Wednesday, Aug. 22:

We woke in Moab, Utah and I started work in the KOA site, which had pretty good wireless Internet access. We got out of there around 1 p.m. again and headed north toward Arches National Park.

Arches National Park

It’s full of these naturally formed sandstone arches and spires that come in all different shades of red and orange and brown. The theory is that millions of years ago the area was once an ocean, and when dried up, it left a giant salt bed. Thick layers of rock were eventually deposited on top of the salt bed. Because there was salt underneath, the rock eventually eroded underneath, leaving these gaps that turned into arches and spires. Got it? There will be a test later on all this.

We didn’t have a whole lot of time here, so we weren’t able to drive and hike to the Delicate Arch, which is the most famous of the arches in the park. It’s the one that’s on a lot of Utah license plates. But we did get to go on a short hike to the North and South Window arches, as well as the Turret Arch. I actually think my favorite would have been the Landscape Arch, which is the longest in the park at about 300 feet. Sometime recently a 60-foot-long piece of rock just fell from the underside of this arch, making it even thinner. If you were under the arch at that time, you would have instantly become part of the geology.

East into Colorado

Once we crossed Utah and into Colorado, we started hitting these tremendous hills and our car’s engine groaned in protest, shifting to a lower gear automatically to pull us and all our junk up the inclines. At one point we were driving at about 11,000 feet and I was thinking that we were higher than any spot in New England, by about 6,000 feet. Our ears were popping like something that pops a lot, like soda or something, or like “pop,” as they call it in the Midwest.

For much of our Colorado drive, we were also following the path of the Colorado River, which was incredibly cool. At the Grand Canyon, we looked down at the river. Now we were driving alongside the river and looking up the mountains on either side of us.

Anyway, driving alongside the Colorado reminded me of William Least Heat Moon’s book River-Horse, where he travels across the country by rivers, from New York Harbor to the Columbia (even though he doesn’t go on the Colorado, I don’t think). If you haven’t read it, check it out. It’s probably my favorite book by him. It also reminded me somewhat of his more famous book, Blue Highways, because we were in the middle of a big trip. Then it occurred to me that those two books are about avoiding fast food chains and interstate highways and the general commercialization of America, and although we didn’t eat any fast food on our trip, we were all about the interstate highways. Then again, we didn’t have three months or however long it took for Moon to travel the country on its secondary roads, like he did in Blue Highways. I still think we’ve seen some cool things.

Vail and Cherry Creek

Eventually we drove into Vail, Colo. and took some pictures of the ski slopes and checked out the village areas there, which are very nice and fancy and so forth. But it was starting to get late by this point so we continued on toward Denver.

This was actually the first night in our trip to California and back that we didn’t have some kind of a reservation. Every other night, we had a reservation, even if we didn’t end up using it. But it was getting to be near the end of August and we were noticing that the campgrounds were less busy. The kids were going back to school. So we figured we would just find a campground and a spot pretty easily.

We were right. We went to Cherry Creek State Park just southeast of Denver and there were tons of spots. It took us about 20 minutes to figure out how to pay for a campsite during after-hours, but then we set ourselves up in a corner on a nice grassy spot. It was dark out but we’d gotten used to setting up the tent in the dark, so it was quick.