Colorado River and Sego Canyon

 On our way home from Moab the boys took one last mountain bile ride on the Navajo Rocks trails while I took a little stroll along the Colorado River. I crossed the new pedestrian bridge across the river. With its new artistic additions. I'm sure there is deep symbolim here, but it was a little lost on me.

The Colorado is a significant rriver system for the western US, but it is not a particularly attractive river by itself here in Moab.

Fortunately the canyon sidewalls add more interest along the way.

I picked the bikers up at the end of their ride and even managaed to get a little video. Sadly I hit the stop button by accident so I didn't get Zach and Calvin all the way.

I talked everyone into stopping at Sego Canyon, one of my favorite rock art sites. These Barrier Canyon style figures date from 6000BC to 100BC.

The figures in front are from a more recent era

Mountain Bike Shuttle

I don't enjoy bike riding, so when plans are for a weekend of biking I am more than happy to drive the shuttle.  That means that I don't really have any pictures of the rides, just a few start/finish photos.  But while the boys were biking I did a little exploring on my own.

 The Friday ride was down an old favorite trail Gemini Bridges.  The beginning of the ride is very close to Dead Horse Point, so we all toook a quick peak over the edge.

Then I left them at the top and went back to Moab for a walk in town and a little pool time.

Saturday was an adventure among the Navajo Rocks bike paths.  

I left the boys with their bikes and went back into Dead Horse Point and took a walk along the East Rim Trail.

Spring flowers here are pretty limited here

The changing weather made some spectacular scenery

The Needles- Canyonlands Nationa Park

We arrived in Moab in the early afternoon, Butch and the boys weren't due to arrive for a few hours, so we decided to make a quick dash to the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park, even though we knew that you can't really make a very successful "quick dash" through a National Park.  We starteded up the road to the park once a few years ago and got as far as Newspaper Rock  before we decided the drive to the park entrance was too long.  This time we powered right through, even though we had to wait for road construction a couple of times.  We decided we really only had time for one adventure and that was a 2 1/2 mile loop on the Slick Rock trail.  There were amazing vistas on all sides of the loop, but as usual a phone camera just doesn't do justice to the immensity of the scenery.

When we pulled up to the trailhead we saw two ravens sitting on jeep.  Calvin jumped out to take a picture because he has a friend with a jeep like that and wanted to send him the picture. Calvin scared the ravens, but when I opened my door one hopped right up and made himself at home.

In no particular order, these are the views from the trail.

We were, of course, late getting back in time for dinner at Moab, but we did stop for a couple of quick pictures at Newspaper Rock. Someday it would be nice to know what these images really mean.

Road Trip Across Nevada

 We went to Moab, Utah last weekend, but in order to get to Moab we first had to cross 400 miles of northern Nevada desert. This was not our first trip east across Nevada, we know the road pretty well, but lately we have started taking travel guides along with us to discover new things along the way.

Our first stop was the Carlin Angular Unconformity.  We have actually stopped here before, but it is always amazing to me that between the reddish sandstone layers in the shadow and the white limestone/sandstone formation in the sunlight roughly 50 million years in the geologic record is missing.

Our next stop was Lamoille Canyon just south of Elko.  Just a few miles from I-80 we came over the hill to see a beautiful panorama of the snow capped Ruby mountains and the green valley of Spring Creek.

It was spring in the valley, but still winter in Lamoille Canyon

Snow on the road stopped us from going to the top, but we were able to take a short nature walk where we saw spring welling out of the ground, you can kind of see water welling up in the middle of the pond. 

A couple of beaver dams captured the water to make a pond before it joined the stream headed down the canyon.

 

And we had great views of a hanging valley left by a side glacier

We tried to go to Angel Lake just south of Wells, but the road was still closed by snow, so we took a short side trip north of Wells to Thousand Springs Valley to see the route of the California Trail. I image it looks about the same as it did in the 1850s. This is right on the edge of the Winecup Gamble Ranch which currently covers roughlyone million acres. It is still a working cattle ranch. It was owned briefly by actor Jimmy Stewart.

So much to see just a few miles off the interstate.