I added a few more pictures from the last week in the collection On the road (part 3).
Check out updated the Series collection, which has pictures of some of the people I’ve met along the way in Chance Encounters.
So I was driving along and had to stop to take a picture of these to twin clouds after seeing twin rocks about a mile up the road. Upon further inspection, some might see a smiley.
If you’ve never been out West, you should start saving now. There was an easy dirt road at the end of the pavement in the Capitol Reef National Park. Even though it was overcast and sprinkling and the signs said, flash flood warning, take caution when a storm is looming”. I decided to check out this narrow canyon.
I’m over the 6,000 mile mark total, over 4,000 for this trip. It’s funny to think that the shortest distance across the US is is 2,200 miles (Jacksonville to LA on I10). With the same end points, I will have at least twice that when I get to LA. To understand this phenomenon better look at this track:
The last few days
(You can close the titles on the left by clicking the very small triangle in between the map and the list)
As you can see, I’m taking neither the fastest nor the shortest route; the extra time is totally worth it.
This thousand mile section took me from Santa Fe to the middle of Utah. These western mountain roads have been great. The scenery has been excellent and because it’s not the season, the traffic has been low. Since I left Santa Fe I’ve only ridden about 100 miles on the Interstate, the rest has been on the “scenic” routes from my atlas. Each color on the map shows a different segment of my ride (different days or gas breaks change the color). If you switch to hybrid view, you can get a small taste of some of the great formations. Look closely at the National Parks. You can even see the dirt road I rode in Capitol Reef National Park into a narrow canyon.
The ride from Moab to Capitol Reef was like a 250-mile drive-thru geology lesson. Imagine being an ant on a football field sized diorama. The scale of the mesas, cliffs, boulders, canyons, and layers is immense. Without blowing my pictures up to billboard sized, it will be hard to grasp how large these features are. Along with the size, the colors are just as impressive. The range of rust tones is so broad that counting them would take a lifetime. I read in a brochure that it only takes a little iron in a rock to give it a reddish color, so the varying levels of iron are easy to spot.
At one point the road took a right and cut through the rusty sandstone to reveal a valley below. Driving down the man-made path led to the edge which anywhere else along the ridge would have led to a several hundred foot drop. Here, the road engineers created a long ramp in the wall that led to the valley floor. Looking back at my path I could see thousands of years of history in the sedimentary layers.
Later on I came to an erosion carved valley near Hite in the Glen Canyon Recreation area. From the viewpoint above it I was able to look down at all the layers that I’d spent the last several hours riding on and floating between. It was easy to see that some layers are tougher than others by the way they erode; some break in chuncks, others dissolve, a few crack in sheets, some get windblown, plants and ice crack others, all are changed by the water that rarely appears here.
