Butch, Sundance and Steve Fossett

The four corners of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico that come together to form the Colorado Plateau is a beautiful site to behold. The canyons number in the thousands. Plateaus, buttes, needles, arches, valleys, hoodoos, mesas, gulches, etc. along with animals, reptiles, insects and birds make for an ecosystem uncommon to Easterners. Monday and today we saw lizards, butterflies, and ravens. Other people were fortunate to see bighorn sheep.

Arches has a very nice visitors center where you can start out with a movie tracing the development of Arches and Canyonlands. The theme has become very familiar to us after visiting so many parks in the Colorado Plateau. We know all about John Wesley Powell and his exploration via the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and what we now know as Canyonlands. His trip all the way to where the Colorado and Green Rivers meet is an adventure equal to any that European explorers made across the Atlantic.

In Arches National Park there is one main road that runs about 18 miles. You make your return trip via the same road, but all sights look different in reverse. The first pull-off on the road was Balanced Rock. It is a marvel to see this huge rock balancing on a larger and somewhat tilted rock. At this stop you can view the tableau from roadside or take about a half mile hike all the way around Balanced Rock.

The next pull-off for us was Delicate Arch, an arch that has grown fragile with the passage of eons. At its thinnest point it is only about 6 feet in diameter. Although we stopped to see and photograph many arches along the way, the largest and most dramatic is Landscape Arch. It is 306 feet wide and looks large enough for a container ship to pass through. Whereas most of the canyons are the result of water flow, the arches are more a result of winds and the passage of time. The landscape continues to evolve, but only scientific animations can project what they may look like hundreds of thousands of years into the future.

Today we visited Canyonlands which looks like a scaled down version of the Grand Canyon. Canyonland has three major, but separate areas. We visited Island In The Sky via a direct route in and out like Arches. The other areas are Needles and The Maze. Needles would have required an extra day and The Maze can only be traversed via four wheel drive vehicles, so we limited our Canyonlands experience to Island In The Sky. The four major sites to visit are Upheaval Dome, Mesa Arch, Green River Overlook and Grand View Point Overlook. All are very dramatic vistas, and at Grand View you can see a bit of everything in the far distance.

At Grand View a young lady asked Pat to shoot a picture of their group of six as they posed at the summit. They were speaking a tongue which we did not immediately recognize. As they were walking down the trail in front of us one turned around and said, "we're Polish". We struck up a conversation as we walked together to the parking lot and discovered that they had driven all the way from Chicago over the previous 24 hours. Sounds daunting, but doable with six drivers. They also were on a tour of the National Parks, but with a more limited scope than us. One of them had visited Charleston last year.

Everywhere we visit we are overwhelmed with the number of visitors from Western Europe and the Orient. Something to do with the exchange rate on the dollar, but I'll let the politicians worry about that. Most of these visitors are anxious to talk to Americans and to share experiences. Today we also chatted with some visitors from England and passed along our regards to the royal family.

Why did I reference Butch, Sundance and Steve Fossett? Canyonlands is where Butch, the Sundance Kid and the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang hid out. Any lawman, even with a large posse, would be insane to track outlaws through the canyons. It would be absolutely amazing to think that anyone could find there way around the Colorado Plateau, but many pioneers settled along the banks of the rivers and tried to make a go of it. Later ranchers tried their hand at raising livestock. As for Steve Fossett, I know he disappeared over Nevada. Did you?