Do Horses Like Bananas?

Dead Horse State Park, Utah

The jury is still out on that one, but my own sample of three horses resulted in one horse asking for more and two horses spitting them out. I was out of apples. These horses are in a pasture behind our RV.

We went up to Arches again last night for some sunset shots. It was a choice between that and "Ironman". The local theatre has one movie, which it presents each day at 8 PM.


We went for a six mile hike up on the mesa at Dead Horse State Park today. The trails lead around the mesa rim for views of the Colorado River canyons 2,000 feet below.


The "point" is reached by a narrow neck of land, about 30 feet wide. It was convenient to herd wild horses onto the point and then construct a short fence over the neck from juniper branches.


Horses existed in North America from at least 100,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, when they went extinct. Mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats and giant sloths disappeared along with the horses as part of the Holocene mini-extinction event. Most scientists attribute this to the arrival of the Amerindians, with climate as a possible contributing factor.


Then the Spanish reintroduced horses to North America 500 years ago and 300 years later there were herds of wild horses up on the mesa near Dead Horse Point.

So, anyway, the horses were rounded up and the good ones were sorted out from the inferior "broom-tails" (a class of range horses that are considered not worth much). Legend has it that one time the cowboys forgot to take down the fence after the round-up and the leftover horses died of thirst out on the point.


The hike was good. Lots of good overlooks, unimpressive cryptobiotic lumps, little lizards, wildflowers, warped junipers and pinion trees. If we did six miles a day, I could melt off some extra pounds.

Dead Horse is up on the same big mesa as Canyonlands National Park. Down below we can see the same road we bumped up on the jeep.

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.

Poetry?

Canyon lands National Park by Jeep

Canyon lands National Park, Utah


Canyon lands is a really big park The off road trails can take weeks to navigate in a jeep.
 

 There are about 16 miles of paved road and several hundred miles of roads that require a high-clearance four-wheel drive vehicle.


 
These back-country gravel, bedrock and dirt roads run around the rims of deep canyons, up loose-gravel narrow switch-back mountain trails and back down though narrow canyons. It can take several days to traverse the park circumference.




The Green River and Colorado River confluence is inside the  park. You may recall the 1869 exploration of the Green and Colorado rivers by John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran.




Driving these roads is an exciting experience. When the going got really scary Mrs. Phred took over the driving.
 

 Once the rear wheels started to spin and slide toward the edge of a 3,000-foot drop, so she coolly engaged the 4WD and continued slowly upward. We spent about nine hours bouncing over tiny rugged trails on canyon rims and hiking short hikes to see arches, deep canyons and 'upheaval dome', site of a possible large meteorite strike. 

 We only met two other vehicles during the day. The silence was as immense as the landscapes.