The past few days have been a whirlwind of parks, hikes, overlooks and driving. Orit and I both feel like we would like to take a few days to slow down and digest everything we’ve experienced, so we changed our plans for the coming weekend and will try to stay in one place for 3 (!) nights.
The day before yesterday was probably the toughest we’ve had in our trip so far. There is no external reason or constraint that caused it to be like that. In other words, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We started the day with a fairly strenuous 2.5 mile roundtrip, 1000 feet elevation gain hike in Capitol Reef National Park, to see a really nice arch. We then drove 2.5 hours in beautiful terrain to Arches National Park, and spent 3 hours exploring its various lookouts and short hikes. Though we didn’t do any strenuous hikes there, we were completely exhausted by the time we arrived at our hotel. By then we had walked more than 10 miles, some of it in rough terrain, and have been in the car for hours. Delirious, we went out for dinner, wolfed down some salad and pizza at Antica Forma, a really nice Italian style pizza restaurant, got back to the hotel, dipped in the hot tub for a bit and collapsed into bed. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.
The following day we tried to pace ourselves a bit more. We took our time in the morning, and walked around Moab for a bit. It is a very cool little town. There are lots of outdoor adventure shops everywhere, as well as other touristy shops selling books, hats, t-shirts, backpacks, artsy photos from the nearby parks and lots of other chachkes. We then decided to do the more user friendly part of Canyonlands National Park - Island In The Sky, with a quick stop at Dead Horse Point State Park on the way. The state park is nice and has really nice views of the Colorado river, and also some kind of mining operation that harvests potash. Sad as it may be that this is still happening inside protected land, it does produce some interesting colors against the snow capped mountains.
As we were approaching the entrance to Canyonalands, there was an unexpected slow down in the road. We were unsure about what was going on, and Orit pulled a page straight out of my playbook as a former tank commander and surveyed the landscape ahead.
Somewhat similarly to Arches, Island In The Sky is also an area where you can mostly take the view in by driving from overlook to overlook, combined with the occasional short hike. There were some pretty incredible views, and one dirt road called The Shafter Trail that looked super cool to drive on, even if a bit scary. It will make for a fun adventure when we come back someday…
We then drove to Cortez, CO, located 10 miles outside of Mesa Verde National Park. We arrived in our Airbnb in the evening, and visited the park the following day. Cortez is located on a high plateau at over 6000 feet elevation, and the end of March is still very cold here. The temperatures at night ar below freezing, and it is clear and cold during the day. The park itself is on a mesa (table in Spanish), a flat area that rises above the surrounding land. The highest point is above 8000 feet, and wen we visited, it was very very windy, with gusts up to 40 mph, so it was really cold. It was very inspiring to think of the pueblo people that lived in this place until 1200 CE as we looked at the dwellings they built. The earliest are called pit houses and are dug into the ground for better insulation in the cold winter and hot summer. The latest, most advanced dwellings they built are cliff dwellings, and one of the most impressive ones in the park is the Cliff Palace. It is a kind of incredible how the ancestral Pueblo people were able to build these elaborate structures in the cliffs, and live their lives in this high plateau with its harsh winter and even harsher summer. I imagine some people lived their entire lives on the mesa without ever going down to the surrounding Colorado plateau.
In every trip we try to optimize our experience, and be prepared for whatever the day might bring. We were prepared for the cold and dressed very warmly. We had water and snacks. But our binoculars, which we had used a few times already during the trip, stayed back at the Airbnb. If there was one day where we would really have enjoyed them, it was today. I kept kicking myself for forgetting them behind. And, as if to make it even worse, as we were driving inside the park, I was stopped by a park ranger for driving 10 miles above the speed limit (I was going 45). I have been trying really hard to stay at the speed limit for the entire trip, and have mostly been successful. Clearly not fully successful though. It didn’t help that the ranger was driving behind us just as a wild horse jumped into the roadway from the forest, forcing me into an emergency maneuver to avoid it. The horse was fine, as were we, but my fate was sealed. Luckily I got away with a verbal warning to drive slower in the future.
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