.com/116107386675555024952/GrandStaircaseEscalante

Capitol Reef NP

When you think of National Parks, Capitol Reef would generally not be one on the tip of your tongue.  But in our tour of National Parks this year, the hits just keep on coming including Capitol Reef.  It has a lot of the red sandstone of the parks in southern Utah, but has its own unique character.  The area only became a National Park in 1971.  The first paved road in the area was built in 1962.  The Park still has very few paved roads.  There are 20 miles or so of State highway cutting east/west through the Park and about a 10-mile scenic drive and that is it for the pavement.  There are many miles of jeep trails but our Ford Focus station wagon doesn’t do real well on them.  One probably would need four-wheel-drive to really explore this park in depth.

Why is it called Capitol Reef?  Well the Capitol part comes from the many white sandstone domes adorning the top of the cliffs.  One of them is even named Capitol Dome as some felt it looked like one of the domes on the US Capitol Building.  We were in DC last year, so let’s see if there is a resemblance.

Well, it may take a bit of imagination.  But there are a lot of white domes in the Park.

When the Mormons migrated from the Midwest to Salt Lake, they were also encouraged to migrate out from Salt Lake and settle the broader Southwest.  One settlement, called Fruita was established in the 1880s in the Fremont River valley where now the main highway passes through Capitol Reef.  Although the Park Service now has acquired all these private lands, they still maintain the orchards of Fruita and some of the buildings of that settlement.  We went into one orchard and picked some apples, peaches, and pears.  There is a Dollar a pound collection box at the orchard gate.  I made some applesauce, a peach coffee cake, and we will munch on the pears when they ripen a bit.  It had to be a rough life in such a remote area.  There were 10 families residing there at the most.  Below right is a picture of the one-room Fruita School.

The main home of the Fruita settlement has been restored and has a store which sells some fruit products and other canned goods.  We bought two jars of salsa, one with peaches and the other with fire roasted peppers.  They were both quite good.  But the real specialty is the small fruit pies they sell.  We bought one to top off our picnic lunch in the Fruita orchards area.

 

We hiked a bit through one canyon that also served as a wash and along the ridge of another canyon.  We might have hiked a bit more but during the time we were here they had at least an inch of the annual ten inches of rain they receive a year which shut down the scenic drive and a number of the trails.  The Fremont River flowed red.

If you would like to see more of our pictures from Capitol Reef, click on the link below:  https://picasaweb.google.com/116107386675555024952/CapitolReef

On To Torrey

To where?  We are in an area about as remote as it comes, Torrey, Utah, the closest town to Capitol Reef National Park.  We hadn’t done as much in Moab as we wanted to and we hadn’t gotten to Mesa Verde NP so we went to the office at our campground in Moab to extend.  That certainly wasn’t a productive endeavor.  They could only let us extend for one more night on our site as they subsequently had it booked for two weeks.  But worse, the Passport America rate we had been using wouldn’t be honored for the holiday weekend plus there was a surcharge for the holidays.  So, to extend for more than one day, we would have to move our motor home to another site and see our rate go from $25 a night to $61 a night.  That made it an easy call.  We moved not to another site; we just moved right on down the road. As a result, we did forgo a few hikes we might have taken and we had to pass on Mesa Verde but we weren’t about to pay $61 a night for a campground in Moab, Utah, holiday weekend notwithstanding.

So we got on the phone and secured a campsite at an RV park in Torrey.  As we drove north from Moab to the I70, we thought we probably should get some fuel before heading into these remote regions even though we were 3/4 full.  We stopped at the only gas station at that freeway entrance.  Gary pulled up to the pump, went in to prepay, but quickly came back out saying we’re heading on down the road.  The price for diesel at these pumps was $5.29 a gallon.  He had seen the price on the pump and went inside to find out if it was real and why.  The clerk in the store said “yes, that is the price and the owner thinks he can get it”.  Well, he didn’t get it from us.  We headed west 15 miles to the next exit and filled up for $4 a gallon.  We pity the poor people who can’t make it east or west from this exit.

During the last 100+ miles to Torrey, there was only one town of less that 200 people.  And Torrey doesn’t have any more residents than that.  And from here south in some of the least populated area of the country.  At times, the terrain looked almost like a moonscape.

 

 

We drove through Capitol Reef on our way to our campground.  It looks like it will be another beautiful park to explore.

Canyonlands–The Needles

Although Canyonlands National Park is not all that massive, the main access roads are quite far apart.  It was 35 miles north, west, and south from our campground to the visitor’s center for Island In The Sky.  The visitor’s center for The Needles was south, west, north and west a total of 75 miles from the campground.  But then it isn’t easy building access roads into a land of canyons.

Along the way was an impressive arch right along the main highway, Wilson Arch and a petroglyph wall with 2,000 years of etchings called Newspaper Rock.

Whereas we were on a mesa looking down into two levels of canyons at Island In The Sky, we were on the intermediate level at The Needles.  You are looking up at mesas and mountains in the distance and also looking down into the lower levels of the canyons.

So why is this district known as the The Needles?  Because of these formations where their softer rock has eroded away leaving these harder “needles” still standing.

 

 

Our favorite formation in this district was one called Wooden Shoe Arch.  There were also a lot of formations that looked liked mushrooms or stacks of pancakes.

We took a couple of shorter hikes and were eyeing some of the longer trails, but we had to cut our trip a bit short as the sky became very threatening.  You don’t want to be caught hiking in a canyon during a thunderstorm.  And for that matter, the roads are no place to be either as they don’t always go to the expense of building bridges.  They just let the water in the washes run over the roads.

The Road To Potash

Rolling in to Moab, we saw a road sign that read “Potash  -–>”.  Gary commented at the time that potash is a component of fertilizer.  We were looking at some local guide books about things to do beyond the national parks and one suggestion was to drive the canyon roads along the Colorado River and one of the suggested drives was the road to Potash.

So off we went to visit Potash.  It was a different drive than the others we had taken.  This time we were right at the level of the Colorado River rather than a few thousand feet above it as we had been in Canyonlands.  There had been rain and the river was very muddy and somewhat red like the majority of the rocks around here.

 

We saw on the maps that there is an area of petroglyphs on that road. 

We also found a neat arch that was a vertical one – Jug Handle Arch.

And there was a waterfall with water that really was as red as the rocks.

At the end of the state road, we arrived at Potash.  But there was no town there as we expected.  Potash was just a few big buildings and a rail car loading facility for a potash mining operation.  We drove a  bit until the pavement stopped and the road became a jeep only trail.  This was one of those times that we wished we had a high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicle as our “toad” as on up that jeep trail were the evaporation ponds for the potash mine as well as Thelma and Louise Point.  Yes, the over-the-cliff ending was filmed in the Moab area.  We visited a small museum dedicated to all the films that have had scenes shot in the area, and there have been a bunch of them.  It seems Hollywood directors also like these amazing sights.  It has been a favorite location for Westerns including several starring John Wayne.

Canyonlands National Park–Island In The Sky

When we were at Arches NP, we were up on a high plateau, but still looking up at arches, fins, and other rock formations.  Not far away at the Island In The Sky district of Canyonlands NP we were back up on a high plateau, but this time we were mainly looking down into vast expanses of canyons.

Canyonlands was created by the erosion from two large rivers that drain a large section of the Rocky Mountains – the Green River and the Colorado River.  The two rivers join together in the park for the Colorado River’s run on down through the Grand Canyon and beyond.

Canyonlands has three major districts.  The Island In The Sky district reduces down to just a neck of land between the erosion fields of the two rivers.  The Needles district, which we also visited, is down in an intermediate level of the canyon floors.  The Maze district on the west side of the rivers is some of the remotest lands in the country.  Butch Cassidy and his gangs used to hang out in that area as they felt no lawmen would ever follow into these canyons and risk never finding their way out.

Gary had not visited Canyonlands but has been to the Grand Canyon.  He says I won’t see anything like the expanse of these canyons there.  And by the way, we passed on the jeep path down to the next level of the canyon.

Arches National Park

A quick summary – what a picture-taking mecca.  I knew almost nothing of this Park.  At one point in our trip planning, I asked, “what are we going to do there?”  Gary had visited there 38 years ago and assured me it would be well worth the trip.  It was!  The picture below right is of Delicate Arch, featured on the license plate of the State of Utah.

Arches reminded me a little bit of Garden of the Gods back in Colorado Springs, but on a super massive scale.  In the case of Garden of the Gods, the eruption of the Rocky Mountains has caused nearby rock lying horizontally under the ground to thrust up vertically.  In the case of Arches, a huge ancient salt bed left behind from an inland sea provided the base.  Subsequently layer upon layer of sediment had turned to soft rock (sandstone)  on top of the salt bed.  And then through erosions of various manners and upward thrusts from the shifting salt were created these amazing formations.   Below left are The Three Gossips and at the right is Balanced Rock.

And then there are the Petrified Dunes and the Ham Rock

The Arches erode from rock formations that are known as “fins”.  As the fins formed from the various layers of sediments, sometimes it is the bottom layer that has eroded away leaving the top layer of harder rock in place, creating the arches.

We are way behind in cleaning up and posting our photo albums, but for Arches we had to make an exception and get this album posted. Just click on the following link:  https://picasaweb.google.com/116107386675555024952/Arches