On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Time is flying! Thanksgiving is right around the corner, which seems impossible!
Talk about crazy, there are no birds in Albatrossity’s post this week. Not crazy bad, just crazy!
Albatrossity
More from an overcast day at Arches National Park, and then we head to Escalante on one of the most scenic blue highways in the entire country.
I normally do not take pictures of humans, for a number of reasons (plenty of other people are producing plenty of those pictures, and as a child of a professional photographer, I grew weary of being in the picture, etc.). In fact, my sister-in-law accuses me of NEVER taking pictures of people, so I snapped this one of her, my brother, and Elizabeth on the Park Avenue Trail. Click here for larger image.
Balanced Rock is one of the most visited (and photographed) sights in the park, and it was quite eerie in the mist that morning. Click here for larger image.
The most obvious flowering plant here (and elsewhere on the trip as well) was Rabbitbrush (Ericameria nauseosa). The specific epithet nauseosa apparently refers to the smell of the crushed leaves. I didn’t find the smell to be particularly obnoxious, and apparently some folks think it smells like pineapple! Just like pineapple on pizza, there seem to be widely differing opinions about this. Click here for larger image.
Not too far from Balanced Rock is another site that is quite popular, since wandering about and clambering up the rocks is not just allowed, but encouraged. This is called the Garden of Eden, and a formation named “Adam and Eve” is in the vicinity as well. When we were there we saw lots of families with lots of kids, and they all seemed to be having a great time, despite the cool wet weather. Click here for larger image.
I’ve always been fascinated by the tortured shapes and textures of cedar and pine trees in these harsh environments, so I took quite a few pictures of this Utah Juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) near the Garden of Eden. These things get pretty gnarly as they get older, and the oldest one, from the Crawford Mountains near the UT/WY border is nearly 2000 years old! Click here for larger image.
Here’s a closer look at the cedar in the previous image. Click here for larger image.
The more commonly photographed arches here, like the Delicate Arch that appears on the Utah vehicle license plates, were not particularly photogenic in the rain, and also a bit too much of a hike and scramble for me and my compromised lungs. So I was content to enjoy them from afar, including this one, the famous Double Arch. As you can see, there were plenty of people exploring the arches that day, so this picture has people in it too! Click here for larger image.
Near Double Arch is the whimsically-named Parade of Elephants, complete with a gnarly old cedar in the foreground. Click here for larger image.
The next morning we packed up and meandered to our next destination; my sister-in-law had booked us into one of the Escalante Yurts. Glamping is OK with me these days, I have discovered. On the way we stopped at the Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding, which Elizabeth had visited previously but I had not. If you are ever in the area, I’d recommend it highly. They have the largest collection of Ancestral Puebloan pottery in the world, and a sash made from the feathers of Scarlet Macaws. Click here for a virtual look at the latter. As a state park entity, they do not have to abide by the federal repatriation guidelines in NAGPRA. I suspect that is an ongoing dialogue, or at least was ongoing until the pedophile-in-chief was elected. Regardless, it is worth a visit. Then we headed west on one of tbe great Blue Highways, Utah State Route 95, which crosses the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Along the way we hit a humongous traffic jam, with cars and trucks and about 50 leather-clad German motorcyclists riding fancy BMW bikes, all waiting to get across the White Canyon Bridge. Incidentally, that is one of the bridges that Hayduke and his companions tried to blow up in The Monkey Wrench Gang. A vehicle (it looked like a rented Jeep when we finally saw it as we crossed the bridge) had gone off the bridge and rescue/recovery operations were underway. We waited for about an hour, and finally the rescue helicopter took off and traffic began to move again. I have searched many times for some news article about this incident and found nothing… Click here for larger image.
Since this is the only time I have ever submitted a post to On The Road that did not have any bird pictures, here is the whirlybird, going up and down the canyon for a while, but apparently finding nothing. Click here for larger image.
donatellonerd
thank you. lovely post, even without live birds. i love monday mornings because of you.
Gloria DryGarden
Divine shot of the double arch.
Fun pix in the mist. It’s glorious to see often photographed spots with a different angle, or in the mist.
Have you ever done the fiery furnace walk in Arches? I hear it’s a lot of clambering around, rather strenuous, but a good botany walk.
These photos are really wonderful. I thought your traffic jam photo was at arches, because I’ve seen it backed up at the entrance, only worse.
SteveinPHX
Picked up a copy of “Desert Solitaire” at my local used book store recently for a reread next time I have some time & peace.
Thanks for the photos!
Trivia Man
We had friends in moab so visited many times. A strong highlight of arches fir our kids was outside the park, across the road from the entrance. Is there still a sand dune you can climb? Hundreds of feet IIRC and you just walk up as far as you can. All the footprints disappear when it rains, shortly after that the solitary tracks look very interesting.
Betty
Gorgeous pictures. I will say in favor of sometimes including people in pictures like this is that it helps to appreciate the scale of the landscape.
sab
No birbs?
Xavier
Can’t say enough about Highway 95. Moab without the crowds.
bluefoot
These are beautiful. I never made it to Arches despite living on the West Coast for a long time. I need to plan a trip.
Albatrossity
@Trivia Man: I did not notice any sand dune climbing across the road from the entrance to Arches, but I was not looking for it, and it was raining, so my lack of observation probably doesn’t mean much!
@sab: Birds were not much in evidence on this trip. Part of that is the season, part of it is that bird numbers and diversity are not particularly great in sandstone desert regions, and part of it is because national parks (particularly when you can get in free because the government is shut down) are full of people. Birding can be done in a group, but bird photography is best when you can get far from the madding crowds.
Quinerly
Great post. I’m a big fan of Highway 12 and Escalante. As I have mentioned, just spent almost 3 weeks in Utah.
Did you happen to see this place after Escalante….Cannonville address? I had to stop to check it out. Ended up eating a late breakfast in the restaurant/bar. Felt that was a fair price for admission in order to drive around the resort. Looked to be around 100 domes. I felt like I was in another world. All guests I encountered were Middle Easterners and I guess Indian or Pakistani. No Europeans or Americans. There’s employee housing. Out of 100 domes, I would guess 10 were occupied, but it was around 10 AM.
clearskyresorts.com/
Albatrossity
@Quinerly: I did notice that as we were driving by, but had no idea what it was. Looks like a great place, although if we had booked one of those I suspect we would have been frustrated because of the cloudy skies for most of our time in UT.
Quinerly
@Albatrossity:
Took me a bit of editing to get the correct link. Sorry about that. Just got home. Haven’t gone thru all my pictures of the place. Plus, hadn’t even looked up the link until I saw your post.
Not my kind of digs. Plus, no “JoJos” allowed. I am glad that I turned around after passing it. Was interesting to check out. Opened 8/2024. I will say the restaurant, bar, outside area with the firepits around the restaurant were beautiful. My breakfast was outstanding but overpriced. Like I said, “price of admission” in order to snoop around.
stinger
Now you’ve gone and done it! Guess what topic will take over all future threads today!
Seriously, what a beautiful region of the country — thanks!
Trivia Man
@Albatrossity: I looked it up on google maps. take a left onto 191 as you leave the park. Less than a mike, right hand side. not exactly “sand” but very fine red dirt on a steep slope. Maybe a hundred feet high, fun for all.
Denali5
One of our favorite areas is around Moab – so beautiful and not overcrowded. We camped in those days, but glamping looks better and better.
Halteclere
Once upon a time I was told that there had been a mistake originally when the arches were mapped to their names. This resulted in Delicate Arch and Landscape arch names being transpose, which makes total sense to me when looking at the arches. Landscape Arch is quite delicate, while Delicate Arch has the best landscape behind it!
pieceofpeace
What a beautiful part of our country! Thank you.
West of the Rockies
@SteveinPHX:
I do love Desert Solitaire. I liked some of The Monkey Wrench Gang, but Hayduke was such a borish brute, constantly throwing beer cans all over the nature he claimed to care about. Also. Abbey was not great writing female characters. YMMV.
Excellent photos, Albatrossity!
Albatrossity
@West of the Rockies: Agreed. Desert Solitaire is a good read. The Monkey Wrench Gang shows off the lesser aspects of Abbey, including the misogyny and racism.
TF79
@Quinerly: That drive north out of Escalante on Hwy 12 a) is gorgeous and b) made my wife cry from the exposure!
West of the Rockies
@Albatrossity:
Abbey’s female characters remind me of Heinlein’s: too frequently over-sexed and short on thought or standards.
Mike Mundy
I didn’t see any birds either. But I did see a bunny.
cope
Thank you for the great pictures of a unique patch of our planet. I am lucky to be within a few hours drive of most of these places. When I was working as a well site geologist (I had to live on location, 24/7 job), I did some wells up toward Dead Horse Point and got to know that area well.
I have also put in a good amount of time in and around the La Sal Mountains. So much to see. Back in the day I did an OTR post of a drive from Gateway, CO west following John Brown Canyon into Utah. I should take that drive again, maybe next spring/summer.
Thanks again.
Mr. Prosser
Rabbit Brush is quite common all over the region. I prefer the Spanish name for it, Chamisa. A couple I know gave their daughter Chamisa as her middle name.
Mr. Prosser
@Albatrossity: Abbey’s fictional autobiography, The Fool’s Progress, redeems him a bit. His favorite 8-course meal was cheese, crackers and a six-pack.
cope
@Mr. Prosser: Abbey also wrote the novel The Brave Cowboy from which the movie Lonely Are The Brave sprang. I think I read that Kirk Douglas considered that his favorite movie though I am old and subject to strange memories.
Trivia Man
@Albatrossity: I had friends who always tossed empty beer cans out the window. Their defense: an empty beer can is automatic DUI, regardless of BAC. As long as that is a law, ill toss.
I never did.
Trivia Man
@Denali5: Ever been to Dead Horse Point SP?Im told they have luxury yurts now.
Aziz, light!
Despite his brilliance and his reverence for nature, Ed Abbey was at heart a rural redneck. In 1975 I got to spend an evening drinking 3.2 percent beer with him at the only bar in Logan along with a few other Utah State students. I moved west from Missouri because of Desert Solitaire, and I had read his first novel, a prosaic but sappy romance he had written at age 20, set in his home state of Pennsylvania. Asked him about it and he made a face and said “If you have a copy, burn it.” It’s true he was a misogynist who drove his first three wives to leave him, and was also anti-immigrant. The latter was then a stance popular with Sierra Clubbers and other environmentalists who didn’t want to see our population grow. On my bookshelf, of course, is every published Abbey title and biography. My treasured possession is a copy of his manuscript, fresh from his typewriter, for a book about the Grand Canyon called The Hidden Canyon, which I ran out of the bar to photocopy. The striking thing is that the published work was essentially his first draft verbatim, no edits needed.
BillD
It was Abbey who wrote that the two most overrated things in America were Mack trucks and teenage pussy.
Albatrossity
@Aziz, light!: Wow, that’s a great story! First of all, because it is always an experience to spend time with authors you have read and appreciate. Secondly, I had no idea that there were bars in Logan UT in 1975! This is indeed an educational and all-service blog.
Albatrossity
@Trivia Man: It simply isn’t true that an empty beer can in the car is an “automatic DUI”. You can get charged for having an “open container” in the vehicle, and it will often be a reason for the cop to give you a breath test or other field sobriety test. But it ain’t an automatic DUI in any state, as far as I can tell.
The reason why I might know about this stuff is not from personal experience with DUIs and beer cans, but because long ago and far away I was an expert witness (for both prosecution and defense) in DUI cases that relied on the earlier versions of the Intoxilyzer/Breathalyzer machines.
MikefromArlington
Love arches.
Stayed in a camper van there a couple nights a few years back
it looks like another planet. The photos we took are out of this world.
Snarlymon
Thanks for the pix. I love Southern Utah for its primordial landscapes. One time I was driving back to Denver from a Las Vegas convention and decided to stop in Escalante for a few days. It’s a good place to use as a base with a lot of beautiful day trips in the area.
I decided to drive Hells backbone because … the devil made me do it? It was an extremely intense drive especially since I was driving a Saturn Ion. I don’t know what I was expecting since hell is right in the name of the place. Maybe I’ll send in some pictures for on the road.
Trivia Man
@Albatrossity: distinction noted. I looked it up for a reminder and will add that the open container applies to everyone in the vehicle. If there is any liquid in the can (do you trust cops to be fair? I can imagine turning an empty upside down… any liquid coming out means it contains alcohol) it is fair game to breathalyze every passenger.
mvr
@Albatrossity: I can confirm that an open empty is not an automatic DUII as you say. It is worth noting that the laws on such things vary from state to state, but I am unfamiliar with one drop counting as sufficient for an open container charge. Also, they would have to retain the liquid to have it analyzed if they were going to charge someone on the basis of the liquid, so turning the can upside down would be a counterproductive move.
I used to work for a good criminal lawyer as an investigtor and trial assistant and we were known for working on car crimes. Coincidentally, as a result I got very familiar with the Intoxilyzer, the breath analyzing machine which was used in Oregon at the time. (The Intoxilyzer II, was the model number 40 years ago IIRC) At once point I had to track down the studies they used to certify use of those machines. It turns out that even pre-AI citing studies that didn’t exist was a thing. At least the cited alleged NHTSA author told me he had done no such study. At the time most state crime lab personnel had no advanced science degrees and it showed.
Oh, and I really like the picture of the cedar tree in front of the distant formation. And Arches is in fact wonderful.
Albatrossity
@mvr: Yes, the crime lab staff and the cops would often demonstrate quite dramatically that their knowledge of basic science was pretty skimpy. And the training sessions for the cops, to teach them how to use the Intoxilyzer, were run by company reps and full of pseudo-scientific baloney. The cops, for example, were absolutely certain that the machine only detected ethanol and nothing else. One of the attorneys I worked for had one of these ill-trained cops on the stand and demonstrated otherwise by asking him if he had had an alcoholic drink that day, and of course the cop said no. So he had the cop blow into the machine and indeed, it registered zero BAC. Then he had the cop take a few bites of a hot dog bun and blow into the machine again. Typically it would register anywhere from 0.04-0.08 BAC. Message – there are lots of chemicals in your breath, and some of them are mis-identified as ethanol by the IR spectrometer in the machine. This usually made quite a big impression on the jury…
Newer current models have lots of software “filters” that allegedly screen out the IR signature of non-ethanol volatiles, but the companies that make the machines won’t tell you anything about those software filters. Top-secret proprietary stuff, you know. And they won’t sell a machine to an attorney (or anyone else who is not in law enforcement) so that he/she could reverse-engineer it and figure out if the filters were working as the company claimed.
Quinerly
@Snarlymon:
Great road.
Another great road is Moki Dugway near Bluff, Utah.
Quinerly
@Aziz, light!:
💙
Quinerly
@TF79:
The Hogback section from Boulder, Utah to Escalante is the BOMB. I think it’s 4-5 miles
Lots of good stuff on line about the building of the road from Escalante to Boulder, Utah. Boulder has an interesting history. So isolated until that road was finally finished.
Trivia Man
All responses duly noted and I thank you. Point stands – the reason they threw empty beer cans on the side of the road in and around Arches was fear of cops.
mvr
@Albatrossity: That’s a good bit of cross examination!
I did that gig for about five years total and felt good about doing it. Prison is not a place for people or all but a very few people. And because my boss was a good lawyer I learned a lot from doing it. I had thoughts of becoming a defense lawyer for a good while. But the stress of defending accused criminals (and really we are all criminals), would have made me into a (more) difficult person.
So now I’m a professor. Less stress. Less likely that a mistake you make might be the difference between prison and freedom for someone.
But criminal defense lawyers do a much needed and under-appreciated job in our country. Probably now more than ever.
mvr
@Trivia Man: Yes, I get you weren’t vouching for your friends’ logic. Just tickled that Albatrossity has a somewhat obscure bit of knowledge in common with me, besides living in flyover country.
Albatrossity
thanks, everybody