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ARCHES AND CANYONLANDS National
Parks in southeastern Utah are reachable by train if you're willing to
rent a car and drive two or three hours west from the Amtrak stop in
Grand Junction, Colorado.
Our trip there involved a pleasant overnight ride from Chicago on the California Zephyr to
Grand
Junction, an overnight in a hotel near the station, and the next
morning that rented car to the parks
near Moab,
Utah. (You can
read more about the rail trip here
and get more details about our visit to the parks here).
Following is a selection of photos my wife, Debby, and I took in the parks.
On the way from Grand Junction,
Utah 128, one of the most scenic roads in the West, parallels the
Colorado River from Interstate 70 down through the majestic Utah desert
to
Moab. This view is through the hazy cliffs of the Colorado Plateau
sixty miles south to the lordly La Sal Mountains on the eastern border
of the state.
Just past the entrance to Arches
National Park outside Moab, the red
sandstone fins and monoliths of the rock formations collectively called
"Park Avenue" stop the visitor in a cloud of deja vu. Where have we seen them
before? In the 1991 film "Thelma and Louise."
Debby used a 17-70mm lens racked
to its widest angle to
capture Courthouse Tower, the massive rock formation that anchors the
stately Courthouse Wash bluffs near Park Avenue.
One of the most popular
photographic subjects in Arches National Park
is this curious sandstone formation in the Courthouse Towers section
aptly known as the Three Gossips.
Down the road from the Three
Gossips are the spectacular Windows Arches, easily reachable from a
car. Luckily,
a couple of hikers appeared at North Window Arch at just the right
moment, giving the photograph a sense of scale.
Balanced Rock, the most
photographed attraction of Arches National Park, is 128 feet tall, the
balanced portion the size
of three school buses and measuring 55 feet high.
Debby took this wide-angle shot
from atop
the Island in the Sky mesa
overlook in Canyonlands National Park. The viewpoint stands more than
1,000 feet above a flat and broad sandstone plateau through which the
Green River has cut a maze of meandering box canyons, themselves
another 1,000 feet deep, over millions of years.
There's no mystery in the name
of this sandstone formation -- Wooden Shoe Arch -- on the road to the Needles District in the
southeast corner of Canyonlands National Park. Debby took the photo.
For 2,000 years Native Americans
have been drawing mysterious petroglyphs in the desert
varnish on a 200-square-foot sandstone rock on Utah 211 south
of Moab on the way to Canyonlands Park. They're both hard to
date and hard to decipher, and the reason for the concentration of so
many figures in a small space is also a mystery. Debby took the photo.
Not all spectacular Utah stone
arch formations in are located in a
national park. Wilson Arch lies just off US 191 some 24 miles south of
Moab and is easily accessible from the highway. Its opening is 46 feet
high and 91 feet wide. Debby took the photo.
Links:
Please visit my blogs: The Reluctant Blogger
and The Whodunit
Photographer
Also see my books website, www.henrykisor.com
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