Day three ended at the top of that climb, looking down at Moab in the valley. Day four was the payoff. The parks we had been driving toward for three days, and a road neither of us saw coming.
Getting out of town took longer than it should have. There was construction in Moab and construction leaving it, and we sat in it a while before the road opened up.
Arches was first. We got there first thing on a weekday morning, on purpose, to beat the lines. We drove right up to the entry booth and there was nobody ahead of us. From everything I have read and heard in the twenty years since, that is not a thing that happens anymore.
The park was full of people. But full in 2006 meant we never once had trouble finding a place to park. We would pull in, hop out, take a hike, come back. The only place we ran into a real crowd was Delicate Arch. Everywhere else we might pass a few people coming or going and that was it. We could take our time. We could stand and look at something for as long as we wanted to.
The terrain had changed on us by then. We had come out of the forests we were used to, and now everything was the red and orange you only get in that part of the country.
Then we drove up out of Moab into the high country for Canyonlands. Massive walls the whole way up.
What you get at the top is not what you get at Arches. Arches is up close. You walk right to the thing and stand under it. Canyonlands is the opposite. You stand at the edge and look out into all of it, the way you do at Bryce or at the Grand Canyon, and the country just keeps going. Canyon after canyon, out past where you can make sense of it.
You look at that and you wonder how anybody ever survived out here. It is beautiful in its own right, but it is the vastness and the emptiness that stay with you. You have to be standing there to feel it.
We still had a long drive ahead of us, and we knew it. But we never let that turn the day into a race. We took enough time at each stop that we were not sitting in the car later wishing we had stayed longer.
The next stop was not on the list. We saw a brown sign for ruins in Blanding and figured it was worth pulling over to stretch. We got there close to closing. Neither of us wanted to be the reason the staff stayed late, so we rushed through the museum, read what we could, and moved fast. Then they told us we could wander the grounds outside as long as we wanted. So we did. It is mostly foundations out there, so it does not take long, but there is something about standing on them with nobody around and the day going soft that a museum case cannot do.
From there we hit Natural Bridges. We drove the full loop and followed the rules, hopping out at the stops for photos and taking the short trails where we could. Most of it was driving, but we saw it.
We took Cigarette Springs Road up and stopped at the top for the sunset. Then we started down the mountain in the dark on a very narrow dirt road. Sharp turns. Steep dark sides falling off the edge of the headlights. The lights of a town somewhere out in the distance. That was all we could see, and it was enough to make the whole way down feel like a bad idea.
At the bottom there was a hotel and a gas station. I am not sure the place had a name. We went into the gas station and got to talking with the clerk, and she asked where we had come from. We told her. She gasped. Then she told us we ought to drive it again in the morning and see what we had missed.
So we did. Surprise is an understatement. In daylight the road is barely wide enough for one vehicle, and there were RVs and cars coming up and down it, squeezing past each other with almost nothing to spare. We had driven the whole thing in the dark, and the dark had done us a favor.
The time-lapse video below covers day four of the trip.
Next in the series: day five, the run through Valley of the Gods, Monument Valley, Four Corners, and Mesa Verde.
