Day 11 - Moab, UT

Monday, May 14, 2018

Weather:  Sunny and low 80s during the day; clear, moonless night in the high 50s.

Steps: Shaun - 9,834, Shannon - 8,727

We had to get up at the buttcrack of dawn today to be at the Navtec Expeditions Center at 6:30am for an all-day off-roading tour of Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. We arrived on time, but then we had to wait for the guide and pick up another couple before heading into the first park, Canyonlands.

Our guide was a long-time resident of Moab who was very colorful. He had worked in what seemed like every job over the years and had a story for everything. Of course, he was in good company with Shaun.

We started the trip by going back down Potash Road, the road we had explored a few days before, but rather than turning around when the pavement ended, we continued on. We were able to see the evaporation ponds used to extract the potash from the water, which has been pumped underground to create a slurry that brings the potash to the surface. The ponds are dyed blue to speed up evaporation. Once the water is gone, the potash is scraped up by big machines and is used as fertilizer.

We also got to see the petroglyphs that we had been unable to find when we drove down Potash Road the first time. When we finally spied them, eye-level, right where the sign said they were, we felt like idiots, but oh well, we saw them today! Oh, and we saw some dinosaur tracks too.

In Canyonlands, we went up the White Rim and Shafer Canyon Trails, with tons of switchbacks and beautiful vistas. It wasn’t too bad in terms of road roughness, and along the way, we saw the place where Thelma and Louise’s car went over the cliff (spoiler alert?). 

We also got to walk in the footsteps of dinosaurs where a layer of rock had been uncovered that still had impressions from their feet. Really cool.

Our group ate lunch off the tailgate of the jeep, and then headed to Arches. The “roads” were A LOT rougher there, and we got knocked around quite a bit. We visited Delicate Arch and the Windows Section, and then bumped and jerked our way to Tower Arch. We found what looked like a Jeep convention in the parking lot, but it was cool to see the arch with the tower overhead.

To end the tour, we traveled down a slightly less rough road to the Eye of the Whale Arch. It was low on the wall, and while we eventually found it, the whale part was hard to see. Since we were still out in the middle of nowhere with a ways to go before returning to the Navtec Center, Shaun had to pee behind a bush. Classy. 

Overall, we would give the tour a 7 out of 10. We enjoyed exploring parts of both parks that we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to see, especially in Canyonlands, where so much of the park is backcountry. Our guide was a character, for sure, and knowledgeable about a wide variety of things, but more of a jack-of-all-trades-and-master-of-none type. 

We ate at Arches Thai for dinner, which had good food but slow service, and then relaxed for 90 minutes until we had to meet our group for our astronomy trip. We caravanned with the group to the top of the mesa above Moab and made a square of the cars in a campground parking lot to block the lights from cars and people on the road.

Our guide, Alex, talked while he set up a computerized telescope. He showed us nebulae, star clusters, colliding galaxies, and Jupiter with four of its moons visible. There were ten of us in the group, so after each person looked in the telescope for a minute or more for each sight, we ended up being out until midnight. It was fun and interesting, though, so we thought it was worth it. Afterward, we went back to the apartment to drop into exhausted sleep until an early wakeup the next morning.