Gael Glen Farm On The Road

Before departing from Arches National Park, we tried our hand at some night photography of the Milky Way. It is a designated dark sky park so we wanted to make the most of the opportunity to really see the night sky. These are the best shots from right above our campsite.

This morning we were off early to visit Canyonlands National Park - the final stop on our tour of Utah’s Big Five National Parks. Before entering the park gates, we drove by Wilson Arch and stopped at Newspaper State Historic Monument in San Juan County. This large rock panel has one of the largest collections of petroglyphs in the United States, created by various cultures over 2,000 years, including Ancestral Puebloan, Fremont, Ute, and Navajo.

Love the raven and the big horned sheep.

That is a lot of toes! Not sure that that is about.

We then entered the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. We stopped by the Visitors Centre to watch the very good park movie and then checked into our campsite #18 in Loop B. We have our very own huge rock! So cool. Also very cool is that we saw a coyote cross the road right in front of us. We are on Wiley Coyote’s home turf after all.

We are only here today so we headed out in the afternoon despite the intense heat to see some of the park. I can say with certainty that we are getting tired of the extreme desert heat and have seen a lot of rocks lately. We had a very grumpy Liam and Alistair this afternoon; they are done with hiking (even short trails) in the 43 degrees Celsius heat. We first checked out a stone store house. The boys ranked it underwhelming.

Yep. The photo on the placard is what it looks like.

Next we visited the Cave Spring trail. This hike was so good we had to do it twice since we missed noticing the pictographs the first time around. We saw an old cowboy camp from the time of the early ranchers. The camp was built under the rock overhang to provide a natural roof. We could see all the black soot on the rock ceiling from their many campfires.

Notice how black the ceiling is?

We saw the spring - it was small but still producing a tiny puddle. We saw lots of deer prints in the area around the spring.

We finally found the pictographs of handprints and figures. Try #2 for the win.

Finally we got to climb two (scorchingly hot) metal ladders to complete the trail loop up over the rocks. This was another adventure where we felt like we were inside a Zelda video game following cairns over rocky outcrops.

We appreciated the truck’s air conditioning as we drove along the Scenic Drive, past red and white stripped, mushroom shaped rocks. Inside the canyon, the Green and Colorado Rivers meet at an area called the Confluence. The canyon is half as deep as the Grand Canyon but twice as wide. From our side, we could see the red and white stripped sandstone pillars (called needles) in the distance that give this district its name. We found out that you can’t actually drive up close to the needles without an hours long and arduous back country 4x4 drive requiring a permit, so we just appreciated them from afar.