Around Moab, Utah

---

The drive up from Cortez was uneventful,(except that Fitchett got stopped by the Colorado state trooper for speeding (again!) luckily the trooper was with a trainee and let us off with a warning and some advice about rodeo. On the way we stopped at the Needles overlook at Canyonlands National Park which is pretty spectacular. The whole Canyonlands area is huge and difficult to put across in a couple of photos, but is well worth a visit. Moab is a great little town surrounded by great scenery, National Parks and the Colorado river, which sets it up really well for a great time in the outdoors. It is a great area for mountain biking and river rafting, but as we have rafted the Zambezi and White Nile, we did not need to get wet in Utah. The mountain biking is suberb in the area but we just did not have the time as we were only staying 2 nights and really wanted to hike around Arches and Canyonlands (and the Dead Horse State Park). All parks deserve more than one day each but we made the most of the time we had. Rock arches are different from rock bridges as discussed in a previous entry as they are caused by weathering alone. Water into cracks and freezing and thawing and this with wind etc causes their formation over a few thousand years. In Arches National Park there are over 2000 natural Arches and it is easy to "arched" out but there are spectacular ones that are easy to get to. We decided to take Ranger led hike to the Fiery Furnace which was well worth the $10 and it prevented us from getting lost in the park. There are some precarious looking areas where rock looks like it will crumble to the ground in the next millennium or so. Canyonlands is completely different park and is famous for really deep canyons (strangely enough) caused, in part, by the Colorado river which winds through areas of it. It is a vast area and warrants more time than we gave it. Views from the top are spectacular as always.
Camping in Moab was great in the respect that it was a cool walk-in camp for those people with tents only, so there was none of the huge RVs that have been a feature of the campsites used previously. It was onwards and upwards to South Dakota

---

Photos

Arches National Park
It is not all about the Arches. There is fantastic scenery throughout the park.

Landscape Arch
You cannot get too close to this one as bits have fallen off in recent years and it is only a matter of time before it becomes a gap.

A smaller arch
A small crawlable Arch in the Fiery Furnace

Canyonlands
It is big