As Bridget Jones might say, we just took a "mini-break" up to Moab, Utah. We drove up on Wednesday - a 7 hour drive from Santa Fe, up the Colorado plateau, through very pretty northern New Mexico scenery, through a bit of southwest Colorado and on into Utah. We took a bit of a shortcut from our usual route to Colorado and drove west from Abiquiu, former home of Georgia O'Keeffe, and around Pedernal, the black mesa in the Jemez Mountains, which she often painted, before heading northwest again.



We took an hour sidetrack to the Needles Overlook about 1/2 hour before Moab - unfortunately the wind had picked up at that point and any views of the "Needles" near Canyonlands National Park were obscured by the swirling sands.

The wind only got stronger as we dodged tumbleweeds while driving towards our hotel, the Sorrel River Ranch, which is 17 miles northeast of Moab, down an incredibly scenic red rock canyon road that winds along the Colorado River. The "Ranch" is lovely - our room overlooked a bend in the river with a wide balcony for gazing at the scenery and watching kayakers and rafts go by.



Thursday we explored Arches National park, 5 miles north of Moab, a geological wonderland of sculptured rock scenery created as a result of the forces of water, ice, extremes of temperature, underground salt movement and erosion. The arches (over 2000 of them) range in size from 3 ft. wide openings to the longest, Landscape Arch, which is over 300 ft. long from base to base.



Arches is a national park you could see in a day by car or spend much longer in exploring by foot.



We drove all the park roads and stopped at many of the scenic spots, did some short loop hikes and parked at Devils Garden at the end of the park for a 4 mile hike out to the Double O arch where we had our picnic lunch.





Friday we explored part of Canyonlands National Park. In contrast to Arches which is quite compact, Canyonlands is huge and has 3 separate districts, the Island in the Sky, the Needles and the Maze. The Island in the Sky is about 35 miles from Moab by road. It is a large mesa carved out by the meeting of the Colorado and Green Rivers, connected to the “mainland” by a narrow 40 ft wide “neck”. The park roads loop around to many viewpoints with trails heading off from them – some down the next level, the “white rim”, about 1200 ft. below the mesa top. From the “white rim” it is another 1000 ft or so down to the rivers. We checked out a number of the scenic overlooks, walked a bit of the Grand Point trail at the end of the mesa where we also took in a ranger geology talk.



Later we hiked to 2 lookouts over the Overlook Dome and had our snacks way out there. We toyed with the idea of descending down one of the 4 wheel drive trails to the bottom and then back to Moab but at the information center they suggested we take a look at the switchbacks before we attempted it in our Subaru. Totally scary looking



– we passed and took the regular roads back to Moab.