Tom's National Park Adventure

Canyonlands National Park was a short half hours drive from Arches. The topography isn’t really all that different than arches. It’s the same mountains surrounding the same town, Moab, UT. However……the majority of your time is spent looking down…..not up! The National Park is cut into three sections. This is done by the Green River and the Colorado River. The two rivers converge inside the park and become a much livelier Colorado River from that point on. I stayed in the “Island in the Sky” portion of the park today. It is the easiest to get to and you can see the other sections of the park from this one. Today I primarily drove to scenic observation points and took my pictures there. The rangers at the visitors center that I spoke to suggested this plan of action.

The first overlook I attempted to access was the “Upheaval Dome Overlook”. I got as far as this sign. It turns out that the short walk I was expecting was primarily uphill on the way there and downhill on the return trip. Lately these types of hikes haven’t gone over to well with my right knee, so you get a picture of a picture on this one!

My next stops were to look at the Green river from a couple of different overlooks.

Next I stopped at the “Orange Cliffs Outlook”. I’ll bet you can hardly see them…but they are there….

This is a Panoramic shot taken at the “Grand View Point Overlook”

OK……About this time I started getting a little bored. So here are the rest of the pictures I took. I will list the points of interest and you can guess which ones go with which!

So…not in any particular order….i took pictures at: The front Park Entrance, Buck Canyon Overlook, Mesa Arch.

I left the National Park and took the first right, in order to arrive at

Dead Horse State Park. I have not made it a habit to check out the state parks, but the Ranger pointed something out to me that I thought you might like to see. The state park is right next to the national park. The scenery is pretty much the same in both places with one big exception. The state park has an overlook of the Colorado River that can’t be seen from the national park. From that overlook you can see a very specific bend in the Colorado River. The Cliff created by this bend is location of the final scene in a movie you all will remember…………..

Did I you recognize it??? It is where “Thelma and Louise” drove the convertible Thunderbird off the cliff while holding hands!

More tomorrow…..