Evening, Campers! It's Silver Cliche'
here with you again. Still in Utah (night 6 on that score with 8 total
planned) but out of the frozen highlands that was beautiful Bryce Canyon
National Park and on to the comparative warmth of Devils Garden
Campground in Arches National Park just outside of Moab, Utah.
I took one more explore around Bryce as
the sun was setting last night to see if I needed to hit any of the
points to watch the sun rise and take more pics to share with you. Turns
out, I had all I needed. That meant I didn't have to be the early bird
today and more importantly I didn't need to leave the comfort and warmth
of the trailer to freeze my hoodoos off at 5:30 AM. Instead I made
coffee and did a number on the Wall Street Journal including the
crossword all before Mrs. C' and the dogs got up. Oh... It was 31
degrees this morning, so I was happy to inside.
We had two options for today. One was the
"option of record" which involved a 4 hour 45 minute drive to Arches
National Park where we have campground reservations for the next three
nights. The "alternate plan" was to head to Capitol Reef National Park
just 2:45 away and hope to snag a spot at their "no reservations"
campground for a night then go to Arches tomorrow and Wednesday. What I
have not shared with you is that every national park campground we have
been to on this trip since the Grand Canyon has been full every night.
I'm shocked too. We arrived at the Grand Canyon North Rim Campground on
its second night of operation for the season... that's right, from the
very first night if you don't have a reservation, you don't have a spot.
The ranger there said they will be 100% full from opening day to
closing. Sounds like we need more national parks! Anyhow, back to
today's plan. It would have been an hour out of our way to Capitol Reef
with uncertain chances for even getting a spot plus we are beginning to
suffer from a condition known as "sandstone burnout" which is a form of
confused delirium produced by exposure to to many variations of
sandstone... so we went with the plan of record and here we are at
Arches. We are considering boycotting the sights here tomorrow and
sitting under the trailer's awning in camp chairs and reading all day to
fight sandstone burnout.
The trip from Bryce was, as Google said,
nearly five driving hours. We pulled over and made lunch at the smallest
town in Utah (or so it seemed). It was a few houses with a single
commercial building that housed both a gas station and a Dairy Queen.
The truck didn't need any more gas and Mrs. C' and Romeo both told me I
didn't either, so we patronized neither the Shell station nor the DQ. It
is very common in the rural west for people (presumably high school
student, but I've never caught them in the act) to climb the nearest
tall hill close to the town and form a large letter in contrasting stone
to represent the initial of the town's name. This town was so small
that the initial was a lower case "e".
We jumped on I-70 and headed east. A year
ago we took I-70 across the whole of Kansas (that was three days of my
life I'll never get back) and the plains of eastern Colorado then west
from Denver and through the Eisenhower tunnel (the highest point in the
US interstate system) before turning right at Dillon, Colorado and
heading north to Steamboat Springs. It struck me how much farther west
we went this trip when I saw a sign on I-70 today that said "Denver
420".
The most remarkable thing about I-70 in
central Utah is that the geology changes about every 20 miles. I
couldn't stop to take pics of each type of stone and gravel we saw or
the trip would have been 5:45 and Mrs. C' might have grabbed the
Remington from the wardrobe, pointed it at me and said "drive or I'll
shoot", but I did get in another set of pics in the "Silver Cliche'
Driving Experience" series (despite protests from Mrs. C') and one area
was so impressive that I had to stop at the overlook to take a panorama.
Here's what I got:
(Note: In the panorama above, that thing winding through the picture is I-70 and the spec on the thing in the center of the frame is an 18 wheeler)
Even to the untrained stone watcher, it's
clear that some of these blocks of sandstone are recently exposed and
still huge and rugged while others have been weathered into small hills
that will soon be flat plains. It is perfectly clear that the geological
description of Bryce Canyon as the edge of the receding Colorado
Plateau carries out for hundreds of miles. I know. I drove it today.
Late in the trip we saw a sight we had
not seen before... the Rocky Mountains as viewed by a traveler
approaching from the west. On our last trip here we approached from the
east but never fully cleared the range to renter from the west. This
time we went well beyond and saw the amazing geography that lies only to
the west of the Rockies. Now we are close enough to see the shop
covered tops of the Rockies about 50 miles to the east and in some cases
over 14,000 feet tall. On Thursday we'll be in the Rockies and on
Monday a week from today we'll pass out the other side.
Here, let me show you a couple of pics
from right here at our campsite in Arches including those snow capped
peaks which I can see from my recliner in the Airstream in the setting
sun as I write this:
So that's it for today. I hope I can post
this for you tonight. Cell service is very weak and sporadic here and
sometimes in fringe areas I only get enough service to post in the early
morning (presumably when everyone else is sleeping and I can sip the
nectar of the internet through the straw-sized pipe all by myself).
Tomorrow and Wednesday we'll explore Arches and share what we find with you. The views on the way in were amazing!
Later...
SC'
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