My first thought upon driving into this park was "How is it that this place has just been sitting here and nobody told me that I absolutely must come see it - immediately?"
My second thought was that this place isn't a fluke of time and erosion as they would have you believe. This is a sculpture. A piece of art. One that could only have been created by a crazy powerful being far greater than we can possibly imagine. One who was perhaps bored one afternoon and thought it would be fun to sit and play with a pile of clay and create something beautiful and illogical just for the pure enjoyment of messing with our heads.
There is no way to capture it in photos. Sure, we can snap a picture of an arch here and a pile of rocks there, but it is a sad excuse for the feeling of standing there, surrounded on all sides by these impossible formations.
It was mind numbing. Literally. Like the Louvre. Where after an hour of going from room to room you have to go sit, stare at a blank wall, and give give your pathetic excuse for a brain time to try to comprehend what it is you have been looking at.
There are of course arches. Ribbons of rock that have chosen to simply ignore gravity. Gave it a dismissive wave of the hand and told it to go annoy something else. Then there are towers and cliffs and spires and hoodoos and swonks and ploppity-bobs and whirly-gigs (some of those I may or may not have just made up). Some are white and some are yellow and some are even green - though admittedly most are red.
One thing is clear - most of these things should have fallen down a long time ago.
Remember Wiley Coyote chasing the Roadrunner? (Of course you do. That is why our generation is so messed up.) Somehow he always ended up running straight over the edge of a cliff. But he didn't fall - not right away. He would just hang there in mid air his legs still spinning but not touching the the ground. Then, realizing his mistake, he would look down, pull out a sign out that read "Oops" and then - only then - plummet to his demise.
I think some of these rocks are at that point in their geologic lifespan. The cliff holding them up ran out a long time ago, but they have yet to look down, and until they admit the presence of gravity, it simply has no effect.
Day one, our first desert hike! It is cool and a little overcast when we leave the car. Perfect hiking weather. Boy, those water bottles look heavy. We aren't going that far... right? Let's leave half of it in the car! Great idea! And off we go!
But then the sun comes out. Wow, it's pretty hot. It's like an oven out here. How far back to the car? Four miles? And how much water do we have left? A liter? Hmm...
Needless to say 3 litres of water for two people for nearly 8 miles of hiking and climbing in 100 degree weather with no shade was not near enough. On our next hike we did less than half the distance, carried more than twice the water, and still came back fantasizing that a giant talking juice box was calling out to us just over the next hill.
...up next: Canyonlands.
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