The Vicinity of Moab and Me: An Attempted Rapprochement

Southern Utah isn’t my place. It’s great for 12 hours or so, but then I want water and a color outside the orange-to-red part of the spectrum. Or, at least, THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT.

Friday: Little Wild Horse and Bell Canyons

These slot-ish canyons are right near the BLM primitive camping sites just outside Goblin Valley State Park. It’s a fun hike. A little dry, I guess, but the occasional slick rock scrambles are entertaining, and, if you haven’t seen red rock in a couple years, it’s pretty.

That night, we stayed at Robber’s Roost (a hotel) in Green River. It was shady, but we didn’t get murdered. The most interesting thing about Green River is that the highest-rated restaurant is a taco truck at a closed-down gas station hanging out under a roof being held up with duct tape electrical tape (see below).

Fine, it’s the light being held up by the tape, not the roof.

Saturday: Druid Arch

Next day, we headed to Canyonlands, a park that I haven’t visited since the early oughts. There, we vultured our way into a parking space at the Elephant Rock trailhead and hiked on out to Druid Arch. It’s another hike with a lot of red rocks, not much water, and some fun slickrock obstacles of which I did not take photos for some reason. But here’s a panorama of the greater Druid Arch area, which would’ve been a decent panorama had I managed to not cut the top off of the arch.

And here’s somewhere else on that same hike, included for the sake of not implying that this is a short hike. Definitely a two-photo’er, at least.

And, at this point, we’d been in southern Utah for about 24 hours and everything seemed pretty good. All ready to pack up and go home and… well, but that wasn’t the plan, since it was still only Saturday. Ben’s cousin-in-law and her friend didn’t get to Moab till that evening, and there was still weekend remaining.

Sunday Morning: Floating the Colorado

Ergo, we went and rafted down the Colorado the next day. It was a pretty float, no real rapids, a lot of red rocks, and, confusingly, some water (!). Here’s the only photo that I appear to have taken of the event. Ben’s Pit Vipers were, as always, on point.

Sunday Afternoon: Corona Arch

I don’t remember. I wrote most of this post in June 2021, and it’s right now more than a year later. We hiked most of the way to the arch. Marissa’s dog sure wasn’t getting up that ladder, though, and seemed to be having a hard time throughout. But, Ben, Stephanie, and I went up the ladder, took in the long view of the arch, then called it good.

Sunday Evening: Delicate Arch

And, again, it’s been a while, and my recollection is that I was pretty tired to still be hiking at this point, and then the end of the hike tripped my acrophobia a little. But, I’d never been to Delicate Arch before, and now I have. So — that was cool.

It’s all fine. Just: dry, and everything is some shade between orange and red. And I still don’t *love* love southern Utah. Maybe I can boost the expected pleasantness period up to 24 hours now though.

Also, for a few months of my time with Ben, I had a sign on my fridge that said, in part, “remember, southern Utah is *nice*”. I dunno. It’s nice. I should like it. It’s been a weird last few years.

bkd