Cedar City 1

Our next stop is Cedar City, Utah, where there are several national parks and monuments.

This is Cedar Breaks National Monument where the trail takes you to the top of the canyon, and you look down 1000 feet and more to the bottom.

These small formations are called hoodoos, and we'll see more of them later.

The canyon views are breathtaking, and the colors of different rock layers fascinating.

We see the first signs of fall, as these aspens are turning along the trail.

In the morning, Peg took this shot of a hot air balloon floating over our campsite. Found out later there was a balloon festival in town. More on day 2.

Capitol Reef National Park

From Moab, we took the RV to Richfield, Utah, and drove the Jeep south to Capitol Reef National Park.

The Fremont River carved this canyon. The park is entered from the bottom, and the formations and cliffs rise hundreds of feet from the canyon floor.

Peg is standing at the bottom of this cliff, which gives some idea of the scale of the formations.

There's a lot of red rock vistas in Utah, each one different and all beautiful

Moab 4

On our last day in the Moab area, we decide to explore the southern section of Canyonlands Park, called the Needles. This is a mesa area, lower than the Island in the Sky and about an hour's drive south.

Formations rise out of the desert land, some rising to 1000 feet.

This is the "Wooden Shoe Arch" appropriately.

The scuptures Peg's standing by could have been man made - but not, by nature.

We walked several trails across the red rock "slick rock" area. They were all marked by small cairns like this, to keep us on the trail.

At the end of the trail, we're rewarded with views like this.

We've done some back trails, but this looked like more than I wanted to handle.

These early native pictographs were inside the park area.
Peg's doing the warrior, I'm holding up the mountain.

These pictographs were outside the park at an area called "Newpaper Rock". The early tribes apparently stopped here to leave messages for those who followed. Fascinating to see.

Moab 3 - Canyonlands Park - Deadhorse State Park

Canyonlands National Park is divided into three sections by the confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers. The northern section, called Island in the Sky, is about 30 miles north of Moab. Deadhorse State Park is on the same mesa and overlooks a lot of the national park.

These shots were taken from the statepark. Where you approach Arches park from the bottom of the valley, here you are driving on a relatively flat road until you are looking over the edge of a 250-300 foot cliff and across the valleys at neighboring mesas.

The same thing happens in Canyonlands Park. Once you conquer your stomach butterflies from looking down, all you can do is give voice to your awe. We've said that we need to record both of us saying "WOW!!!" so we can press a button when needed.

These shots only hint at the depth of the canyons.

We took this back road in the Jeep - not a terribly rough one, but with some tight turns and ups & downs. The last two shots are from the end of that road.

Moab 2

On the evening of the second day, we boarded a jet boat for a sunset ride on the Colorado River. The captain assured us that if we got in trouble, the water was only 3 feet deep - not to worry.

The 25 mile roundtrip took us through the gorge carved out by the river over time. These pictures don't do justice to the scenery - the walls towered up to 250 feet above us. Along the way we watched several rock climbers scaling the sheer faces of the rock walls, and near the spot we turned around, saw a pair of Rocky Mountain sheep far above us. Tried to get a picture, but they were too far away to be captured on camera. Anyhow, we've been looking for them ever since Denver. Several times advertised in brochures, but this is our only sighting to date.

After the ride, the tour outfit served a very good buffet dinner to all passengers.

Next, more rock shots from Canyonlands Park

Moab, UT - Arches National Park

Moab, Utah - we originally picked this place out from articles written in camping travel magazines. It's a tourist oriented town, in Utah red rock country, near several national parks and monuments. Our stay was everything we expected and more.

The first day we went into Arches National Park just north of town. The road into the park begins at the bottom of the Moab fault, where a valley collapsed as the plate collisions raised mountains on either side (100's of millions of years ago). As the road reaches the top of the mesa, rock formations like these rise out of the earth. We kept asking ourselves, "how could this happen?".

The official explanation from the guidebooks and park videos is that great oceans flooded the area several times over millions of years depositing salt layers thousands of feet thick. Minerals from higher elevations deposited over the salt and when the plates moved, cracks appeared that allowed water over the years to dissolve the salt layers, leaving the rocks. Water and wind erosion did the rest. We just marveled that a higher being allowed mother nature to create such beauty.

The arches were formed as water seeped into cracks in the

narrower sections of the "fins" and froze and broke pieces out of the formation. A ranger told us that a large piece fell out of the

overhang on the arch to the right two years ago.

More on this beautiful and exotic landscape next.