Sunday, October 30th: Natural Bridges National Park

At a distance from our trailer, we watched John pack up his car and then we headed off to Natural Bridges National Park. John had warned us that there was a steep and narrow part of the road that climbed the mesa. As we drove north, we saw the road head straight for the cliff face of the mesa. “There is no way that road is going up that cliff”, I said to Jan, but as we began to wind up the switchbacks, we could see other cars high above us on the cliff face. As we climbed, we could see that the road was literally cut out of the rock.

Dave, on top of the mesa looking towards The Valley of the Gods

On top, we could see the whole expanse of the valley with The Valley of the Gods to our left and Monument Valley to our right. As we looked down in amazement, we could see some yahoo driving up the road towing a trailer, which was in turn towing a boat! A sign at the bottom explicitly said, “No RVs, buses, or vehicles towing anything. We never found out if he made it or not. We continued on across the mesa for about 30 miles and arrived at Natural Bridges. At the visitors center lobby, there was a 16.5” telescope that had been donated by a private party. I drooled over it as I had seen that model for sale from a small company on the internet. Jan got her usual magnet and her passport stamped, and we headed to the picnic area. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky that day and it was about 60 degrees, but a little breezy at the canyon tops. The picnic area parking lot was filled with 2 big rigs and their toweds (RVer slang for towed vehicles), so we went drove on to the trail head for a look at the first of 3 natural bridges and ate our brown bag lunch in the car.

Jan & Dave near the arch

We had to hike 500 vertical feet down into the canyon on a trail that consisted of switchbacks, steel stairways, and a rustic ladder make of tree branches (I guess to give the visitor a feeling for the way the Indians did it). A lady who was standing near the top of the ladder said that see did not have the balance to go down the ladder and that her husband had gone on ahead. We climbed down to a vantage point which was about half way the height of the arch and stopped there, since Jan’s knee was bothering her and there seemed to be no advantage in going under the arch. We took pictures of each other, and then the lady’s husband came down the trail and offered to take our picture. When he left, another young couple appeared and I took their picture. We turned around and made it back to the top and then stopped at the overlooks for the 2 other natural bridges.

One of the other arches (very thin at the top)

We came back to Gooseneck via a different, although longer route, which had no winding steep roads. We had a nearly empty propane tank with us, but could not find propane in the only town that we passed through, Bluff. Since we had an hour or 2 of sunlight left, we decided to drive the 17 mile loop through the Valley of the Gods. It was kind of a Monument Valley in miniature, but we actually liked it better than Monument Valley because you could get closer to the monuments and they were closer together and more numerous. The only bummer was that the gravel road was very bumpy with lots of wash boarding, which make the truck shake violently.

Jan in The Valley of the Gods

We got back as the sun set and soon after there were the clearest starry skies I’ve ever seen. I was exhausted though and didn’t have the energy to set up the big scope, but I did view a couple of galaxies with my small scope.