Jeeps are fun! They’re even more fun if they are modified for serious 4-wheel driving & you take it off-road!
We woke up bright & early (well, at least early) & drove out to Canyonlands National Park, about a 45 minute drive from the campground. We visited the area known as “Island in the Sky”, a broad mesa wedged between the Green and Colorado rivers.
First stop: the Visitors Center, where we got our park stamp. The National Park service has a neat little way to record your trips to their parks. You buy a Passport book, a small spiral bound booklet about the size of an adult hand (if it were a complete rectangle) & approx. 1/2” thick. It has a thick vinyl coated cover, navy blue in color & embossed with gold writing & logos. Inside you find a clear plastic pocket that holds your US map of all the national parks plus, if you have one, which we do, your National Parks Pass, which gives you a year's worth of admittance to all of the parks. Then comes the fun part. Each geographical region of the US (i.e., North Atlantic, Southeast, etc.) has its own section in the book, with maps, park information & a listing of all the national park areas in that region. Then follows the pages with places for you to collect the series of Passport stamps which are issued each year. It also has areas where you can get your book “canceled” when you visit a national park.
Whenever you visit a park, at the visitors center you will find a station set up with an ink pad & stamp. These stamps record the name of the park and the date of your visit. There is no charge to cancel your Passport - although you do have to purchase the book – with proceeds from the sale supporting the Parks system. The Visitors Centers almost always have little squares of paper for those who want the cancellation, but don’t have a Passport.
After getting logistical information, we drove out to Whale Rock, where we spent 1 ½ hours climbing up, over & back a huge slickrock that looks like a beached whale. The view from the top was breathtaking! It was also windy, which was a welcome relief from the heat. A quick drive further down the road delivered us to a shaded picnic area where we ate our lunch eagerly!
Now it was time for some real excitement. Instead of taking the nice, smooth 2-lane highway that had brought us into the park, we decided to depart via the Shafer Trail Road, an unpaved 4-wheel drive road that starts of with a long series of steep, tight switchbacks along a canyon wall. No guide rails, sometimes just enough width for one vehicle, 1st gear all the way – what a blast! I kept thinking of my brother Steve – he used to go off-roading, until his Pathfinder was jumped by a gang of miscreant deer late one night. I think he would be out-of-his-mind in love with this place.
Eventually, we made it to the bottom of the canyon – the kids started sing “Hallelujah” – and continued alongside Dead Horse Point State Park (Kimi was not amused by this name) and Gooseneck Overlook, which was where the Colorado River makes a huge U-turn around what looks like an island. Shafer Trail gave way to Potash Road, which brought us to a salt harvesting company – huge pools of salt with the water evaporating away. At some areas, the salt looked like snow banks leading into and around the pools. Very surreal!
Potash Rd. leads to Route 279, an actual paved road that parts tall canyon walls from the Colorado. At one point, we passed petroglyphs. Then we were back in Moab. Even though the way back home was a much shorter, more direct route, it took us 3 ½ hours to complete the journey. And I was hooked! I kept trying to find ways to continue the 4-wheel driving while we still had the Jeep, but, alas, none appeared. Now I’ve been telling Phil that I want to trade in my minivan for a Jeep.
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