Canyonlands National Park

Wounded but not broken, we pulled our motorhome into a campground in Moab, Utah.  This is high desert country, not our favorite kind of landscape scenery, but the snow-covered tops of the La Sal Mountains in the near distance were quite beautiful.  Their sharply-pointed peaks suggest that those mountains are quite young, geologically speaking.

We had visited Moab six years ago, and it's grown a great deal since then.  This may be the offseason, but traffic is heavy, and the locals will probably be relieved when the tourists leave in a few weeks.

My watch - a cheapie - stopped, and I looked for a shop that could put a new battery in.  But there were no jewelers in town - shocking for such a tourist mecca.  Then we realized that the visitors here were young and fit, many of them wearing backpacks, ready for hiking and climbing adventures.  Few old moneyed folk who would toss away big bucks on a bauble.  Finally a gentleman from the Netherlands at a tourist center told us that the local drug store performed that service.  A lady at Walker Drug and General Store opened up my watch, found that that particular battery size was on order, and asked that I call on Wednesday to see if it had come in.  When she replaced the back, the watch started working again, so I'm in business, temporarily.

Moab is the jumping-off place for two national parks - Arches and Canyonlands.  On our 2012 visit there, we went deep into Arches National Park, the one that is closest and has the more spectacular individual formations.  This time we traveled to Canyonlands National Park, which is about an hour's drive away.  Six years ago we were in Moab in late spring and the weather was uncomfortably hot, but this time there was a chill in the air - it got down to below freezing last night - and it was much more pleasant for exploring the scene.

From the road we hiked to Mesa Arch.  The other national park in the area, Arches National Park, has many arches that are much more spectacular.  (Maybe that's how it got its name.)  But the distant views from Mesa Arch were great.

At the end of the paved road was Grand View Overlook, with spectacular views of what nature has wrought.  The huge canyons below were formed by the Colorado and Green Rivers over millions of years.   (Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona was also created by the actions of the Colorado River as it flowed south to the Gulf of California.)

I read that most of the rocks here were carried from elsewhere and that there are twenty or so distinct layers that the rivers cut through - sandstone and shale, mostly.  Plus there were earthquake upheavals along the way, and both wind and water erosion.  In other words, the geology is incredibly complicated.  The Grand Canyon in Arizona has steep walls and is therefore more picturesque, but the vastness of Canyonlands is jaw-dropping as well.

Here's a little senior beefcake at the canyon rim.

On Wednesday the watch battery had arrived at Walker Drug and General Store, and it was inserted into my watch.  Now I'll be able to maintain precise timing on our tight vacation schedule.