Moab
Moab is a play town. The recreation opportunities here are endless, and most of them are for the young and strong.
We have lots of steel legged mountain bikers staying here. When we are way up on some overlook we can see them churning up the switchbacks out of a canyon, or flying along the dirt roads. We pass them on steep grades as they pedal in a low gear, and they pass us on the down grades. There are bikes to rent , bike tours to go on and lots of bike repair shops. Then there are all the intrepid back packers who disappear into the canyons with their tents and think nothing of a 1000’ climb up to the canyon’s rim. And the Colorado is there for rafting trips too, although the rapids that are interesting are a ways to the south. But the real centerpiece is off road running in either jeeps or ATV’s.
Moab was a small farming community, raising fruit until the 1950’s when the fuel of the future, uranium, was discovered and Moab became a boom town. This lasted until the demand for uranium slacked in the 60’s. A potash mining operation is in operation today, but tourism is the big deal. The main street is lined with businesses that cater to those who want to go play on the rocks or the water, and the gift stores that wait for tourists everywhere.
Our first visit is to Arches National Monument, since 1929, an easy way to get up close and personal with weird rocks. The stars of the show are the arches, there are 18 of them in the park and plenty more in the area. The trails, from a short amble to a 7 mile rock scramble are all designed to get you to as many as arches as possible. I still don’t get it but we dutifully drove the loop and did some of the hikes, and duly admired the arches. Much more impressive is the switchback road up to the main area, where you are climbing right up through the shoulder of the fault that the river goes through with the La Sal mountains towering to the east, and the ramparts of the remaining high cliffs to the south.
Up above, you drive around huge mesas, two called Courthouse, because they do have an architectural quality to them, past the Tower of Babel, the Organ, the Balanced Rock, the Ham Rock and so on, oh and an Elephant Butte too. My favorite part is called fiery furnace, a wilderness of red fins that lights up in the sunset, hence the name. The fins are vast parallel cracked and eroded but smooth ridgelets. They are the precursor to the arches when the underside of the fin is eroded away. From a distance they look as though they were made of bread dough, sliced and then baked light tan. The tops look smooth the way risen bread does. Caused by the same collapsed underground salt dome that made the big Moab fault, they are oddly mechanical because they are so regularly parallel at 90 degrees to the horizontal lines of the strata in the limestone. Well mostly horizontal anyway. I also like some of the lumpy “needles” in this area which are red with white tops.
We go last to the north and south windows, arches up on a mesa that overlook the mountains and the wide upland plain. We can see some distance blue mesas, but the big holes are hidden. I have seen so many pictures of these two holes that I feel a little funny to be standing in front of them, actually under them. The view from up there is the best yet.
The next day we geocached around town and along the river, including a hike up Negro Bill’s canyon, with a nice stream that did little water falls and pools, while we walked through sand or climbed over rocks. We met lots of people. If you want to hike by yourself, you have to get further away from town. And a number of people brought their dogs along, without leashes, which makes me VERY cranky.
This town is entirely too full of young, fit, rabidly active people. Even the folks with their kids (it’s school vacation week in parts of UT) were off on bikes or climbing canyons. Maybe people in UT have a healthier lifestyle, but I think this place just draws people who like to exhaust themselves.
We, on the other hand, are going to do the (physically) easy stuff, the 4X4 part. You have probably seen pictures of people trying to drive up rocks, over rocks or off cliffs. Moab is the place for this. They have meets and safaris and competitions on some of the most outrageous excuses for a road in the US. There are jeeps everywhere, and Hummers and short pickups way up in the air on lumpy tires, new shiny ones and dirty crunched ones. I would guess half the people in this campground have a jeep, literally. We bought a jeep trail book and have been reading up on trails that are called Hell’s Revenge, Steel Bender, Metal Masher, Cliff Hanger, Moab Rim, and, picture it if you can, Potato Salad. Oh and Poison Spider Mesa. The book has pictures of the high points, some of them are very high, and some of the roads are just boulder fields.
Obviously, if we are at a world class weird rock place, the only thing to do is to try and drive on them. Tomorrow, we will go arrange to rent a jeep, something we are both looking forward to with much glee.
We have lots of steel legged mountain bikers staying here. When we are way up on some overlook we can see them churning up the switchbacks out of a canyon, or flying along the dirt roads. We pass them on steep grades as they pedal in a low gear, and they pass us on the down grades. There are bikes to rent , bike tours to go on and lots of bike repair shops. Then there are all the intrepid back packers who disappear into the canyons with their tents and think nothing of a 1000’ climb up to the canyon’s rim. And the Colorado is there for rafting trips too, although the rapids that are interesting are a ways to the south. But the real centerpiece is off road running in either jeeps or ATV’s.
Moab was a small farming community, raising fruit until the 1950’s when the fuel of the future, uranium, was discovered and Moab became a boom town. This lasted until the demand for uranium slacked in the 60’s. A potash mining operation is in operation today, but tourism is the big deal. The main street is lined with businesses that cater to those who want to go play on the rocks or the water, and the gift stores that wait for tourists everywhere.
Our first visit is to Arches National Monument, since 1929, an easy way to get up close and personal with weird rocks. The stars of the show are the arches, there are 18 of them in the park and plenty more in the area. The trails, from a short amble to a 7 mile rock scramble are all designed to get you to as many as arches as possible. I still don’t get it but we dutifully drove the loop and did some of the hikes, and duly admired the arches. Much more impressive is the switchback road up to the main area, where you are climbing right up through the shoulder of the fault that the river goes through with the La Sal mountains towering to the east, and the ramparts of the remaining high cliffs to the south.
Up above, you drive around huge mesas, two called Courthouse, because they do have an architectural quality to them, past the Tower of Babel, the Organ, the Balanced Rock, the Ham Rock and so on, oh and an Elephant Butte too. My favorite part is called fiery furnace, a wilderness of red fins that lights up in the sunset, hence the name. The fins are vast parallel cracked and eroded but smooth ridgelets. They are the precursor to the arches when the underside of the fin is eroded away. From a distance they look as though they were made of bread dough, sliced and then baked light tan. The tops look smooth the way risen bread does. Caused by the same collapsed underground salt dome that made the big Moab fault, they are oddly mechanical because they are so regularly parallel at 90 degrees to the horizontal lines of the strata in the limestone. Well mostly horizontal anyway. I also like some of the lumpy “needles” in this area which are red with white tops.
We go last to the north and south windows, arches up on a mesa that overlook the mountains and the wide upland plain. We can see some distance blue mesas, but the big holes are hidden. I have seen so many pictures of these two holes that I feel a little funny to be standing in front of them, actually under them. The view from up there is the best yet.
The next day we geocached around town and along the river, including a hike up Negro Bill’s canyon, with a nice stream that did little water falls and pools, while we walked through sand or climbed over rocks. We met lots of people. If you want to hike by yourself, you have to get further away from town. And a number of people brought their dogs along, without leashes, which makes me VERY cranky.
This town is entirely too full of young, fit, rabidly active people. Even the folks with their kids (it’s school vacation week in parts of UT) were off on bikes or climbing canyons. Maybe people in UT have a healthier lifestyle, but I think this place just draws people who like to exhaust themselves.
We, on the other hand, are going to do the (physically) easy stuff, the 4X4 part. You have probably seen pictures of people trying to drive up rocks, over rocks or off cliffs. Moab is the place for this. They have meets and safaris and competitions on some of the most outrageous excuses for a road in the US. There are jeeps everywhere, and Hummers and short pickups way up in the air on lumpy tires, new shiny ones and dirty crunched ones. I would guess half the people in this campground have a jeep, literally. We bought a jeep trail book and have been reading up on trails that are called Hell’s Revenge, Steel Bender, Metal Masher, Cliff Hanger, Moab Rim, and, picture it if you can, Potato Salad. Oh and Poison Spider Mesa. The book has pictures of the high points, some of them are very high, and some of the roads are just boulder fields.
Obviously, if we are at a world class weird rock place, the only thing to do is to try and drive on them. Tomorrow, we will go arrange to rent a jeep, something we are both looking forward to with much glee.
posted by Thistledown24 at 11:02 AM
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