Day two ended in the high country near Bryce, cold air and a wet day behind us. Day three was the drive to Moab, the longest stretch of road on the trip so far.
We woke at Bryce to a beautiful, warm morning. After the day before, when it rained on us all through Zion and Bryce and never really let up, the warmth felt like a gift. We broke down camp and pointed the truck toward Moab.
Leaving Bryce, the road climbs back up into the mountains. Winding roads through high forest, the kind of country you forget is up there until you are in it. Tall trees and cool air and the road bending back on itself as it works its way up and over.
Then you come down off the mountain. The land drops into lightly hilly terrain for a while, and then it flattens out and opens up wide. The dense forest gives way to red rock, and we spent the rest of the day in it.
This was the longest driving day of the trip so far, and there was not much in between. We stuck to the smaller highways instead of the interstate. Two-lane roads across open desert, the kind where you can see for miles in every direction. There was a long flat stretch where the desert just ran out to the horizon and kept going. Nothing but distance.
We talked the way you do on a long drive. Normal life, road trip banter, the kind of easy back and forth between brothers that fills the miles and that you cannot remember a word of twenty years later. The country did most of the work. We just watched it go by.
As we got closer to Moab, the world started to fill back in. Traffic appeared where there had been none. Boats and RVs began to show up on the road, more and more of them as we shot across the last of the barren flatlands. You could feel that we were getting close to somewhere.
The road to Moab climbs the mountain on the main highway at the end. Massive stone walls rise up on both sides of you, close and red and huge. You climb and climb, and then you crest the top and there it is. Moab, laid out in the valley below you.
We had made it. Tomorrow was Arches and Canyonlands and the long push south to Blanding. But that was tomorrow. For now it was enough to sit at the top of that climb and look down at the town, at the end of a long day of driving, with all of it still ahead of us.
The time-lapse video below covers day three of the trip.
Twenty years on, that high country between Bryce and Beaver is burning. The Cottonwood Fire started in June and has grown into the largest wildfire in the country, tearing through the forested mountains and the land around them. I keep thinking about that warm morning and the cool green road out of Bryce, and how the places we drive through do not stay the same. They change while we are not looking. All the more reason to go, and to remember it the way it was.
Next in the series: day four, the day we finally reached the parks around Moab. Arches, Canyonlands, and the long road south to Blanding. That one publishes July 24.
