Time To Head For The Desert.

After surviving the buffalo migration through our campsite at the Great Salt Lake, we decided that the rain monsoons and flash flood were over in southern Utah. We spent the night at Green River State Park which is a veritable oasis on the way to Moab. The little town , however, looks like it has seen better days. We took a detour up a dirt road to some obscure Native American rock art. Further down the road we entered Moab Canyon and arrived at Arches National Park. This is one of the most popular parks in the country and is jammed with people from April through October. It was real work to find a parking place at any of the trail heads or points of interest. The small campground is always full with reservations booking months in advance. This is my fifth visit to the park and it is no wonder that it is so popular. The hundreds of natural stone arches and crazy science fiction landscape always astonishes me. The first time that I went to the park was in 1970 after reading Edward Abbey's masterpiece “Desert Solitaire”. At that time all of the roads were dirt, we had the campground to ourselves and we could do technical climbs on the arches. Now there are hordes of people everywhere. When I go on a trail in any of our wonderful parks, but especially in Arches, I am struck and saddened by the fact that most of the people that you see in the back country are foreign visitors, especially German, French, Japanese and always French Canadians. I guess that many Americans are just too fat and lazy to get out of their cars.