Evening, Campers! It's Silver Cliche'
here again tonight and once again from spectacular Arches National Park
just outside of Moab, Utah.
Tonight's blog is probably going to be a
little of this and a little of that, because today we did a little of
this and a little of that. The day started cool, but not cold. The
overnight low was about 50 degrees, but the trailer was buttoned up, the
furnace kept us all at a comfortable 65 inside and the best news of all
is that yesterday's sunshine provided enough recharge "oomph" that we
awoke with plenty of battery power left and we had not even hooked up the
third battery to the bank. It's a sure sign of spring in Airstreamland
when a few hours of sun gets you through the night on only two batteries
(for the rest of you, I'd still use the arrival of robins to mark
spring). We repeated the cycle today and I think we're ready the night.
Breakfast today was (of course) pita
toast cooked over the open gas flame since we are now on day 5 without plug
in electricity and the toaster is looking like a boat anchor.
Delicious! The sun was brilliant with no clouds and humidity around 15%. I
took a chill stepping out of the shower even though the trailer was
over 70 degrees by at time and the windows were not open so there was no
breeze. Amazing thing that lack of humidity! Mrs. C' and I both trimmed up after almost five weeks of
travel. She took the bold step of having me trim 3/4" all around off the
bottom (I think I would be less nervous performing my own appendectomy
using a YouTube video as a guide than taking a scissors to my wife's
hair) and I did my semi-weekly beard trimming which involves all the hair
above the neck. Most of that is, in fact, beard. The rest is what
passes for fringe around the hat band of my baseball cap. 90 seconds, tops
and I'm good for three more days. Of course, sometimes I miss a spot, or
worse yet knock the trimmer to its shortest setting without realizing
it. That happened once last year while we were in Kansas on the way to
Yellowstone. While at lunch, Mrs. C' stepped away from the table to...
ah... powder her nose... and when she came back she approached our booth
from behind me. She sat down and asked "What did you do to your head?"
Note: she astutely recognized this as a "head" problem rather than a
"hair" problem. As any well practiced husband would do I drew out my
stock, answer to a surprising question and quickly said "What?" (It's a
stall tactic. Sometimes those few moments bought allow me to think of a
way to dodge whatever is about to hit me). "There is a section of your
hair missing" she informed me. "Hmmmmm" I said (I may also have stroked
my chin whiskers at the same time for effect) "I'm wondering if my
trimmer slipped a notch when I was trimming that part this morning."
Naturally, early that afternoon the trimmer was set to that short
setting and I repeated the job I had flubbed that morning.
That warning about self hair cutting and $3.95 will get you a tall latte
at Starbucks, but it won't help you understand what we did today, or
Arches National Park or Moab, Utah. Back to our story.
After toast and haircare we headed out to
see the park. It's truly amazing. At a "ranger talk" the other evening
here at the park (your tax dollars at work... thanks!), the ranger
explained a bit about the geology of the park. It seems that 100 million
years or so ago, this part of North America was an inland salt sea.
Over a long period of time it flooded, dried, flooded, dried over 29
cycles and deposited a salt later one mile thick which sits below all of
this sandstone and in only a very few places has been exposed by the
erosion since then. (One of those places you may have heard of is the Bonneville Salt Flats here in Utah) Sand in the form of dunes piled on top of the salt (there is an area here in the park called "petrified dunes"),
then this became a freshwater sea which deposited mud and muck then repeated
those processes about a dozen times with varying combinations of sand,
muck, water and goo. After being pressed for 50 or 60 million years then
lifted up, crushed, folded and eroded (by both wind and water) voila!
We have the crazy, layered, multicolored, textured place we have today.
Since this is mostly sandstone and since sandstone is easily etched and
eroded by anything acidic (including slightly acidic rain) this park is
falling apart. It is precisely that falling apart that creates the
arches and other features. We visited the most famous of those arches
today... Delicate Arch. This arch is so recognizable in this area that
it is the backdrop image for current Utah license plates (it does for
Utah travelers what the orange does for us Floridians... yah.... it's
that important and symbolic). Let me show you what we saw:
No, I did not take that while tipping
over. Delicate Arch sits on a sloped plateau of rock and is surrounded
by a few similarly large, but not arched, rocks on an otherwise swept plain.
It's quite a sight. It hasn't always been called Delicate Arch. Most of
its other names include either the word "pants" or "crotch". In the
interest of keeping this not "family friendly" I'll let you invent your
own names.
A very short distance from the Delicate
Arch viewpoint where I took that pic (the alternative was a semi-rugged
three mile round trip hike) was the Wolfe Ranch. This is the spot where
in the 1880s a family built their homestead to raise a heard of cattle
here that grew to 1,000 head. The cabin remains and is a stacked log
structure about 7 feet tall with one room of maybe 12 feet by 16 feet.
That's it. The roof and chinking between the logs is mud from the banks
of nearby "Salt Wash" (there is that salt the ranger told us about!)
Mrs. C' and I looked in the door into the dark, humorless space and I
looked at her and said "I'm sure nobody ever came home here and hollered
'Honey, are you home?'" Let me show you what life was like for those
early settlers on Salt Wash:
Amazingly, just a few hundred feet from
the Wolfe Ranch (that name makes it sound grander than it is) are the only
known petroglyphs in the park. They are believed to have been made by
Ute Indians who used this land for hunting, but
did not have permanent camps or villages here. My theory is that the
Wolfe kids might have drawn these to prank their parents... but that's
just a theory. You tell me:
So after that we headed out of the park
to nearby Moab. It's a town that has reinvented itself repeatedly over
150-ish years. Initially it was a crossing point on the Colorado River. I
guess technically it is still a crossing point on the Colorado River.
Heck, we crossed it there today... twice. Of course today the river
glides under your feet almost unnoticed thanks to the concrete and steel
span there. 150 years ago it wasn't so easy and Moabites (or Moabians,
or whatever they call themselves) made a living charging people with
Conestoga wagons filled with all of their earthly belongings who were
heading to their new life in California. That only lasted so long. Later
Moab became a uranium mining center. Like the river business, uranium
mining went bust once the ruskies caved and environmentalists decided
we'd be better off burning fossil fuel to create greenhouse gasses than
to bury spent uranium back in the ground where it came from (I wonder
what unforeseen damage comes after we stop burning fossil fuel to cut
back on greenhouse gasses?). So, today Moab is an outdoor adventure
Mecca. We even saw kids riding mountain bikes at a mountain bike park
that in most other cities would have been dedicated to skateboards. From
Moab you can go rafting, climbing, hiking, off-roading on 2, 3 or 4
wheels and I'm sure many other exciting and dangerous pursuits (maybe
even uranium mining!). There was a wide array of outdoor and adventure
gear being hauled through Moab or parked on its streets in the back of
trucks, on trailers or on its own power.
That said, Moab is not a photogenic town, we at lunch, hit the supermarket and headed back to perform pet care in the park.
Tonight is looking to be super-clear. I
hope to honor a request to photograph the Milky Way through the thin
clear air of Utah. To,or row it's back to Colorado and specifically to
Ridgeway near Ouray. Unfortunately, rain is forecast for all three
days/nights we are booked there... This could get ugly... and soggy...
and boring. Stay tuned (if you dare).
Here's one last pic combining where we are, with where we are headed:
oh...and one more arch...
Later...
SC'
P.S.: I've been trying to post Arches
pics to Flickr but the Internet service is to slow and flaky. Watch for
those in a day or so when we could have better service.
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