Arches, Canyonlands and Colorado

First of all: here is a link to our picasa account on which we posted a lot of pictures from the start of our trip until now: https://picasaweb.google.com/116931182011734845806

The last blogpost Sander wrote was in the town of Moab, which lies in between Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. The 25th we went hiking in Canyonlands. This is a national park which consists of a very large plateau which is surrounded by 700 meter deep canyons and is created by the confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers. Here, we went hiking on the Northwestern tip of the plateau; the trail went around a very large dome which was destroyed by a meteorite. The weather was brutal: no clouds and no wind and there was virtually no shade along the trail. Happy day J Luckily, we had 1.5 litres of chocolate ice waiting for us in the Hoff, which went a long way to restoring our joy in life. Afterward, we rode to the southern tip of the mesa and had dinner while watching a gorgeous sunset over the amazing network of canyons which lay beneath us.

The day after, we went to Arches. The presence of thick layers of salt in the subsurface has caused some parts of the sandstone layers above to rise and rain in combination with frost-thaw cycles has created some 2,000 natural arches, some of which span tens of meters. This park can only be enjoyed by car while hiking for short distances to the arches themselves so we spent a lot of time in the Hoff. That night, we parked at a rest area where the constant coming and going of trucks and a temperature of 25 degrees did a very good job of keeping us out of our sleep. Then it was on to Colorado, where we spent a day talking to people on skype, baking pancakes, washing our clothes and visiting the local outdoor store. We’re going to spend nearly a month in Colorado climbing mountains but as it is only late May and Colorado has received a record amount of 520 inches of snow (13 m!) the higher reaches of the mountains are still impassable. We wanted to know exactly how high the snow line was and hoped to get some information from the store people, but sadly, they couldn’t tell us much.. We ended up by buying a book which describes a hundred hikes in the whole state of Colorado; with some luck, we’ll be able to hike some of these trails.

After our restful day in Grand Junction, we decided to give the book a try and hike Mount Garfield, a mesa-like mountain which lies above Grand Junction. From there, we had a great view of a landscape of eroded shales at the base of the cliff, the Grand Mesa (a 3000 meter high plateau where we hoped to hike the day after) and some snow-capped mountains towards the south and east. We were so filthy when we arrived back at the Hoff (we hadn’t taken a shower in over a week) that we decided to wash ourselves in an irrigation channel in the middle of the village. Then, we rode up the Grand Mesa where we came to the conclusion that the trail we were going to hike was still too much covered in snow so we rode on for another 1.5 hours to Montrose, a town near the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. There, we spent another miserable night at the Walmart before going on a hike which went into a valley of the Gunnison. The hike was fun and hot and the most notable thing was that we drove our ’78 Ford (meaning the Hoff) for 4 km over a 4-wheel-drive road, thereby reducing its value for when we’re going to sell it by at least 200 euros.

Today, we went to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison; a 700 meters deep canyon which is only 400 meters wide at some points. Afterwards, we drove for 2,5 hours trying to find Forest Road 721 in the little town of Crawford which is the location of the trailhead for the hike we’re going to do tomorrow. And now Frans is singing ‘listen to your heart’ by Roxette so I’m going to try and muffle him with a pillow or a brick.