Canyonlands by Jeep

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

It was a bone-jarring ride on 50 miles of bedrock. It took eight hours to bump and grind over the four-wheel drive road.

We spent some time at "Thelma and Louise Point". The was the movie that ended when Thelma and Louise, persecuted for their armed robberies and for blowing up gasoline tanker truck, drove off a spectacular cliff.


At first, because the scenery is so spectacular and varied, I was disappointed, even depressed, with the pictures.


When you blow up the pictures into the full 2 gigabyte format and look at them, they begin to hint at what your eye might have seen. However, when you try to shrink the whole thing down to a 2" x 3" picture, it doesn't translate.

So it's not my fault.


Some of the roads are a single lane that runs for several miles on the edge of a thousand foot drop with a rock wall on the other side. You get a major pucker factor when you meet a dirt bike. We were lucky not to meet any more imposing oncoming traffic.


There is a climbout on a long series of switchbacks to the top of the mesa. Meeting traffic on the climb would require you to hang two wheels over the cliff. This time I screwed up my courage and did the whole drive myself instead of turning the wheel over to Mrs. Phred and closing my eyes.


Canyonlands has some great vistas that you can reach in the family station wagon. I love the back country. They have enough four-wheel trails that it takes four or five days to do a complete circuit of the park on the edge of the canyons.



Here are a few more pictures of Canyonlands.