It's not my fault! It would happen to anyone, I swear!
First of all, the stuff that Nature has produced in southern Utah is mind-blowingly beautiful.
There are gigantic chunks of tectonic plates jutting thousands of feet up into the sky. I'm talking like 75 mile long, jagged pieces of earth. It looks like those plates that go along a stegosaurus's spine.
I got this picture from rangenet.com because it shows the San Rafael Swell nicely.
There are swirling canyons of red sandstone. Rocks that glow in red and orange and purple. Rocks, people. Crazy colored rocks.
I took this last year at "the wave" in southern Utah.
There are arches and fins and needles and all kinds of geologic oddities.
This year in Arches.
And giant expanses of desolate desert, where you might not encounter another person for days.
Arches National Park.
And then there are cute little pockets of inhabitable land, where agriculture is possible, and people have set up farms and ranches. And again, your heart just hurts to see the perseverance of the farmers against the backdrop of the Dr. Seuss-like landscape.
This picture isn't mine either. It's from thundafunda.com.
So basically, I am in love. With the ridiculous rocks and the river-carved canyons and the way that millions of years of the earth's geologic activity is so shamelessly laid out on display.
For this year's third annual pilgrimage to this holy land, I chose to go canyoneering around Moab. I signed up for some guided trips, and spend 3 days hiking, scrambling, rappelling, and otherwise navigating rocky canyons. Some highlights were:
A counterbalanced rappel off of a large arch. This means that the rope was not tied to anything at the top - having one person rappel off of either side of the arch is more than enough to keep the rope in place.
Counter-balanced rappel off of a giant arch. I'm on the left :)
Trying to avoid giant potholes full of water in Granary Canyon.
The guide fell in!
Scrambling through "Fat Man's Misery" in the Fiery Furnace, a rocky section of Arches National Park.
This was really a tight spot. And tough to shimmy through.
AND there is nothing below you to hold you up.
AND there is nothing below you to hold you up.
It was actually a bit hard to leave this time. I wanted to stay and play more. I started to become curious as to whether I could maybe even move out there someday. Would I miss city life too much, or would I maybe find that the stores and the events and the restaurants don't mean as much to me as I thought? Would I miss the hustle or forget all about it? Bored or fulfilled? Not sure. But as I get older, I can imagine staying out there more and more. Definitely something to keep in mind when things get hectic around here, and financial obligations feel stifling, that there's always Utah.
Arches NP with the La Sal Mountains in the background.
