Canyonlands

I can’t seem to make a move in less than a week. Just too many interesting places to see in between everywhere, even when the distance only crosses one state line. After my lease ran out, it took me a full six days to leave Utah. After leaving St. George, I drove east, over two plateaus, the San Rafael Swell, over the Colorado near Moab, south past the sandstone buttes of Indian Creek Canyon, and finally into the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park. Over Thanksgiving we had been snowed out backpacking here, and I still wanted to see more of this park (this district gloriously bereft of scenic drives and paved nature trails, but well endowed with hiking trails over sand and slickrock).

I took the trail to Chesler Park, and as it passed through narrow clefts in the sandstone, I encountered one of the most whimsical places I have ever seen on a hike. In a cave the trail passed through, generations of hikers had used the flat rocks littering the floor to build cairns. Hundreds of them. Teetering rock piles covering the ground, perched on ledges and boulders.

The trail then swung through a joint in the rock several hundred yards long and not an armspan wide, before emerging on the Needles’ most photographed area, Chesler Park, where spires of white and red sandstone stand over a grassy meadow. This area is remarkable not only for the scenery but also for the flora. The grasses in this meadow are all native, a rarity in the west where cattle have carried seeds from Asia and Europe all over the rangelands. The cliffs, canyons, and vast expanses of slickrock in this area are difficult to navigate on cloven hooves, and so, many isolated areas of the canyonlands have never seen cattle, or the foreign seeds and grasses they carry.