#7 Canyonlands National Park

Canyonlands National Park 

Square Miles: 527 miles squared
2016 Annual Visitors: 776,218 total (4 districts)
When we visited: March 26-28, 2018
Where we stayed: Needles Outpost Campground (camp site #16)
The route to get there: US 191, East on HWY 211
Trails we took: Squaw Loop, Potholes, Cave Springs
Activities: Hiking
What we liked the most about this park:

• Slickrock hiking and climbing is the best. 
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Things that surprised us:

• You CAN get stuck on the rocks.
• There are places you can still go where you see hardly any people.
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"Keep close to Nature's Heart...and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean." --John Muir

Being out there, miles from crowds or people and "off the grid" is so liberating, it "washes your spirit clean." Gone are the dings and dongs of our ubiquitous phones alerting of us incoming messages and to-dos, projects we haven't completed, calls we have missed, emails that need to be answered. Instead, we can be in the moment and present with our children and aware of our surroundings.

We can observe the way the different deep layers of rock zig and zag over each other in what looks like could have been a current of rock swirling around at one time. We can watch the hawk glide overhead silently flowing on its own current of air. There are streams of sand in between walls of rock that disappear from view because they are so tall. I am actually describing our hike into Squaw Canyon. It. Was. Amazing. And it was fortuitous that we misread the signs and took the long hike, in a way, because we spent all day walking in a landscape that we don't often see.

These layers of rocks were like steps down on the trail that we were on.

black and white, zig and zig

Ripples and waves of sand...

...and ripples and waves of rock.

Favorite Things
The 9.8-mile hike we took into the canyons and all of the amazing variety of rock and terrain and landscape that we saw. There were waves of rocks, dunes of rock, ripple rock, and rock that was zigzag this way and that. It was all so chaotic and beautiful.

Potholes Loop would've been a little more interesting for the potholes, had there been water, I think. But the scenery was still beautiful and the hike was relatively easy and short.

Cave Springs Trail was a beautiful spot where the plants were growing out of the rock. There were signs that the ancestral people had been there, too, literally. I loved seeing the handprint of one of them amongst the other cave paintings.

This guy was here....a long time ago.

Hop...

skip...

jump...

The kids LOVED climbing on the slick rock. I can't express how much they loved it and were excited about it. We did have a great learning experience when we first arrived at our camp when they got stuck up on the rocks...let's just say getting up the steep rock is much easier than coming down.

I really love the locomotive shape rocks and cliffs that border the road as you drive into and out of the Needles area. They are enormous. Gigantic. Humongous. I tried to catch the scale by taking pictures of some climbers who were attempting to scale the walls.

Close-up of the climbers that I circled in green.

It was a beautiful, quiet stay in the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.

I think that I am addicted to productivity. I believe it is a technology driven addiction. I can schedule and plan and look up and respond and initiate and "make things happen" all with this little iPhone I carry around. Useful to a degree, but also very overwhelming and pressure-filled. Being away from all of that "washes the soul clean" as John Muir put it....and makes me reluctant to return to the digital age. Yet, here I am plastered in front of my computer yet again. 

The mountains are calling me (again) and I must go!  

7 Parks down and 52 left to go! Black Canyon of the Gunnison is up next. 

The things that surprised us the most:

• the wind and the dirt
• how few people there were in this park