Arches National Park

Three Gossips

Natural wonders envelop Moab, Utah.  The area is one red sandbox filled with giant toys.  Huge stone sculptures set against enormous red cliffs make up the landscape.  This is high desert; hot in the summer and frigid in winter.  Although rivers do stream, collecting thunderstorms, channeling their precious fluid to oases like Moab, the local splendor is rocks.  Geological forces made these rocks, heaving them up through tectonic plates shifting and setting them into place, while extreme weather: wind, rain, and snow,  polished and sculpted them into their latest form.

Arches National Park is most amazing of all.  The scale is monumental and it's first magnificent monument is the Three Gossips seemingly discussing the latest political intrigue and passing judgement on their hapless subjects.  They might be robed choir members but for their chiseled aspect and austere demeanor.

Balancing Rock

Balancing Rock is an enormous egg-shaped rock atop a red pillar; a Jurassic vision ensemble resembling T-Rex on the prowl.  The prehistoric predator sizes up and seizes its prey, if only it could...

Double Arches

Arches National Park, not surprisingly, has a few arches.  Naturally formed and varying in size, these red portals dot the landscape.  Sometimes they're grouped into compounds, other times isolated and discreet.

Arch

One major grouping is the Double Arches compound.  It is expansive, requiring quite a bit of walking to get a taste of the place, or vigorous hiking for hours to fully take in its scope.  Here a formation, there a sculpture, everywhere a climbing adventure.  All red.  

Spring Arch

One attraction juts out of the ground springing up and over head like an arcing liquid extrusion petrified in mid air.  Another, is a conglomerate of shapes scattered and piled into an arch-like castle.  Much like sandcastles, these sandstone piles evoke a playful hand sparking the imagination.

Picnic Area

Life makes a go of it wherever it can. Hardy trees take root in the unlikeliest of places, requiring the rare thundershower and runoff to survive.  These micro oases resembling landscaped parks prove that "life imitates art"... and make perfect picnic areas too.

Surrealist Rocks

At times, vegetation and sandstone take on a surrealist look as if rocks and trees had been Terra-formed by Salvador Dali for a Southwest Disney theme park.

Rock Faces

Rock faces really start looking like faces and pillars start resembling animated creatures.  Animism is alive and well in the desert heat.

Arches Crows

Crows thrive and eagles soar, jack rabbits hide from the full sun and lizards bore into cool sand under cover of rocks.  It's a minimal, conservative existence of economic simplicity.  A Darwinian laboratory for the survival of the fittest.

Greatest of all gems in this vast collection of jewels is Delicate Arch.  It stands alone and aloof from the rest, quite far from any other attraction.   In fact it's practically inaccessible.   Hiking uphill for two miles over slick behemoth boulders in the desert heat at high altitude seemingly conspires against anyone ever reaching this isolated landmark.

Pathway to Delicate Arch

The anticipation built while getting to the arch is like potential energy released at first sight.  A fantastic feature on one continuous rock surface stands there, impossibly, pointing skyward, and downward, marking an undisclosed passageway.  A portal to another dimension? A divine whimsy?  A giant's project?  Certainly a testament to nature's varied splendor.  A skeptic might believe, however briefly, that a cosmic Architect, or the hand of God gently carved out an arch so exquisite its only purpose could be to signify majesty; for no other purpose than to inspire, to leave you standing there, agape.

Leaving behind scientific buzz-kill words like erosion, tectonic upheavals and the like, it is so much easier to let go and wonder...

Delicate Arch

Josie Bassett Morris

Green River

Utah wilderness was settled by many colorful figures but a little known woman stands out for being tenacious in the face of adversity.  Josie Morris dealt with the typical pioneering hardship: eking a living out nothing in the middle of nowhere.  However, the territory was filling up and the state had entered the union; people were there and so was man's Law.

Josie's claim to fame was that she was a wild west woman going solo in a codified world, an American woman in an arid land. Her challenge was being one of the last homesteaders in the modern context of strict water rights and land ownership laws.

Sand Spit - Green River

Someone had already staked a claim to the Green River water rights and he wasn't sharing.  Though hardly anyone lived in the area known today as Dinosaur National Monument, a few ranchers had cattle grazing on  the open range.  Josie's options were limited and she chose an unwanted patch of dry dirt bounded by massive bedrock, relatively close to Vernal.

Bedrock

She couldn't access the river, so she squeezed water out of the rocks; almost literally; and she made her own corner of the desert bloom.

Artesian Spring

Precious autumn rainfall seeps into porous rock formations, freezes during the winter, and is released in Spring like trickling water from a soaked sponge.  Josie captured the dribble, channeled it, and made it flow to her land; homestead irrigation a rustic aqueduct. And, she fashioned a pond, storing water for her fields, hogs, and other barn animals.

Homestead Irrigation

Although Josie did not imbibe forbidden juice during Prohibition, she made moonshine; she conducted business.  Money raised by her stilling output bought building materials for a modest, yet comfortable cabin; most notably, expensive glass windows.

Josie Morris's Cabin

We take glazed windows for granted today, but they were a valuable innovation allowing ample lighting while keeping the elements outside and maintaining a comfortable temperature inside.  Josie's cabin windows are remarkably big and wonderfully segmented into cottage style panels.  By installing a fire place her rustic cabin was transformed into a home during cold winters.  How she got wood in a desert place is a mystery, most likely she bought coal with her hard earned illicit money.

Into the Rocks

Today Josie Morris' legacy is a fertile canyon home to wild flora and fauna.  So after visiting Dinosaur
National Monument and seeing a fossilized dinosaur head

Dinosaur Head

or two take a side trip out to Hog Canyon  - named after Josie's favorite home grown food.
It will be a rewarding surprise: an oasis in the desert.

Petroglyphs - A Photographic Essay

Warriors

On the outskirts of Vernal, Utah enormous cliffs jut out of the valley. A pleasant, moderate hike on a well groomed trail winds along giant red boulders for about one mile.  Exposed bedrock bearing the largest, best preserved collection of petroglyphs in the world line the cliff walls on this trek. This prehistoric Art gallery is embedded in rock with delicate and precise etching.  Keeping line weights consistently wide and deep the Artists - or possibly one of the earliest artist's collective - Native Americans memorialized their creations for eternity.  A first glance may falsely register simplistic drawings, but careful observation reveals sophisticated abstraction akin to modernist composition.

Petroglyphs

Although the art collection is of necessity on a linear progression along a path at the bottom of a cliff with rock face sheer and shooting straight out of the ground, no linear story telling is taking place.  Rather, a series of vignettes illustrate discreet themes like paintings at the museum.

Hoop Man Carving

Glyph themes typically depict iconic symbolism, or more frequently people.  Figurative scenes show various stages of human development; children, adolescent love.....

Young ones

adulthood; family or clan groupings, Paleolithic families (stone age man and wife with welcoming gestures),

Paleolithic Nuclear Family

 chiefs and warriors.  But strangely absent is death: all figures are vertical, none horizontal.

Family Clan

At times, a powerful chieftain figure stands alone, headdress prominent.  Other times a group of impressive figures with variously complex head pieces gather looking outward.

Chieftain

Whatever their purpose, head ornaments are intricate and wonderful.   Each hat is strangely alien; some evoking electric equipment or images of electronic receivers like headphones or giant ears; possibly signifying a connection with the other world; intricate headdress, more likely accouterments of rank.

Tribal Headdress Clan

Occasionally there are images of hunting, like a man fighting a fierce bear... presumably victorious.

Bear Hunt

Some petroglyphs are reminiscent of stone age crop circles leading to the inevitable conjecture that perhaps crop and geological manifestations have been occurring for quite some time.

Stone Age Crop Circle

One glyph is remarkably like the solar system, suggesting a connection to the cosmos.  None appear to be hieroglyphs: absent pattern repetition.

Solar System

In any case, who were these people? And, what inspired them?

The natural landscape is reason enough to prompt reverie.  With massive cliffs and giant rock formations sticking out of the ground, it is easy to see the magic of this place.  When monolithic stones start looking like giant heads, deities come to mind and similarities to the great Moai statues of Easter Island emerge.

American Moai

Desert Crossing

Driving from California to Utah is challenging and rewarding; crossing an interminable wasteland to reach the Great Salt Lake.  A sparse sprinkling of bright spots surprise the weary travelling on highway 80.  Mind expanding vistas beckon to look far and wide as time dilates in the face of disproportionate space.   Points of interest emerge and a diminished sense of human scale is relieved by some bright spots.

Among the few small towns clinging impossibly to life along a ribbon of asphalt Winnemucca is a miracle of human tenacity; and here is a surprise: the largest concentration of free flowing desert dunes in the US.  They're reminiscent of Sahara dunes in their undulating and rippling nature but lighter in color; they're surrounded by mountains mimicking and magnifying their magnificence.

American Sand Dunes

With the setting sun warm tones envelope the landscape in a pink glow until the onset of darkness on the Winnemucca Sand Dunes.

Winnemucca Sand Dunes

On the far Eastern side of Nevada is Wendover, the gateway to Utah the next time zone.  Eastward, an hour vanishes instantly from the chronometer and mental gymnastics ensue adjusting to the fact that arrival time will be one hour later than anticipated.  Mountain time seems ironic because the terrain actually drops from slightly rolling hills to the flattest most level landscape in the world entering the great Salt Flats of Utah.

Bonneville Salt Flats

Adding to the overall eeriness of the place, vast salt deposits stretch to the horizon all around but for punctuating jagged buttes Northward.   This is the flattest most level surface on Earth: primordial salt deposits parched by the searing sun.  It is here on the Bonneville Salt Flats where fast cars set land speed records, naturally.

And it is hot. White hot.  Other worldly. Survival impossible without human ingenuity.  The car better not break down...

Later, much later, around the Grantsville Rest Area, the landscape subtly morphs into rolling scrub lands pocked with rocky boulders, a more hospitable terrain, home of the hardy grasses, hares, and birds of prey.  

Grantsville Rest Area

Then there's the Great Salt Lake.  A land of contrasts is the setting, with flatness once broken by stark peaks in salt water.  Life is scarce; the water is far from potable, toxic to almost all marine creatures.  Only the brine shrimp make it's home here, and few flying bugs. 

Salt Lake, Utah

 Everyone else is just passing by....

Great Salt Lake, Utah