We arrived in Moab in Utah after our eventful journey from Crested Butte in Colorado during which we had managed to shred a tire deep in the Gunnison Canyon.
We had visited Moab once before for a few days back in 2005 and liked the place and the stunning landscape surrounding it. Moab lies at the heart of red rock canyon lands and there are two nearby National Parks, Arches and Canyonlands itself, both reasonably close to the town. The problem with the landscape here is that you can go and look at a lot of lovely vistas but the actual hiking is very limited by both the very hot 100+ degree daytime temperatures and the sheer scale and roughness of the terrain.
Moab itself is an OK sort of place, it’s dominated by outdoor activities of one sort or another: rafting, mountain biking, off-road jeeping, climbing. It’s full of tanned and fit looking young people. Both Isabel and I agreed we wished we had done more of that sort of stuff when we were young instead of taking so many drugs and and spending our youth trying to overthrow the state.
Moab had a reasonably good bookshop, the really nice one we remembered from our last trip had unfortunately closed and the range of the new bookshop was a bit limited. I did manage to buy the recently published autobiography of Mark Rudd who was an SDS student leader at Columbia in 1968 who then helped found the Weathermen and spent many years underground before surfacing and eventually becoming a maths teacher in Albuquerque. I thought his memoir was a very worth while read full of what felt like honesty and it offered a fascinating insight to how a small bunch of radicals could end up going so crazy. It stirred a lot of feelings within about my own past and I had lots of interesting dreams each night as I read it.
We did a couple of visits to Arches and I took the ranger tour of a closed part of the park called Fiery Furnace on my birthday which was pretty fantastic but did involve a fair bit of scrabbling and manoeuvring through narrow rock slots etc.
The Balanced Rock in Arches – its over 200 feet tall
We also visited the Island in the Sky in Canyonlands a couple of times. This is a large mesa uplifted plateau that juts out into and above the extraordinary complex of canyons carved by the confluence of the Colorado and Green rivers. We did a really great short walk at the end of the Island right along the rim and out to the point of the Island (we had done this walk once before in 2005). The evening light on the strange rocks and plants of the high mesa was often very beautiful but during the whole visit to Moab I was a bit frustrated because on several evenings the clouds gathered and shut out the evening light and this really frustrated my photographic ambitions.
Trees along the canyon rim on the Island in the Sky
Isabel on the canyon rim walk on the Island in the Sky
At the end of the Rim walk
Our days were punctuated by our visits to see Mr Chip at Chips Tires to see if our replacement tire had arrived: it never did and we left town without it but with a temporary spare which meant we were less likely to be stranded in the event of a blow out in some isolated back country spot.
We found a few things we had missed on our first trip, a really nice waterfall and a lovely walk up a fantastic canyon called Negro Bills Canyon which criss-crossed a small stream and ended at the third larger rock arch in the US, it was such a nice trail that we did it twice. Both times we got to the huge rock arch at the end of the trail and watched people doing the terrifying abseiling and descents by rope from the arch 200 feet above.
The waterfall outside Moab
Isabel resting under the huge rock arch at the end of Negro Bills Canyon
The only near adventure we had was when we decided to try to drive up onto Island in Sky via Pucker Pass. The name should have been a bit of a giveaway. We knew it was going to be a dirt road and that it would switchback up a big altitude gain onto the mesa but the road turned out to be of poorer quality than we expected and like a lot of land in this neck of the woods as soon as you go off the beaten track you begin to feel very isolated in a very harsh and unforgiving landscape. We worked our way many miles up the road higher and higher and then we hit the “Pucker” that gives the road its name. This turned out to be a stretch of road where the road becomes single track and is enclosed between two steep and high rock walls and the upward incline steepens alarmingly, at the same time the road surface turned to a mixture of very soft deep sand intermixed with some large sharp boulders. As we entered the Pucker I could feel the jeeps wheels beginning to spin and lose grip and then smashing into the large boulders, and after our previous shredded tire I really didn’t want to lose another, certainly not this far from civilisation. We stopped and discussed the situation and decided to turn back. At that point we thought we had just enough room to turn around but we could see the slot of the pucker getting steadily tighter ahead and thought a few more yards and we may not be able to turn around. I wasn’t even really sure we could turn around where had stopped given how tightly we were caught between the canyon walls but eventually I managed a sort of thirty point turn, inch by inch with Isabel outside telling when to stop. We managed to turn around and get home. The next day we drove into the Island in the Sky via the regular route and then then onto the top half of Pucker Pass road and drove in the other way, we stopped where the road suddenly descended and deteriorated and walked down to an overlook over the Pucker itself and discovered that if we had only gone on for another 150 yards or so the previous day we would have been out of the worse of it. But we could have got stuck.
On the Pucker Pass drive – shortly after this we nearly got stuck and turned back
After Moab it was onto the minute settlement of Mexican Hat. We had passed through Mexican Hat, named after a nearby giant sombrero shaped rock atop a large rock pinnacle, once before on a trip in 2005 so were knew what to expect. Not a lot – in terms of civilization that is. This part of southern Utah looks a bit like the surface of Mars and seems almost as empty and harsh. But it does feature some stunning landscape, so the plan was to go out early in the morning and in the evening towards sunset to catch the best of the light and avoid the oven like midday temperatures, and spend the middle part of the day snoozing in our air-conditioned motel room. Our plan was frustrated by the weather. The days were as hot as expected but each morning and evening clouds gathered ruining the light so the two days and three nights we spent in Mexican Hat turned out to be mostly boring with a few moments of terror (see below).
We drove out to the Goosnecks State Park the first night and got some good light on the overlook gazing into the vast twisting canyons (known as entrenched meanders) of the San Juan River. The next day we drove to high and fairly remote Muley Point, we which had been told offered a fantastic view out across this strange landscape. Unfortunately the drive there from Mexican Hat involved driving up a stretch of road called the Moki Dugway (Google it). This is a a narrow and rough dirt road that winds up a series of very steep switchbacks across the face of a very high cliff for several miles before cresting the plateau. For some reason I find driving such narrow roads with no guard rails alongside precipitous drop offs very terrifying. As I drove further and further up and kept glimpsing the view over the edge which looked more and more like the view you get from an airplane as it descends to land I could feel the sweat trickling, my heart pounding and my breathing getting pretty intense. Finally we got to the top where the inevitable native American jewellery seller was waiting to try to flog us some necklaces. As I drove I kept thinking how much my friend Ilse would love to drive this road 
Muley Point turned out to be as spectacular as we had hoped as well as being empty and peaceful and a bit cooler than the canyon floors below.
Gazing out from Muley point
Unfortunately I never got any decent light to photograph the nearby Valley of the Gods which we visited twice, once just after dawn and once just before sunset to be met with grey cloud cover both times.
A few moments of good light in the Valley of the Gods
Generally being in Mexican Hat felt a bit tedious and tiring. The land there is so empty and hot that I sometimes felt like a space traveller visiting Mars. We would open the pod door from our air-conditioned motel room to be met with a heat that felt like the heat you get when you open the door to check a roast, stumble to our car the inside of which was too hot to touch and sit panting while the cars air-conditioning struggled to bring its interior temperature down. Once when I went out on my own during the midday heat to photograph the actual Mexican Hat rock I drove up a deserted dirt track and climbed a small nearby hill for a better view. The land felt lifeless and baked and I could feel the moisture leaving my body. Without being too melodramatic I could sense that this landscape could kill you real quick.
Eventually with relief we left Mexican Hat and drove the three hundred miles plus to Taos in New Mexico. On the way we finally got our replacement wheel which was relief. We also stopped at the Four Corners, which is the only point in the US where four states (Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico) all touch at single point. We were quite excited about walking around the pole marking the four corner’s point (we had been cooped pin the car for hours) but as we pulled up we saw the sign saying “Fours Corners closed due to building work”. There was a small crowd of other disappointed tourists clustered outside the locked gates so we consoled ourselves by taking each others photos and then we pushed on towards Taos.
Four Corners is closed
