Crosscountry Adventures

So this next day was one of the most adventurous and fun days of the trip. I had a blast riding about 60 miles of dirt roads over mountain passes and into the Needles section of Canyonlands National Park. What a great day! And the scenery was fantastic.

It started with cleaning up camp in Natural Bridges National Monument and riding over Bear Ears Pass east towards Blanding, Utah. Jokingly I say that the Mormons had to go through Blanding on their way to settle Utah, but that’s just a joke - or is it?

It was beautiful on top of the pass, and the road was pretty good for the most part.

I found as I went up in elevation the trees got much taller and nicer. Plus the temp dropped significantly. Of course that was temporary as it got hot again on the way down.

With the photos of the trees I would be hard pressed to distinguish between this place and where I grew up in East Texas, and the cows don’t make it any easier

Coming down the view changes as I could see mountains (real mountains formed by volcanoes rather than erosion) in the distance. I got great vistas of colored sediment and National “Forest.” Many places claim to be forests but have trees shorter than a human.

I did a couple things in Blanding including buy (but not install) a bolt for my crash guards. It had fallen out a while back, but I never got around to fixing it. I ate lunch and withdrew more cash for the next part of the trip. The town itself is nice, and as I found out later, it is more agricultural than other places near there because of the higher elevation and water recapture reservoir nearby. I wanted to do more dirt and so headed over and between the mountains to the north. This also helped prevent backtracking later on by going on a side road. It sure was nice although some of the most difficult riding I did the entire trip to CA. Here are a couple shots of the ride.

Once I hit pavement it was an easy ride to Needles but the scenery was too good to not stop, and I took too many pictures just coming into the park.

And the obligatory entrance photo, of which there will be many more coming up

I quickly picked a campsite and went hiking. The site and view from there were amazing. I was really pleased with my spot (the entire park only had a handful of campers), but the real pleasure came at sunset, and you’ll see why.

You can really see the Needles for which the park is named in that last one! Quite nice

My hike had some amazing views of the Needles, Island in the Sky, and Canyons between me and the Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers. I’ll post a few here, but you can see the rest in this link.

So the sights and hike were great, but something that made the day very special was the sunset and light. My ride back to the campsite involved as many photos as the hike, if you can believe that. They turned out great.

This has been a long post, so I’ll have to write more later about the sunset and ride back. It was fantastic though!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 12:01 am and is filed under CA 2010, Motorcycle Trips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.