My first steps into Utah since 2003 came as I dashed out of the car and ran into the Islands in the Sky Visitor Center to grab a map and passport stamp for Canyonlands National Park. I beat the clock by three minutes.
My friend waited while I grabbed the park visitors guide – not the classic NPS map, the first time I ever encountered a park that ran out of them. Twenty-two miles off the main road seemed like an eternity.
Despite being the first stop. Canyonlands would not diminish in comparison to the other four. Daylight beat down furiously as the golden hour hit Arches’ underrated and less-visited neighbor.
Canyonlands conjures various images, but the park must be seen for them to coalesce into something real. Canyonlands rises several hundred feet above the surrounding desert and river-cut canyons. T
he park encompasses four units, with most not venturing beyond Island in the Sky. The Needles has spires to admire, the Maze is for the truly adventurous as it is high-desert backcountry and the rivers form the fourth district (calm upstream, but requiring whitewater experience below the Colorado-Green confluence).
Before its preservation, Canyonland’s mesa had been used for livestock grazing, since it could be easily fenced – at the Neck, a narrow part of the plateau connecting two mesa together that is just 20 feet wide.
Nearby Dead Horse Point State Park includes a famously tight and photogenic bend on the Colorado that had held penned horses. Canyonlands got an endorsement from Interior Secretary Stewart Udall after he had his plane fly over the mesa and river confluence while headed to give a speech in Arizona, leading to national park status in 1964.
The names and history remain from the recent past, but the history that makes Canyonlands magical runs millions of years deeper.
Below the mesa, the rivers jigged and jagged hard. Some side canyons filled with hoodoos looked like the footprints of enormous beasts. From the rim, imaginations could run wild with the magnificent terrain on either side.
We visited the Green River side of the mesa first, as the sun beat on the harshly carved river path. The sun blared at the Green River overlook but the crazed path of the canyon below did not suffer at all.
The Green River seems almost lazy when viewed from its namesake town or other northerly points on its course. But here it cuts a harder path, just as the Colorado River does on the opposite side of the mesa.
The road ends at Grandview Point, and few places have been named with less irony. From the mesa’s edge, anyone can see where the Green joins the Colorado, a series of squiggles in both direction merging into one as the Colorado moves south to where a dam turns impounds the Colorado as Lake Powell. The light plays major tricks with the mesa and hoodoos surrounding Island in the Sky.
You can step to the edge of the rim, where 1,000-foot drops await those not paying attention. Fortunately most visitors do since Canyonlands get less traffic than Arches. Despite the dazzling light, the air barely stayed above freezing.
In the golden hour, the angle of the light made dead wood from the cedars topping the mesa almost seemed to glow as if burning. Anyone hoping for a warmup would be disappointed.
 |
| Not actually on fire |
Canyonlands might not feel the same love as other Utah national parks, but there are few better places to nerd out on geology. From up high, it isn’t hard to find your own perch away from other people and watch the sun descend. There were a few dozen people milling about, but every step contained solitude. Never did Canyonlands feel crowded, even as daylight drifted away.
The last moments in the park were illuminated by three planets lined up to the south (Jupiter, Saturn, Venus) and a vast net of stars waiting to arise behind them.
 |
| From left: Jupiter, Saturn, Venus |
No comments:
Post a Comment