Canyonlands

Let me start out by making one small clarification.  Canyonlands National Park is huge.  Silly huge.  And (not surprisingly) it is full of canyons, which make it a little tricky to get around.  So, if you wander off and get lost, not only is there approximately zero chance of you making it out alive or being rescued, but chances are they won't even find your skeleton.

That's too bad really, because I decided a long time ago that if it was ever time for me to leave a skeleton behind, as I spent my last few moments (probably trying to suck moisture from a rock), I would pose myself in some hilarious fashion.  That way, when the poor saps show up to find me, they will get a good laugh out of it, and that will make them feel better about finding a skeleton in the desert.

Let me make one additional clarification.  We didn't actually go to Canyonlands National Park as the title (and my rambling so far) would have you believe.  We actaully went to one corner of Canyonlands called "Dead Horse State Park".  However, one of us (and it wasn't Maggie or I...) decided early in our day that the name "Dead Horse" was simply "too sad", and so from that point forward it became simply Canyonlands.

(For those of you who have been patiently skimming through these stories about Stephanie and I and wondering when we would finally start talking about Maggie, here it is...)

The main reason we chose to spend the day at the State park (instead of the National Park) is that dogs are allowed on the trails.  By this point Maggie had just about enough sitting around hotel rooms while we went off hiking and biking and doing other things she would have very much enjoyed.  And so this time she came with us, clambering over cactus, sniffing out holes that were probably full of rattlesnakes, bounding and jumping down the trail, and otherwise doing all the things and exerting all the energy that animals better adjusted to desert environments know not to do.

Three things we learned on this hike:

1) Our lives are absurdly small flashes of insignificance on the geologic time scale.  Trying to wrap your head around the amount of time it took to create this landscape is sort of like trying to wrap your head around the distance between galaxies, the number of grains of sand in the desert, or any other number of things that make your head hurt.

2) Maggie would really (really) like to play tag with a deer.  She made that abundantly clear to us, the deer, and anyone else within a two mile range.

3) Maggie really (really) needs to start carrying her own water.  Apparently being covered in thick fur, though really cute, is just not beneficial in the desert, and results in her drinking a significant portion of the water intended to keep us humans alive.

(No, that is not a hat belonging to a waiter from a 1950's soda shop. It is a collapsable water bowl.  Yes, it is really ugly.  Yes, we did get it for free.  Yes, we did buy her a new one.  It is blue.)

Up next... our new home.