Day 29 – Canyonlands National Park Part 2

Megan’s Take

Today we went to the Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands National Park. We hiked the Grand View Point trail (1.8 miles round trip),

and Upheaval Dome trail to the first overlook (0.6 miles round trip).

It’s hot here, and after over a week in the heat, I feel like I have less energy. We got a later start this morning factoring in drive time to get to the trail head, so about 2.5 miles of hiking felt like plenty for today.

The kids really enjoyed the rocky trails, and we watched (1) a fuzzy caterpillar wandering around the rocks

and (2) a lizard eating a different caterpillar (possibly worm) – both very interesting nature experiences for the kids.

They are so cute when they pull out their binoculars to look at something or when they exclaim “that’s so beautiful!” Emilia earned her umpteenth Junior Ranger badge, and I was very proud of her for doing the Junior Ranger oath (repeating after the ranger) for the first time in its entirety. She’s slowly gaining confidence in talking to the rangers at the visitors

We went to the Moab rock shop this afternoon, and they had tables filled with a variety of small rocks and minerals at 50¢ and $1 each. Emilia had a lot of fun carrying around a basket and picking out several rocks to add to her collection. Both kids will find rocks on trails or parking lots and point them out to me excitedly. It’s heart warming. I know they’re interested, because they want to be interested in it with me and have a shared experience. Emilia told me she wants a rock pick and bucket for her birthday.

Phil’s Take

I’ll second what she said about the kids more clearly using the word “beautiful” to describe the things we’re seeing. It really wasn’t something either one of them did until today. I think they’re starting to learn what we use that word for and are applying it themselves. Whether they truly think the things they’re seeing are beautiful or not is another story.

Our first hike of the day took us to end of a ridge that overlooks nearly the entirety of Canyonlands National Park. You don’t see anything up close, but you can clearly see all of it except the bottoms of the canyons, which isn’t much different than Grand Canyon in that regard. I was able to snap the panorama included above, which captures the view from that point.

I captured some other good shots from the eastern side of that ridge on the hike along the way. Here’s a perspective about halfway to the end.

After we got back to the truck, we started back tracking toward the visitor center hitting the overlooks we skipped on our way out. The first most notable stop was at the Green River Overlook, where I captured the best view to the west, which is carved by the Green River.

Much further out the same side road was the Upheaval Dome. I was expecting a bald rock or something, but we were instead met with a crater, which apparently they don’t know exactly how it formed. The theory is that it was either a salt deposit that collapsed or a meteor hitting at that spot. Either way, it reminded me of the pictures I’ve seen of remains of volcanos, which usually have a cone in the middle like this.

The last notable view we saw wasn’t really named, and I can’t see a name on the map, but it overlooked the descent of the road called Schafer Trail. It was here that I got a shot of what is a typical canyon that we’ve seen on this trip.

That brings me to my final thoughts about this place. I think after all of the canyons we’ve seen on this trip, these here are the most beautiful and fascinating to me. There’s just something about how the hard white rock creates this very defined ledge at the top of the canyons that makes it stand out more and give more perspective on what you’re looking at. The featured image at the top of this post is a good example, but here’s another. You can see it in many of the canyon shots.

Given that we’ve been traveling all over the Colorado Plateau, and given that each park seems to be a different set of layers of the same rock, we’ve been able to compare these things with one another within a relatively short period of time. These canyons have the clearest rim of any of them. It is obviously just an opinion, but this feature stood out to me a lot when looking at them, especially from the elevated position we were in.

One thing Megan didn’t mention about the rock shop is that there was the largest petrified wood specimens we’ve seen yet. See Emilia standing next to it for scale (though that won’t mean much years from now).

I know Megan thinks it is pointless, but I have been reading the full detail of this fossil book that Emilia got from one of the visitor center gift shops. For some reason Emilia is listening to all this stuff, even though I know she can’t possibly understand all of it. I get the sense that she’s trying to make a connection to Megan’s rock hunting, and the fossils are something that stands out to her. We’ll see how this new fascination matures.

As always, here is the gallery of all of the pictures from the day.