ARCHES AND CANYONS

Conal walking down Manhattan

We seem to have four seasons every hour - we soon left the verdant valley and mountain area and after a pass we drove through Karoo-like countryside where the hills and mountains are known are mesas and buttes. Wide open spaces with bright green strips close to the river crossing the border into Utah to Moab, one of the top adventure towns. Now this is cowboy country but Harley Davidsons have replaced cowboys and we've never seen so many winnebagos and camper vans. Moab is a nondescript town - wide streets with lots of restaurants. Fortunately David booked in a B&B called the Castle Valley Inn in a beautiful area close to the Colorado River run by a South African woman and her husband. It was a perfect place to spend two nights - Jeanette and Jason proved to be warm friendly hosts. They met in San Antonio in Texas and I wondered whether Frank and Kate know them. A lovely couple who looked after us well. This is a fascinating area and a dream place for geologists. We drove through the Arches National Park where the rock formations are sculptural and the red sandstone rocks have eroded to form arches.

Delicate Arch

The vegetation is also interesting - the dunes are covered with a krypto biotic layer consisting of fungi, bacteria and moss that binds the soil together and is of course very sensitive and if broken takes decades to repair. The giant wall faces of the canyon are marked by desert varnish - they think that this might be a mixture of a fine manganese/iron layer trapped by bacteria from the dust and air. This is truly a mind blowing place to visit.

Canyon-land

We spent the afternoon exploring the canyons not far away - where the Colorado and Green Rivers have carved deep canyons into the sandstone. We drove to Dead Horse Point -this is where the movie Thelma and Louise was shot and where they drove over the cliff for their last hurrah. You can see the road in the picture below.

Thelma & Louise's take off

The eroded canyons expose up to 9 layers of different types of sediment - and the scale of it is quite mind boggling. The vegetation is also fascinating - stunted juniper, pinyon pine and cedar trees many hundreds of years old.  This has been an awesome experience and we are continually saying wow and every day have our minds filled with wonderful images to replay. 

Next stop - Mesa Verde ----