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April 14th, 2013: Canyonlands National Park,“Island In The Sky” section.

Next was Canyonlands National Park, or at least the “Island In The Sky” section of it, which is roughly the northern third of the park. That section has a main road leading down the high plateau to a point where you can see the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, way down below. The first thing we saw along the drive were two large, heavily-eroded mesas that looked like the "Merrimac" and the "Monitor" steamships that fought in the Civil War (at least if you squinted your eyes a bit!). Our next stop was a trail up to a fascinating and mysterious crater that seem to baffle the experts. One school of thought is that the crater is an asteroid impact crater, but another view is that the crater is a huge sinkhole formed when an underground dome of salt leached away and the ground above it collapsed. Apparently there is not sufficient physical evidence either way to be absolutely sure which of those two very different theories is correct.

Another loop trail led out to the large but surprisingly graceful “Mesa Arch”. In the background we could see the stunningly beautiful canyon areas where both the Green and Colorado rivers have been cutting away the rock for many millenia. Again we thought it was a bit reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, only carved from the dominantly reddish sandstone of the area.

Our final stop was a viewpoint from which we could see the actual confluence point of the Green and Colorado rivers. It was a spectacular view out over some deep, toruously convoluted canyons, but in fact both rivers had carved their canyons so deep that you couldn’t really see the water from our vantage point.

That afternoon we celebrated Chris’s birthday with a meal and a beer at the local brewery, plus some gelato to top it off, and then took a walk around the town of Moab. There we found a nice “river walk” along the local creek and odd but charming pieces of artwork scattered around the town.