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Day 15
Day 16
Day 16 - July 14
Moab, UT to Ely, NV
Miles traveled: 406
Local Music:
The Arches National Park Audio Tour CD
This place is remarkably neat. The landscape is like something from another planet. You feel like you're in a cheesy 50's Sci-Fi B-movie. You expect to turn around and find Kirk fighting the Gorn on one of the cliffs. Or maybe that's just heat exhaustion.
What I didn't know before I came here was that the arches for which the park is names are all a mile or more away from the nearest parking areas. A mile of hiking trails that look like something out of Indian Jones. Baren shadeless expanses of rock, mountain ledges only a yard wide, etc. I made the hike out to what is probably the most famous arch here, "Delicate Arch". Look closely in the picture and you can see me.
I also snapped a photo of some petroglyphs along the way.
I wish I had packed a lunch, and had more time to stay here, but I only had about a half a day and about a gallon of water, so I had to move on.
The Hole in the Rock. Back in the 1940's, the owner of the rock started blasting out the hole. 12 years later, he moved in, having carved himself a nice ranch-style home. When uranium was discovered nearby, the front room was converted into a diner to serve the miners. The kitchen was painted sea-foam green (because health regulations required a washable surface) but everything else was kept "sandstone". The kitchen in this place is really amazing, the hardware (oven, deep fryer, etc) is all carved right into the walls. Same with the bathroom plumbing. Anyway, when the miners moved on and the original owners passed on, the place was opened up as a roadside attraction. Definitely worth a stop if you're in Moab.
Fossil hunting in Delta, UT. On the west side of Utah, you find this place. Where you can pay by the hour for to look for dead bugs. Bugs that have been dead for a really long time. You can buy time anywhere from a couple of hours up to all-day. I arrived late in the afternoon and only had a couple of hours before it would start getting dark. But I still managed to get a five-gallon-bucket full of specimens. Mostly prints, and partial or broken trilobites, but a few good samples.
