It’s been a week since I got back from vacation, needless to say it was insanely busy at work. Emails stacked up 8000 feet tall, people sending msn messages non-stop requesting some work done…etc. Anyway, I’d better keep on writing about the trip before I forget any detail of it (even though I’m actually feeling pretty sick right now..dizzy, light-headed feeling)
After visiting Arches National Park, I headed to the Dead Horse Point State Park. It took me a while to figure out how to get there since the route I originally had on the map was actually an unpaved / 4-wheel-drive road and I had to find an alternate route. Since it was a “State” park not a National one, the $80 annual pass I got didn’t work, and I had to pay an extra $10 (or $20?) to get in, kinda pissed. But anyway, the views I got from the park made it all up. The park’s actually being called the “Grand Canyon of Utah”. I couldn’t remember how the Grand Canyon looked since I was really tiny when my parents bought me there, but the view here at Dead Horse Point was, very impressive. It was no any “normal” canyon, but a vast piece of lands (more like plateaus in this case), followed by sudden change in altitude, with cliffs that went down probably like 500 feet on the other side. At the bottom it’s the Green River - the canyon had been carved by this river for millions of years. This art of nature had created a horseshoe-like, U-shaped valley, in the middle of nowhere. It was really impressive and anyone had to be standing there to realize it. Spent an hour or so taking loads of pictures and video, and I was off to my next destination, the Canyonlands National Park.
Canyonlands is vast, and a lot of it is only accessible by 4-wheel-drive vehicles, which unfortunately was out of my budget and I didn’t have. I tried to enjoyed every part of it where a 4-wheel-drive wasn’t needed though. Drove to a couple view points, like the Grand View Point (I actually hiked for an hour there to get to the best part of it where there’s a panorama view), the Upheaval Dome view point - a though-to-be the ground zero of a meteor impact where there’s a huge crater that had a 1-mile diameter, the White Rim view point - very impressive crater crafted by water again. Had fun at the Aztec Butte Trail where there were ancient “granaries” left by Indian people, up on the cliff of some huge sand dunes - it was really tiring and scary (since at the top I was literally walking on the edge of a cliff) but the view I got there were well worth the effort. I got to see these granaries at a very close distance and got a feel of how these ancient people survived at these high attitudes, how it was like to have to climb to the top many times a day…etc. I got so excited at the place I even told some European tourists how cool it was up there when I was on the way down…lol. Anyway. Next morning I got up at 3:45AM, drove 20 miles from Moab to Canyonlands in order to shoot some photographs of the sunrise at place called Mesa Arch. It’s a very popular photographic point where many photographers would get up early and set up their gears there just to get a shot of the sun at its earliest point in the day. I actually got there first at around 4:30AM, but there wasn’t anyone, so I waited as I didn’t want to hike up alone in the dark. People started coming at around 5:15AM and I started to hike this short 15-min walk up to the arch. About 3 to 4 people set up their gears after I did, and we all just sat there waiting for the sun to emerge, kinda cool. But it sucked. It was actually quite cloudy, so we weren’t able to get the epic shot where the sun rises to a point that it is just touching the edge of the arch thus creating a flare on only one side of the stone. Anyway, I got some pretty nice shots of it.
There’s another remote area in the Canyonlands National Park called The Needles which anyone shouldn’t miss. I was off to there next, and it was about a 2-3 hours drive to the southern part of the park. I got a reservation at this camp site called The Needles Outpost. It was a hoot to chat with the owner, she was telling me how to stretch my body as I was mentioning how much walking I just had at the Chesler Park hike (will talk about this next). She gave me a really nice site where I had a huge tree blocking most of the heat from the sun, and needless to say, the site was very very private and cool. It’s all sandy at the ground, but the views was impressive, with huge rock formations at a distance, and on the other side just a piece of vast land that you could see forever. Anyway, the morning of the same day I was actually doing a hike at the Chesler Park trail, the most popular trail at the Needles district. It’s no easy I tell ya, and it felt like I was walking forever, but as always, the views just kept on getting better. I had to first walk past a fairly lengthy trail that began with some fairly standard trail across some flat area with lots and lots of cacti and dessert vegetations. After that I was basically on top of some enormous sandstones, with potholes all over them (potholes - concave “holes” formed by rain water fill up for a period of time at the same spot), and then after that I was surrounded by huge rock formations that piled up like some kind of thick “needles”, in bold red color with white strips in the middle part - there I knew I was close to my destination, the Chesler Park that was pretty much made up of these “needles”. I got to the final destination after climbing over a probably 150 feet tall rock formation, still remember that I got really excited since I couldn’t see at all what’s on the next side unless I climbed over to the other side. Wow, some enormous piece of land, surrounded by countless “needles” and in the middle part it was filled with mushroom-like rocks, with red middle part and a white top, very unique. I was pretty exhausted by then otherwise I could actually walk around the area in a circle. Chesler Park was impressive. In the Needles district I also went for the Cave Spring Trail where there were some interesting rock art and a cowboy camp. Also went to the Big Spring Canyon overlook which was equally impressive as the White Rim. I took a lot of panorama pictures there (which turned out to be great after stitching them up in Photoshop!).
Next it was the Natural Bridges National Monument. It was another 2-3 hours drive from Canyonlands. This park was actually very tiny, I think for people that don’t hike they can finish driving up to all the view points within an hour and half, but I did do some hiking in order to get to the bridges as close as possible. There were basically three enormous natural bridges in the park - Sipapu, Kachina, and Owachomo bridge. I had only 2 hours total (ended up spending 3 hours there) at the park so I chose to hike down only to the Kachina bridge, while viewing the Sipapu and Owachomo bridge at a distance. The hike 400ft down to the Kachina bridge was piece of cake but hiking back up was brutal! But anyway the bridge WAS impressive, very enormous in size and the hole in the middle was HUGE. Took a bunch of nice shots down there, and also found some rock art that was carved right at the side of the bridge (e.g. a carving of a goat). The three bridges in the park were actually much much older than the arches that were found say at the Arches National Park. They were composed by “cedar mesa” sandstones that were deposited about 250 million years ago (same kind of stone at the Needles district in the Canyonlands National Park). I finished the entire park in about 3 hours and then I was off to Page, Arizona.
On the way to Page, I was at the “Valley of the Gods” unpaved scenic drive at one point, where I planned two hours for it but since I overspent my time at the Natural Bridges I only drove for about 20 minutes into the road to take some shots and I backed out. It was too harsh to drive there anyway with my crappy little Hyundai.. After a long 4-hour drive I finally got to Page. At Page I was first confused about the time since it didn’t follow the standard Arizona time, instead it used the “MST” (Mountain Standard Time, which I had no clue what it was) and the time was actually the same as in Nevada. It wasn’t until I looked up on the internet when I realized that only the Navajo districts (district of the native Indians pretty much) uses MST. I set up the tent and went to “bed” fairly early as I had to wake up early the next morning to drive 30 miles to this place called the “Paria Ranger Station” to do a lucky draw in order to get a hiking permit to this INSANLY popular place called “The Wave”. God wasn’t with me that morning and I failed to get the permit (only 10 available and there were like 2x participants). Anyway, back to Page. The highlight at Page was the Antelope Canyons! They are “slot canyons”, canyons with very narrow passages that you could barely fit your body in at most points inside them. The “slots” were again formed by water, which actually filled up the inside of the canyon after almost every rainfall. I got a 4-hour pass to self-tour the “Lower Antelope Canyon” from Ken’s Tour, which was bascially a crappy little “hut” in the middle of nowhere where they sold the tickets and some small souvenirs like post cards. It was way less crowded there compared to the “Upper Antelope Canyon” (will talk about it next), except occasionally there were large groups of 30 people rushing in, but they would usually be gone in a short period of time as most of the groups were guided tours. I spent a good 3 hours inside the canyon, used two of my lenses, to take a whole bunch of very cool pictures - it was photographer’s heaven. The stones, more like walls at the inside of the canyon were carved constantly by water, creating these very curvy shape with occasional “lines” on the surface of the rocks formed by the wave pattern. The different shapes of patterns of the stones, having different light beams casted on them, in different directions depending on the time of the day, had created a virtually infinite amount of photo opportunities. I was super exciting in there, walking through the entire thing back and forth (it wasn’t too large, probably 15 minutes of walking from beginning to the end), trying to aim my lens to different angles…etc. After that I headed for the “Upper Antelope Canyon”, which was a 1-hour guided tour. Yes it was more or less the same as the “Lower” canyon, but was much more darker as the walls are taller and the gap at the top was narrower so not much light could get in. The guide was very informative though (and nice), giving a lot of information about the formation of the canyon and the various cool spots inside it where people had giving them names. The ride to the entrance of the canyon was cool as well, where we (group of ~20 people) were on a 4-wheel-drive truck (I’d call it a monster truck as the engine/exhaust was SO loud), traveling basically on sand for about 3 miles. The ride was extremely bumpy, but that was what made it so cool.
On the last day I got up early (at 6AM), packed up all my belongings, threw away all the stuff that I couldn’t bring back with me due to the weight (the broken fly of my tent, an axe, my sleeping bag…just to name a few 
), and headed towards Las Vegas where I would board my plane 7pm on the same day. I got to Las Vegas at around 11AM, parked at The Venetian’s free 7-story parking. The traffic at LV was really bad and confusing as hell. My GPS didn’t work very well and it took me some scrambling before I was able to get to the hotel. Anyway, I didn’t really have any place in mind to go, except for the M&M’s World where I promised Wendy that I’d get her some souvenirs there, so therefore I was just basically walking along “The Strip”, or the Las Vegas Boulevard. It was so insanely hot and I didn’t wear my hat so it was pretty harsh. The air conditioning inside the malls was very nice though. I went to a couple popular places like the Forum Shop, the Grand Canal at the Venetian, the Bellagio hotel with its huge musical fountain (watched a show there), New York New York (just walked by took some pics and checked out people yelling riding the rollar coaster, didn’t go in), MGM Grand (didn’t go in as well). Had lunch at a Mcdonalds since I was craving for a pop. The place where I spent most of my time was actually at the M&M’s World. It was way too cool - 4 stories of fun, as they called it. Loaded with everything you can imagine, with the M&M’s logo imprinted. I bought a bunch of cool looking M&M’s there with different tastes and colors, and also a few items for Wendy. At next door it was a Coca Cola World, which was kind of cool but I ended up didn’t buy anything there but a bottle of coke, lol. Since it was too hot I decided to get to the airport earlier, which actually was a right decision since my baggage was overweight for 19.X pounds and I had to spend extra time ditching some of my stuff in order to avoid the $50 extra weight fee
That was the trip, and it was a lot of fun. Words simply can’t describe, I guess.
