20th Aug 2009
Utah - Part II
It’s day 15 of the trip, going back to Vancouver tomorrow. I’m sitting at a Mcdonald’s (again) at Page (Arizona) having a Bacon Ranch Salad (not something that I’d usually order but I did for some reason) and it isn’t bad at all! I just finished the Lower Antelope Canyon tour from Ken’s Tour, wandered inside the slot canyon for about 3 hours. It is actually one of the highlights of the trip, and it didn’t disappoint! Great place with lots and lots of interestingly shaped, curvy canyon walls and I had to walk inside this really narrow space, sometimes as little as half a foot across. Sand poured down from time to time, hitting my arms and camera hard, pretty cool.Took tons and tons of photos. The $26 really worth it. I’m going for the Upper Antelope Canyon in an hour or so (3:30pm), not sure if it’ll be a lot different from the Lower one, guess I’ll see. This time it’ll be guided and it’s only going to be an hour long.
Guess I’ll continue from where I left off from my last post. After leaving Bryce Canyon I headed to this place called Calf Creek. It’s about an hour drive and then I arrived at the Calf Creek Recreational Area. There were a couple trails, lower and upper creek, I went for the lower creek trail. It was a pretty straightforward trail, took about an hour and half to reach the end. I picked up a guide from the trailhead and there were numbers along the trail and you could refer to the guide for the description of the numbered area. The trail wasn’t particularly interesting but at the end of it, it was SO COOL. I got to the Lower Calf Creek Fall. It’s as tall as a 20-30 story building, really magnificent. The pouring down force was so strong that the water was splashing outward so even though I stood like 200 meters from it I could still feel it hitting my body. It was so refreshing in the super hot weather, it’s like an air conditioner from nature. I spent half an hour there taking pictures, sitting around, had a sandwich for lunch, saw people getting wet/ kids swimming in the pond of water created by the fall. I didn’t want to leave at all since it was so nice, but I did after half an hour of stay. The hike back was so frigging hot and awful
My next stop was the Capitol Reef National Park. Again it wasn’t too long of a drive, about 2 hours or so. Okay, the entrance of the park was the most awesome/picturesque out of all parks that I had been to so far. Bloody red, enormous sandstone (or whatever stone, think it’s sandstone though) emerges from the earth spanning like thousands of acres. How could anything possibly be so cool (making me want to see the pictures again right now) The park was gorgeous, countless photo ops. I went to a couple of the most popular trails like the Hickman’s Bridge - enormous arch high up on a mountain, pretty steep trail to hike, Capitol Gorge Trail – walking inside the bottom of some canyon with super tall rocky walls on both sides, Grand Wash Trail – similar to Capitol Gorge with different scenery. Also checked out some petroglyphs – ancient rock arts drawn by Indians – pretty mysterious and cool. Went to a couple view points, with the panorama point being the most memorable and impressive. Giant red stones standing not too far from you, kind of reminded me of the Egyptian pyramids replacing the yellow with bright red. The lower parts of these stony hills looked like veins, or fingers, that crawl on the ground almost looked like they were trying to get you – they have to been seen to be understood.
The next morning I drove to the Goblin Valley State Park. It was a longgg drive and it was confusing as well, as to where to make the turn from the highway into this narrow passage – the guide or road sign didn’t really say where to turn so I had to pay so much attention or I’d miss it. Just the road that leads to the park was like 10 miles long, pretty crazy. There wasn’t anyone else at all too. In fact there were a few places that I went to during the trip which hadn’t too many people (or none) around, and this park was one of them. Kind of weird. Guess was because of the weekday thing, or could have been the long drive into the park. Anyway the drive was so worthy as the park was super cool. You can’t really see what’s going on in there till you park and walk into the park. The moment I went in I was like, holy shit (I literally said that at a few places when I couldn’t really believe in what I saw, this place was one of them, and also said that at the Capitol Reef park, the Subway hike at Zion, the Calf Creek fall…can’t remember the rest for now). Thousands of “goblins”, big and small, scattered around the huge flat piece of land. I actually got to walk into the area and explore. When I was there there were only a few people and a group around, it was really quiet which made it even cooler. I felt like I was a kid, wandering around the nature stone sculptures almost like playing hide-and-seek. The small ones were like my height, there were some mid-size ones that were like twice as tall as I am, and the bigger ones were about 20-30 feet tall. They were really cool, bright orange in color, each one of them was totally unique. Most of them formed in groups, while some just stood there alone quietly. There were probably thousands of them and I spent around 2 hours there taking countless pictures as usual. It was pretty hot though, I had to hide behind some huge “goblins” to take rest and cool down.
It was the same day that I drove to the Arches National Park, probably the most famous among all of the parks that I was visiting – I heard that Indiana Jones and a couple other popular movies had scenes that were shot here. The park was the smallest among all the parks but the drive inside he park itself was actually the lenghthiest – about 18 miles from the entrance all the way to the last view point (Devil’s Garden). There were countless viewpoints here and lots to see, and I’ve spent 3 days here (just enough). The highlight was probably my first night of stay at the Devil’s Garden Campground, a really popular (had to reserve few months in advance) campground that had a super nice setting – nice and private area with natural sandstones close to the site also with huge area where you can probably set up 20 tents without a problem. Oh yes, I was like holy shit when I saw my site, as delightful as a kid that was given a XBOX 360 for birthday present. I actually got to check out the night sky at this site without having other people look at me like an idiot, just because it was so private. The only drawback was that there was no shower facility so I had to wipe clean my body at the end of the day. Anyway. Another highlight (lots of highlights) was the Devil’s Garden Trail. I got to see lots of very cool arches like the Landscape Arch (world’s largest), the Double-O Arch, and some other cool arches. The hike took about 4 hours as I got to the last point of the hike which was the “Dark Angel”, a stone monolith that stood up 20 stories tall. Other than this, also went to “The Windows”, which were two huge openings on stones and I actually got to walk through both of them. The BEST hike at Arches was the guided tour – a hike guided by a ranger that I had to reserve two days in advance. It was on my third day at Arches. We had a group of 30 people, meeting up at the Fiery Furnace viewpoint. The hike was into the super confusing Fiery Furnace area, which were a huge number of “fins” that pile up closely and it was because of that the hike would have been extremely confusing to navigate inside it without a guide. People actually got lost numerous time inside it.
It was a very hot day but the guide was very nice as he led us to cool spots quite often, and he was very talkative and it was very informative. We walked through extremely narrow space, sometimes had to slide down using our butt, and at some point we had to walk side ways moving our bodies in unusual way, making it a very interesting walk. The guide told us a lot about the dessert being very fragile even though it “looks tough”, especially the crypto-something organisms that live in the sand to retain moisture and to support the sand so that it doesn’t flow away – always follow the trail and never step on them. Also learnt a lot about arches that are actually formed by water not by wind – water sip through the rocks and cracks eventually loosen the mud stone part of the structure leaving the sandstone (harder part) intact, thus creating holes. Potholes, holes on the ground that were formed by rain water staying at a certain area for a long long time. Micro-organisms live in it, like waterbears and tiny shrimps, worms…etc. Even if the holes become dry out it’s not a good idea to step into it.
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