2012/06 Western USA trip - Canyonlands |
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From there it was a short drive to the Canyonlands park, the part known as the Island in the Sky. The park is very large and divided into three parts by the Colorado and Green river canyons. Access to its other parts, the Maze and the Needles, requires a Jeep or a boat, or both. The part we were going into is a plateau edged by high cliffs and the only access is across a narrow neck of land; hence the name of Island in the Sky.
We drove across the neck onto the “Island” and then we had a road taking us to Grand View Point and a side road to the Upheaval Dome area.
John and I hiked up to the Upheaval Dome, a two-mile-wide crater-like depression around a heaved-up dome of salt. Salt can be easily squished and it forms domes, cracking the layer of rock above it, which is what made the crater. A sign there says that some geologists believe it’s the result of a meteor strike. Those geologists should hop on a plane to Australia and see what a real meteor crater looks like.
Not surprisingly most of the stops on the road are at viewpoints, and the sheer scale of those is mind-boggling. We could see so far and what we were seeing was so large it was like looking down from a plane or satellite. The cliffs and canyons have all been carved by the Green and Colorado rivers; their confluence is visible from Grand View, but the actual rivers are largely invisible, thousands of feet down in their canyons.
We covered most of the road twice, leapfrogging around two buses and their crowds whenever they stopped. There were a lot fewer buses and people than at Arches. We were done before sundown and we were able to sit out around a fire back at Horsethief.