Our first full day in Moab was Monday. We started out by walking around the area along the highway. We wanted to raft the Colorado and bike. Since we flew there we'd need to rent equipment and find a raft place. This is not a problem in Moab and we pretty much had our week laid out Monday morning.Monday - Needles
Tuesday - Bike Klondike Bluffs
Wednesday - Arches National Park
- Delicate Arch
- Sunset
Thursday - Raft trip on the Colorado
Friday - Islands in the Sky.
Originally we'd planned on leaving Moab on Friday morning. Given all the things we wanted to do and the experience we'd had with Black Dragon we decided to extend our stay through Friday. Turns out this was a good decision.
The Canyonlands National Park is composed of three distinct areas - The Needles, Islands in the Sky and the Maze, plus Horseshoe Canyon. We got to the two closes - Needles and Islands in the Sky.
Monday afternoon - picnic lunch in car, we headed out to the Needles district. Needles is almost two hours south from Moab. It's an hour on the highway and then almost another hour on a road that runs through some Bureau of Land Management land. The BLM areas are where they let you have fun - ATV, bike trails, fishing, lots of campgrounds. National Parks have campgrounds but fun stuff that "might" damage the terrain is out.
We could have a bumper sticker - STOPS FOR PETROGRAPICS - on our car. This is Newspaper Rock, a petroglphy site. These areas weren't parkland until fairly recently so I suspect some of the carvings are modern, but generally they look like ancient carvings and it's always interesting to see what people did in the days before TV.
