More great roads, UT95

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.