Canyonlands: Wilderness of Rocks

By Nicky Leach

Located in southeastern Utah, Canyonlands National Park embraces some of the most spectacular, and remote, landscapes in the American West. Divided by both the Green and the Colorado rivers it has long attracted enthusiastic travelers who desire the challenges provided by this wilderness of rock. Nicky Leach's brilliant essays reveal the park's many moods and facets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Park Partners, Inc
• Release date: Apr 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781580711050

Nicky Leach

Award-winning author Nicky Leach began visiting Utah's national parks 30 years ago and is constantly pulled back by the region's remarkable blend of natural beauty and human history. Born in England and trained as a teacher, Nicky uses her writing to both educate and inspire people to feel more aligned with nature's healing rhythms in their daily lives. She has written 45 guidebooks, including many other Sierra Press titles about parks in the Southwest and the Northwest. Her interpretive writing has been recognized with several National Park Service Cooperating association Awards for Interpretive Excellence. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Book preview

CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK

Wilderness of Rocks

By

Nicky Leach

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SIERRA PRESS

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Sierra Press

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to Anna and John Chitty, outstanding teachers, gifted healers, and supportive colleagues. My notion of field work will never be the same again. Thank you for opening my eyes to a magical new world of possibilities.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following for their assistance in helping to birth this book: Paul Henderson, Chief of Interpretation, Southeast Utah Parks division of the National Park Service, for taking time out of a busy schedule to discuss issues and review the final text; Cindy Hardgrave and Sam Wainer at Canyonlands Natural History Association, for supporting our work over many years; editor Cindy Bohn, for helping polish the text once again; Moab photographer Tom Till, whose magnificent eye for composition and unusual details in the landscape are both frame and context for my prose; and lastly, publisher and photographer Jeff Nicholas, for not only always choosing the high road but also getting out and coming along for the ride. You're the best!

—N.L.

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TABLE of CONTENTS

WILDERNESS of ROCKS

The Region

THE GEOLOGIC STORY

HUMAN HISTORY

VISITING THE PARK

The Setting

ISLAND IN THE SKY

Dead Horse Point State Park

THE MAZE

THE NEEDLES

THE RIVERS

PLANTS and ANIMALS

NEARBY PARKS

RESOURCES & INFORMATION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Sunset in The Needles District

WILDERNESS OF ROCKS

Summertime in southeast Utah's La Sal Mountains. Up here, among the aspens, it's a pleasant 75 degrees—a blessed relief from the 100-degree temperatures in the sandstone canyons below. Hummingbirds dive-bomb the yellow spout of the red gas can inside my truck, mistaking it for a flower. A ground squirrel sits on its hind legs on a stump, angrily scolding me in a series of odd ratcheting sounds. Curious mule deer rustle in a clearing, huge ears twitching away flies and radiating heat, then bound off into the deep forest, all four legs leaving the ground at once like cartoon Bambis.

In the meadows below, a herd of pronghorn slowly wanders single file behind a huge fallen boulder. Nearby, a local rancher's mama cows and their calves idly graze the road margins, watched by a single cowboy out for a morning ride. Knee-deep in grass, the cows meander at will, growing big and fat, before the September roundup brings them down to the 4,000-foot rims of the Canyon Country below—a fall ritual enacted in this historic ranching region for well over a century.

Overlooks along the scenic La Sal Mountain Loop offer mesmerizing 100-mile views of Canyonlands and Arches national parks and the Canyon Country beyond. Rolled out to the horizon, it looks like a giant topographical map—all tilted angles and skewed planes, as unexpectedly pleasing to the eye as the ordered chaos of a Frank Gehry building amid the cookie-cutter architecture of a city street. Nature is the architect in this wild country, though, which has more weirdly eroded buttes, spires, fins, arches, natural bridges, grabens, salt