Normally I would wait to post anything on a park, until after I got back home and had some time to digest. This time, I am snowed in and already have digested plenty, giving me some time to write a little bit about Canyonlands National Park outside of Moab, UT. When I first heard the name and read a little bit about the park, I thought to myself, “How much of a park can you make around/about canyons?”. Isn’t there already the Grand Canyon? Well, I am more impressed with Canyonlands than the Grand Canyon. Where the later drops thousands of feet down and spans a great distance, Canyonlands is something that you just have to physically see to try to fathom. I will try my best to represent it with the shots that I have taken in the large format prints I will have, but nothing can help you comprehend the massive and vast landscape of canyons within canyons – as if it were a Russian doll or an onion of layers of canyons. So far, I have a glimpse of the east side of the park, which gives way to a dramatic view of the La Sal mountain range in the distance – kind of an “icing on the cake” in the photos I will post.
Canyonlands is one of the few parks that allows for visitors to go off-roading. This is an amazing feature to this park. It also can get you into a world of shit too. I drove along Potash Rd to enter the park – after the National Park Service biologist for the area gave me heads up on where there would be sheep – which was once one of the most scenic Utah roads when it was built that takes you into the park via an unofficial entrance in a valley of one of the canyons. Driving along a ledge with a 2000 foot drop off to one side let’s you know that your toast with any mishap. Let alone the loose dirt, rocks, boulders and cliffs that fall into the next canyon and in turn, fall on you. You can stop every 1000 feet on the road and take pics or absorb the vista in front of you with the Colorado River cutting around some of the canyon you are driving above. Ranchers still have their cattle grazing all the way up to the park entrance with plenty of water from the snow melts in the winter. I sat down and had a bite to eat with Karl Targen – who’s family homestead the area and were ranchers as well – and got a little history on the area and how dramatically it has changed in the past 60 years; from the ranchers, to the mining of uranium (and they have a clean up going on as you drive into town from the north), to the establishment of the park and now all the adventure outdoor companies. Karl tells some of his amazing stories to tourists on buses as they bring them around the park and surrounding areas. I was pretty fortunate to get one-on-one question and answers as to how his family got here, how he adapted to all the changes, and a bit about what he loved to do – be a rancher in the open backcountry.
Hopefully the snow lets up tonight for the moon, so I can get some shots of the park(s) at night with some dramatic moonlight. The gallery is coming soon!