We started our trip to Colorado and Utah last month by flying into Denver International Airport. After hunkering down in the mile high city for a night, we got up the next morning and headed west along I-70 towards Utah. When we got to Dotsero, Colorado, we found ourselves driving alongside the mighty Colorado River for about 100 miles until our path diverged at Grand Junction. Following that waterway down Glenwood Canyon was one of the two or three driving highlights of this trip. Yeah, I know that's a lot of driving highlights, but riding alongside that river was awesome.
After Grand Junction, we weren't separated from the River for long. We'd meet up with a wider version of the Colorado later that same day just before pulling into Moab. And later on in the week, we'd be searching for wildlife close to the River's source in Rocky Mountain National Park. In many ways, our journey was guided by the Colorado. We even walked over it on our stop to find Doc Holliday's grave.
Between our drive on I-70 and our time in Rocky Mountain National Park, we came across another of the west's great rivers: the Green River. The Green parallels the Oregon Trail in Nebraska and caused many a westward pioneer to lose their wagons, mules and even their lives on the way from the Missouri River to the Oregon Territory. Our encounters with the Green were much less treacherous. We stopped at a few viewpoints to watch the river flow just after its crossing into northeast Utah.
The Green meets up with the Colorado just south of Moab in Canyonlands National Park, the second of the three great National Parks we went to Colorado and Utah to visit. Our visit to that Park is what this post is about.
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| Grand View Point Overlook. Island In The Sky. |
By the time we got to Canyonlands, we had already been to Arches and already understood a little bit about the sheer size of the red-orange-amber-brown rock wonderland that makes up that Park. And it is big, covering about 120 square miles (for perspective, Rhode Island is just a little bigger than 1,200 square miles). That was way more than we could have realistically covered in a few days, let alone the few partial days we spent there.
Canyonlands is about four and half times as big as Arches, a massive 525 plus square miles. We reserved one day to explore. There's no way we were covering the whole thing in a single day. Triage time!
Canyonlands is essentially a massive plateau broken up into three parts by the two rivers that meet in about the center of the park. The two rivers form essentially a huge "Y" with the Green on the left side of the letter, the Colorado on the right and the combined flow (the Colorado again) on the bottom. Each of the three parts of the Park are separate and distinct and you cannot travel from one part to a different part without venturing right down to one of the rivers and crossing it somehow. And that's not an easy proposition.
There's actually a fourth part of Canyonlands to the west of the main park called Horseshoe Canyon. Compared to the other three sections of the Park, it's tiny, but apparently it contains some incredible petroglyphs. We didn't go. You'll see why in a paragraph or two.
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| Six Shooter Peaks. Wingate Sandstone. On the road to The Needles. |
Two hours sounded just fine.
We knew the day we were at Canyonlands was going to be a scorcher. If I'm remembering right, this was the day the temperature hit 100 at about noon. And there is no shade whatsoever in the Park. I decided I'd claim some measure of success if we could get a good look at both rivers. That became my goal for the day.
First stop: Island In The Sky Visitor Center for some rangerly advice. Where can we see the rivers? His advice was not encouraging. Maybe from Grand View Point Overlook (a two mile roundtrip hike) or Murphy Point (a 3.6 mile roundtrip hike). Probably from Green River Overlook.
Probably? Why call a spot in the Park Green River Overlook if you can't look out over the Green River? I was not super encouraged.
So here's the thing about seeing the rivers. The ground you walk on in Island In The Sky at Canyonlands is essentially flat. Walk to the edge of that section of the Park and you'll find another flat plain maybe 1,000 feet below you or so (I'm guessing on this distance) That's not where the rivers are. The rivers have carved canyons further below, a full 2,000 feet from where you are standing (not guessing so much on that number). And the canyons are pretty narrow, all things considered, which doesn't really let you get a good angle to look down into them. Your view ends up being something like the photograph above. There's a canyon there for sure. And there's probably definitely a river at the bottom. You just can't see it. You need to get to the right viewing angle. And it's difficult to get to that without descending further down, which is about impossible to do without an off-road vehicle and some serious free time. We had a four-wheel drive SUV, but not near enough time.
We did spend our time doing a little walking. And I do really mean a little. We planned on three stops: Grand View Point Overlook as recommended by our ranger friend; Green River Overlook in hopes that you could actually see the Green River from the eponymous spot; and a quick hike to Mesa Arch, because somehow we felt we didn't see enough arches on this trip.
Grand View Point Overlook was scenic. No doubt. There were no rivers to be seen but you are literally (if you choose to do so) walking along a cliff edge that plunges hundreds of feet down to an arid but absolutely gorgeous canyon. Amazing stuff. No guardrail or nothing. Just an unrestrained view of some amazing nature. Done with that one. Onto Green River Overlook.
Can you actually see the Green River from the Green River Overlook. OF COURSE YOU CAN!!! That's why it's called that. Green. River. Overlook. Not the best view of a river I've ever seen and also not the best view of the Green River I'd get on this trip. But we saw it. One river down. One to go.
We didn't have the same luck with the Colorado River in Island In The Sky. Didn't see it. We left Colorado-less. On to The Needles. We had pretty much no shot at the Colorado there. We knew it and went anyway. Two hours to Needles. On the road again.
Oh...and Mesa Arch? Closed. I didn't really need any more arches on this trip anyway. I was good.
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| I know a lot of these pics look the same but the Green River is in this one. Right of pretty much dead center. |
The rock that makes up the landscape you drive through in Canyonlands was deposited in that spot on Earth over millions and millions of years. The top surface of Island In The Sky was soil carried by wind and water from about 180 million years ago. Drive down to The Needles and you'll find yourself cruising through an environment much lower in elevation and much older. Like maybe 80 or so million years older.
We ended up spending all of about an hour or so in The Needles. The star attraction in this section of the Park is a rock formation know as (surprise! surprise!) The Needles. The formation itself is a series of sandstone spires fractured by the action of that layer of rock sliding over an underlayer of salt and then being eroded by rain, ice and snow into a series of multicolored towers of rock. The photos in the Park brochures look amazing. We couldn't get close enough on a day with a lot of heat haze to get a great picture to match the glossy pics in the free maps you can pick up at the Visitor Center. This despite an off road trip down to Elephant Hill.
Pro tip on this one: you can't actually see The Needles from Elephant Hill, and you can't go any further than that spot without a permit to drive a four wheel drive vehicle. So if all you want to see is The Needles, don't drive all the way down that track. There's a decent view of The Needles maybe about halfway there with some signage. I'd turn back after this spot if you don't plan on hiking anywhere. With temperatures the way they were when we were there, we passed on the hiking.
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| A hazy view of The Needles. Best we'd get on our day. |
It may seem a little crazy to drive two hours each way to a place to only spend about an hour in the actual place you've driven to. But I believe there's some saying about the journey sometimes being better than the destination. The Needles was that for me.
The approach to this section of the Park is a drive over some of the most gorgeous canyon land I've ever been through. It's like you are driving along a pretty wide plateau along the edge of towering cliffs on your right with distant rock formations far away on your left, including two amazing chimney rock formations known as the Six Shooter Peaks. It's probably like that because that's exactly what you are doing. Having just come from Island In The Sky, you can get a great perspective on how far down you are towards the rivers and that what you are driving below is the same sort of elevation you'd been walking on just a few hours before.
The cliffs you drive by are impressive. It's almost as if someone has placed some sheer hunks of rock on top of some massive sand piles made up of some loose rocks (like as big as car-sized) with some smaller ones filling in the gaps. Of course, it's nothing of the sort. The sand piles are actually made up of rock that has split off from the main cliffs and tumbled down towards the very road you are driving on. Concerned? You might need to be. There are massive (did I say car-sized? maybe it's really small house-sized) rocks on the other side of the road from the cliffs that have clearly rolled to their current positions. Don't want to get caught up in that.
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| Driving to The Needles. Those rock on the left of the road came from the right side I'm pretty sure. |
And the River? Nope, we didn't see the Colorado here either.
Now, there is a spot in this section of Canyonlands where you can clearly see both rivers. It's called Confluence Overlook and it's right on top of the location where the Colorado merges and swallows the Green. This is exactly where I wanted to be. However, it's also a five mile hike from the nearest parking lot or a one mile hike from the closest vehicle-accessible off-road permit-required trail. Caution being the better part of valor definitely kept me from Confluence Overlook. No way was I hiking five miles (that's each way by the way) in three-figures heat with no shade. Nor was I choosing a completely isolated spot in southeast Utah to test our rented Chevy Equinox on some sand trails. No thanks. Better safe than sorry.
Island In The Sky. No Colorado. The Needles. No Colorado. This river runs right through like the whole Park and we couldn't see it at all. Not one glimpse. Not one drop. Nothing.
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| Big Spring Canyon Overlook. The Needles. Canyonlands National Park. |
But we did see the Colorado.
Right outside the entrance to Island In The Sky, there's a place called Dead Horse Point State Park. Odd name, I know. Apparently the point of land that forms the park was perfect for capturing wild horses. The legend is the cowboys who corralled the horses took the ones they wanted and left the others to die of exposure after being captured. Thus...Dead Horse Point. A bit macabre I guess. But that's not the point really.
Dead Horse Point State Park is to the east of Canyonlands or in the upstream direction of the Colorado River. And the River runs right by the point that gave the Park its name. And by right by I mean like it's right there below you. You can see it snaking back and forth through the canyon 2,000 feet below you and the view is magnificent. There aren't a lot of trips that I've taken where I've admired a river in nature but we really got to do it in Colorado and Utah. And the view of the Colorado working its way across the canyons of Utah from up high was the best we got. It looks so lazy and slow but it's what carved most of the landscape that we ended up seeing in Canyonlands. The power of water and the silt and sand it carries over millennia is incredible. This is a body of water worthy of respect. I got that from Dead Horse Point. This park saved us. It saved the whole day. I wouldn't have been the same without this visit.
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| The Colorado River, as seen from Dead Horse Point State Park. |
In my opening post about this trip, I wrote that circumstances conspired against us in taking full advantage of one of the Parks we visited. Canyonlands was that Park. Too hot. Too big. Did that mean we didn't get a lot out of our day there? Absolutely not. But I didn't get the same satisfaction I got out of Arches. The level of intimacy was missing, which is understandable given the vastness of the place we found ourselves in. You can't always get what you want in life or when you travel. This was one of those times.
Karma made up for it later in the week. And I wouldn't have traded what we found a few days later for anything. And I also wouldn't have missed our stop at Dead Horse Point for anything. Go here to see the Colorado. Maybe one day I'll get to Confluence Overlook. But honestly, probably not.
How We Did It
Canyonlands National Park is open 24 hours per day, seven days a week, 365 (or 366) days per year. It's vast. Like really vast. There are so many things to do there which take a ton of time. If I were a more adventurous and patient traveler, I'd spend a few days here hiking and taking it all in and finally making it to see both rivers up close.
Speaking of rivers, the Park's website does have a list of river excursion operators. If it weren't for this whole deadly virus thing, I would really have loved to have consider a non-whitewater float on either the Green or the Colorado. But spending any time in a boat with a bunch of strangers? Not interested this year.
Dead Horse Point State Park, which I considered the highlight of my day at Canyonlands (if that wasn't obvious) is also open every day of the year. Their website lists their hours as 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily although they have campgrounds so clearly you can stay overnight. We opted not to camp because we've never ever camped and it will take something pretty extreme to make me ever camp.
Finally, if you want as close to a bird's eye look at Canyonlands that you can get while on the ground, or just want to get a different view of how massive the Park is, I'd suggest a stop at Needles Overlook, a park owned by the Bureau of Land Management out in the middle of nowhere. There are several overlooks to the Colorado River valley (although we failed to see the River from this spot just like we did in the actual Park) and The Needles. To get there, head south out of Moab on US-191 and hang a right on Needles Overlook Road. Or just plug it into your favorite directions app. Once you make the turn off 191 you can't miss it.
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