Today we repeated our strategy from yesterday – a morning hike before things got hot.  We took another trail that left from nearby our campground, to the famous Landscape Arch.  They don’t let you climb under this one anymore, since about 20 years ago a huge hunk of it fell off and crashed to the ground.  They’re not sure how much longer this one will last – it’s very long and narrow.

The kids (at least the aforementioned 2/3 of them) had pretty much had it with hiking by this point.  We made a quick stop to see the iconic Delicate Arch, which is what you often see in Arches pictures and is also the picture on the Utah license plate.  We only saw it from a distance, since we would have had a mutiny on our hands if we attempted the 3-mile uphill round-trip hike to the base.

     

In the evening, we’d decided to say enough with all this quiet hiking business and had booked a sunset jet boat tour through the canyonlands of the Colorado River.  Naturally, the girls wanted to sit in the raised, exposed back area of the boat – but it actually turned out to be the place to be.  The boat was fast, the scenery was beautiful, and the whipping wind kept us cool.  The driver would slalom back and forth across the river, twisting the wheel and sending up a wonderfully cool spray of water just before it appeared that we would crash into the canyon wall.  We also saw various wildlife, Native American pictures on the side of the canyon, and crazy people climbing its walls.  The tour also included an all-you-can-eat Dutch oven dinner with several kinds of roasted and barbequed meats that had been cooked in a Dutch oven for 22 hours – delicious.  We all retired full and happy.  Zoe and Nadia were so full and happy that we managed to convince them to go on one last little hike on the way home — down a trail called Park Avenue because of the skyscraper-like fins on either side.  (Lanie could not be convinced, and went in the car with Bob to pick us up at the other end.)

From Bob:

There are actually 2,000 arches in this place – although some of them might be as small as the ones Tom used to sit next to and wait for Jerry to come out.  I don’t know.  We haven’t seen them all, but even if some are tiny, that should not diminish the splendor of this place.  Any one of the arches we’ve seen in the past two days would be the crown jewel of any other state’s park system. 

                Still, slim and delicate as they are, these arches don’t offer much shade, so it was back into Moab for the afternoon.  This time we visited the County Library, which was air conditioned, offered wifi, and promised many books to keep the girls happy for a while.  As it turned out, the local parents also like some of these features, too, and they brought their kids in.  So the girls got a rare chance to play with some people they weren’t related to.

                It should be noted here that the most time-intensive part of producing this blog is not the sitting down and writing part, which what I expected would be the case.  In fact, the tedium and delay comes from uploading the pictures.  Public wifi – or even the wifi Jen had to pay for in Yellowstone – is pretty slow.  It takes a long time for the pictures to get from the computer to the blogging servers.  The County Library in Moab is a very pleasant place, and it has really cool water coming out of its water fountains, but its free Internet connection is not much quicker, if at all, than the other places we’ve managed to get online.

                So we wait (and read a few more Berenstain Bear books than we thought could possibly exist – did you know they went up into space?). The pictures are very important to the process, especially here, where the landscape so dramatically defies description.