Seeing Green in Canyonlands Nat. Park

Canyonlands is a big national park in southern Utah that we’re tackling in sections; we’re camped near the south section now and we’ll move to the north section tomorrow. It’s got a lot of interesting rock formations, petroglyphs and pictograms, but—big deal to us now—a lot of green.

It’s been since we were waylaid in Austin for March that we saw this much green, or at least it feels like that to me.

Here there’s actual moisture in the air in the mornings, and the green grows not just in the arroyos and canyon floors but up on the rocky formations and mesas.

We hiked up on what’s called slickrock, the hard sandstone that’s left after erosion has worn away the softer layers around it.

The fir and piñon trees are twisted by the wind up there.

Here’s the thunderstorm that moved around us on our hike all morning long.

And these are the Needles, a long line of sandstone spires.

These flowers don’t look like much, but they stand out amid the desert so starkly.

Aren’t these claret cup cactus blooms amazing, even from far away?

We walked among mushroom-shaped monoliths where cowboys made camp in the 1800s.

As well as among “potholes” where small lifeforms in standing water speed up their lifecycle so they can reproduce before the water dries up. I also did a little bit of ladder-climbing to access good views (that problem seems to have gone away as quickly as it appeared).

And we walked right under these pictograms and nearly missed them.

We’ve seen several sets of handprints on rocks in the Southwest, but none like these with lines around them.

I like a park sign about petroglyphs that Tom and Amy saw in New Mexico that reads,

“Rather than trying to decipher their meaning, we are invited to reflect on the profound relationship these people had with the land, their communities, and the spiritual world.”