Eileen & Joe Visit Moab, Utah
posted on January 6th, 2008 by Joe 
Labor Day is a great excuse for an excursion, especially when you’re married to a Travelholic like Eileen. I admit I was skeptical when she proposed visiting “the desert”, and for good reason: First, I said, isn’t the desert boring? (It’s the desert, which is the root word of deserted, meaning nothing there.) Second, I said, isn’t the desert like four billion degrees? Nonetheless, because my wife always gets what she wants, we loaded up the car and set forth on the Epic Labor Day 2007 Excursion to Moab, Utah.
[Note: Tons more pictures of our trip can be found in the Photo Album on this website. For privacy reasons, the Photo Album is protected by a password. If you a friend of ours, please email us and request a password! ]
Turns out I was right about my prediction that Utah would be four billion degrees in late August. In fact, it was more like five billion degrees. More than once, I was surprised the landscape didn’t instantly burst into flame. I was wrong, however, about the desert being deserted.
The word “magnificent” doesn’t do justice to the astonishing landscape of the American Southwest. Great mesas of rock and sand are dotted by incredibly steep canyons and tiers of stone, and the result is a breathtaking world of scarred earth that leaves you awe-struck and ultimately humbled.
Moab, a mecca for mountain bikers and off-roaders, is nestled between two massive national parks, called Arches and Canyonlands. If you have to choose, Canyonlands is the more beautiful of the two in my view, although Arches is probably more famous because it’s the home of “Delicate Arch”, the impossible-looking rock formation on the cover of virtually every American road atlas.
Both parks are astonishing. In Arches, rock formations teeter on top of one another, as if they’re about to fall over. There are over two thousand natural arches in Arches National Park, and the largest of them are hundreds of feet long. They’re so precarious that as you walk around them, you keep checking to make sure they’re not about to fall down on top of you. In one portion of the park, called “The Needles”, the landscape is a virtual pin-cushion of precarious rock formations over one hundred feet tall each. The pillars of stone are sometimes astonishingly top-heavy. I couldn’t resist naming one of them, pictured here, Penis Rock.
I think the Department of the Interior will be ok with that.
If you get tired of rocks (and you will) head over to Canyonlands, which is right next door, and prepare to be awe-struck by the breathtaking canyons. The landscape here is like an inverse mountain range; instead of going up, the land goes down, way down. Some of these canyons are thousands of feet deep. Sitting on the canyon rim, watching the world literally fall away in front of you, is actually quite moving, almost spiritual. You realize that this landscape was made millions of years before you were born, and will be around millions of years after you are gone. It makes you feel small and humbled just to see it, as if your entire life is but a blink of the eye to these stone gods. But it’s uplifting as well, that feeling of humility, because it reminds you that the daily struggles of life ultimately, in the end, aren’t worth a damn.
I’m no geologist, but apparently the breathtaking landscape is actually the result of a dead ocean that used to be here millions of years ago. As the North American continent rose to higher and higher elevations, the ocean became an inland sea, trapped and cut off from the Pacific. The climate turned warmer, the sea gradually evaporated, and the result was a world covered with salt. Gradually, the salt became compressed and unstable, and collapsed in huge hundred-mile swaths, cutting massive scars into the landscape that form the canyons, arches and teetering rock formations we see today. Wind and water did the rest of the work, rounding things out and literally sculpting this surreal world into a thing of beauty.
I won’t gush too much about the spiritual beauty of the desert, except to say this as a rookie newcomer who’s never been here before: Spend a moment at sunset in the desert, watching the red and orange hues melt into each other, listening to nothing but the sound of the wind, and you’ll find that peyote or not, the Navajo are on to something.
Of course, no Eileen-inspired trip would be complete without a fair amount of drinking, and this particular trip to Moab is no exception. This is Mormon country, so be sure to stock up before you go. Trust me, a couple of frothy Colorado micro-brewed chocolate stouts are a great way to wrap up a day spent roasting in the canyons.
Usually, the drive home from a great weekend trip is anti-climactic, but not this one. We took a winding route through the San Juan mountain range on the western slope of the Rockies, and discovered two things of note. The first is Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, home of the ancient Anasasi Indians. The Anasasi are the first known inhabitants of North America, and they are infamous cliff-dwellers. While Europeans were still trying to figure out how to get a campfire going, these guys were building entire cities underneath the rocky canyon walls of the mountains.
The other notable discovery on the drive home was the mining town of Ouray, Colorado, called “Little Switzerland” because of its nestled location between several ridiculously tall mountains. The town has an ordinance that no new structures can be built that do not look precisely like the structures that existed over a century ago. The result is a time capsule so real that you feel absolutely out of place without spurs and a donkey. Eileen and I drink the night away in the Silver Eagle Saloon, and at one point I officially declare Ouray the Most Beautiful Town in America, and mean it. But for the lack of cell phone reception, I am two minutes away from quitting my job and moving here.
Tons more pictures of our trip can be found in the Photo Album on this website. For privacy reasons, the Photo Album is protected by a password. If you a friend of ours, please email us and request a password!