Sunday, June 20, 2010
Father's Day along the Colorado
Before we left Moab today, we finished our petroglyph hunt from the night before, and of course petroglyph hunting always seems to coincide with slowly destroying the underside of our car. We found two sites in a row, but the one petroglyph I especially wanted to find was called the Birthing Rock and was off of a (you guessed it) gravel road. The problem was, we just could not find it. We eyed every boulder that was down off the road, and I guess-timated our location. No luck. We looked for telltale paths to boulders. We squinted. We binoc'ed. Still no luck. I was ready to give up when Mark wondered if we'd really gone the entire 1.7 miles we were supposed to. He suggested that we go back and remeasure. Sure enough, we had gone 1.5 miles, not 1.7, and there at 1.7 was a huge, obvious rock in plain view. All that squinting, oh bother.
The extremely obvious Birthing Stone
This petroglyph is named for this image, that of a baby being born, supposedly feet first. My picture of it is horrible since it was midday and the light was all wrong, but if you look up other images online for birthing rock you can see the entire scene. There's another figure to the right of the birthing mother that appears to be a male figure with face paint or a mask. I put all the pictures of the petroglyphs we found on the slideshow, but I won't upload them all now.
The canyon we were driving in had soaring walls covered in "desert patina" which a dark red to black mineral coating on the stone. The petroglyph creators chipped away at this patina, revealing the lighter stone beneath. We began to eye the rocks anywhere we saw smooth panels of patina, hoping to glimpse an ancient story in pictures. But ancient people were not the only ones to paint here: God must have also put His finger in the paint, leaving swirls and designs on cliff faces:
It was hard to capture the height and narrowness of some of these canyons.
I need a different lens!
After a quick trip to the Rock Shop (quirky place!) we took off on highway 128 which heads out of Moab along the Colorado River. What a completely satisfying, beautiful drive! It was only a 45 mile stretch but it probably took us two hours to make it to I70! We stopped whenever we wanted to, dabbled toes in the Colorado, took a zillion photos, and generally enjoyed a leisurely day in a dramatic canyon.
No vacation is ever complete without a little rock-hounding, so in addition to stopping at the rock store, we found a stretch of the Colorado where we could look for treasures.
Around this area, where the canyon opened up into a beautiful valley, we visited Red Cliffs Lodge and Resort where we had hoped to stay (all booked way in advance) and visited a funky little museum they have on all the movies made in Professor Valley. Some of the more well known known ones include City Slickers II, Back to the Future III, Indiana Jones III, and Stagecoach, just to name a few. Every turn in the road looked somehow vaguely familiar. The narrow pointy rock below is Castle Rock, where car commercials were filmed three times (most recently Isuzu) in which they helicoptered cars and actors to the summit.
Castle Rock sans the Isuzu
At the end of the canyon we found Dewey Bridge, built in 1916. This historic bridge was the longest suspension bridge in Utah until 2008 when a seven year old boy burned it down. The historic Marker said that when it was built it could carry something like three wagons, six horses, and 9000 pounds of supplies. The picture of the burned bridge doesn't look like much, but it was once beautiful.
When I first saw the bridge and read the sign, I could not picture the beautiful bridge as it once had been, and did not even connect it with the burned bridge I had heard about. Then this evening I pulled up the photo of the old gas station (below) and was able to more clearly see the mural painted there, and finally figured it out. Such a sad, sad story.
Not long after the old gas station, we were doing our usual "scan the cliffs" thing, and found more petroglyphs! That made four separate sites today. This one held a new element - animation. Or at least that was our take on it. Some of the animals depicted had fan shaped feet, and Amy's take on it was that it meant they were running, like an animated picture. Haven't looked it up yet, but it makes sense to me! You may have to view this one full size to see this detail.
The landscape of our drive changed rapidly after this. Where once we'd had patina-ed rock cliffs, green trees, and the river, we now had dry scrub brush and almost flat land. We went from the canyon to the mesa, and from a slow meandering drive to 75 mph on I70. We were back in civilization in a flash. We drove through Grand Junction and on to our little town for the night: Rifle. There's always something kind of sad about leaving the wilder areas and going back to the freeway.
We had thought of going to a movie tonight, but the theater in town shows only one movie at a time, and tonight it is A Team. Now if you were only going to show one movie . .. would you chose A Team? So instead we had a delicious dinner at Rib City Grill and then Mark and Amy went to Walmart and bought Alice in Wonderland. We hooked the laptop up to the tv with the magic HDMI cable my husband/daughter never seem to be without, and voila. Amazing.
Happy Father's Day, Howard - Hope there are no more thunderstorms, power outages, smoke detector malfunctions, beeping battery backups, or finicky-eating, manipulative old dogs. See you in a few days! Love you!
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