Incisions In The Earth

In what has by now become a recurring theme for my trip, I was baffled yet again by what I saw at Canyonlands. When you enter the park, you wonder what makes it so special. You're driving along through arid grasslands filled with scrub brush trying to figure out why this grassland is different from any other grassland. Suddenly, you see the land off to the side suddenly give way and you realize that you're on a gigantic mesa called Island in the Sky. Twelve hundred feet below you lies a plateau called the White Rim. Then, carved into the White Rim out in the distance as if someone had taken a scalpel to the earth, were another whole set of canyons, these ones following their own pattern. Finally, at the very center of these incisions, another thousand feet down, was another small canyon containing a ribbon of green. If you squinted and focused, you could see a tiny river running through it.

How could such a small river in the distance carve out such a massive array of canyons within canyons? The Needles and Maze mesas were so far away that you struggle to believe that they are part of the same system. The adventurous can hike down to the White Rim and traverse the exposed plateau. Beware, because distances can be deceiving and there is no shade once you are out there. After almost 50 miles of hiking over the previous eight days, we were not adventurous. So we stuck to short hikes along the Rim Trail and up to Upheaval Dome, a feature that, to this day, geologists are unsure whether it is the remnant of a salt dome or a meteorite impact.

Mere photos do not do justice to the size and intricacy of this park. It is a sight you must behold in person.

For my Canyonlands photo album, click here.