Day 8 – Natural Bridges

I learned a valuable lesson last night. Access to the web is very limited here. So my timing of these blog entries may be off. My apologies.
This is where we live. Our bedroom is on the right.
This is the view around the living quarters.

Up at 6:30. Coffee already made (we brought our coffee maker from home. I know, we’re coffee snobs.) Sat around the house until 8:30, when the visitor center opened. We walked up there and met the chief ranger, Scott, and several other people. Since the park runs 7 days a week, the staff is relatively large, but only a few are on duty at any given time. We do not report for work until Wednesday, so they tell us not to come back until then. That means we have 2 days to explore.

We want to get to know the park where we are, so we drove around a 9 mile loop that has overlooks to the three natural bridges here (named

Sipapu,
Kachina, and
Owachomo) and
one ancestral Indian site, Horsecollar Ruins. This loop is the route that the vast majority of people who come to the park will take. (This park is not a destination for people. It is more of a side trip for people going to Canyonlands or Arches.) There are trails down to each of the bridges and ruin. A smaller number of people take these trails. Some hikes are easier than others. Here are some more pictures from the morning.




Tomorrow we will get up early and take the hike down to Owachomo (emphasis on the second syllable.) The drive loop takes us 2 hours.

After that we decided to get some household items (Bonnie needed a full-length mirror for our bedroom) and groceries, so we headed for Moab, Utah, a mere 110 miles away. We got some water and a cooler, packed a lunch and got on the road about noon. The ride was interesting. Lots of rocks. Neat formations. This is big country. You have to drive a long way to do most anything.

On the way we passed an entrance to Canyonlands National Park. Once we got to Moab, we find the entrance to Arches National Park and entered and went to the visitor center. After that we got in the car and the temperature registered 105 degrees. We decided that a visit to Arches would come later in the month and earlier in the day. The drive ‘home’ was uneventful.

We did pass Wilson's Arch on the way. Since this is on private land, they have built a resort development with this as the main view. We filled up with gas in Blanding, a chore we will do quite often, I think, since you never want to be without gasoline in these parts.



266 miles today.