Afternoon Drive

Wednesday at about 4 p.m. I went for a short drive, thinking maybe I'd go up the canyon and read for a while. A few hours later I called Chieko from Green River and told her I'd probably not be home that night. I stayed in the Robber's Roost motel, which was along the same vein as the motel Randy and I stayed in in Cortez, but this one smelled clean, and there were no black stains on the carpet. And it was only $35 for a king-size bed. I like these inexpensive motels when they're clean. They are cheap and reasonably comfortable. This one even had a big walk-in closet with a little refrigerator and a microwave. However, a metal carpet edge that jutted up at the bathroom door took the skin off the top of my toe in the dark. Ouch.

On Thursday morning I woke up at 5 a.m. and headed for Dove Creek, Colorado, where I bought 100 pounds of pinto beans and two 40-pound bags of Anasazi beans at the Adobe Milling store, the only place I know where you can get Anasazi beans. These beans are similar to pintos, but they have 75 percent less of the carbohydrate that causes gas, so they say.
This is southwestern Colorado in the early morning.

And this is what drives industry in southwestern Colorado.

And this is a newly plowed field. I wasn't sure whether the farmers plowed these fields after harvesting the beans or if they've just planted a new crop of winter wheat. I thought I saw some green sprouting in some of the fields.

Anyone who starts a nonfarm business, such as this restaurant, in the middle of nowhere has a tough row to hoe.

The owners must have had trouble with vandals or theft even when the restaurant was still a going place.

I guess everything that man builds will be undone by nature eventually. Nature always wins.

I imagine the homesteaders in this cabin watching progress pass them by.

Back in Utah, between Monticello and Moab, there is one place I've passed a few times and wanted to visit but never had the time. That's the Needles Overlook in Canyonlands National Park. I've always wondered where the road went and what was at the other end. Well, the 20-mile drive to the overlook was well worth a side trip. This picture is my first-ever attempt at a panorama (other than a train I stitched together once). It isn't great, but if you click on it you can see some of the view from the Needles Overlook.

I call this sandstone outcrop Belly Button Rock. It's on the road to the Needles Overlook.

This is the view from the belly button. Not really. It's the same outcrop, though, where someone started blasting a house or something (this isn't too far from Hole 'N The Rock, where a guy did blast a house in a rock mountain). The person at Belly Button Rock gave up after about 10 feet.

The cottonwoods on Kane Creek were starting to turn brilliant yellow. Not everything in southeastern Utah is orange rock.

I guess there's a reason this road to Kane Creek said "Four wheel drive or mountain bikes only." It turns out the Corolla Cow is neither. (I call it the Corolla Cow because it was Christened by a cow last week.)

Lizards are about the only animal life I saw. If you click on this picture, you'll see that he's staring at you.

Next I grabbed a Subway sandwich in Moab and headed for Arches, where I had a little picnic. Then I hiked to Delicate Arch. So did a lot of other people. I couldn't believe how many people were at Arches. The place was packed and buzzing with tourists--on a Thursday in the middle of October. I checked the cars in the Delicate Arch parking lot, and at least 80 percent had plates from states other than Utah. And of the Utah plates, I would guess 1/3 or so were rentals for all the Europeans who were hiking around. When I passed the hotels in Moab about 6 in the morning, they all said "No Vacancy."

Other than wondering who was going to fall off one of the cliffs or slide into the rock bowl in front of Delicate Arch (one guy's iPhone and at least one camera lens cap tumbled down the rocks and into the bowl), we had to keep an eye on the dive-bombing crows.

This photographer decided to get a picture of Delicate Arch from the other side of the canyon. Click on the picture for a better view.

This proves that Darwin was wrong. There is no natural selection, or all these people would be at the bottom of the canyon. This is the same cliff that the lone photographer was sitting on in the picture above. Notice the children playing on the edge with no supervision.

Everyone was waiting for the sun to set on Delicate Arch, and this is why. I heard a lady in the visitor center say that she told her husband that if he said "Wow" one more time she was going to duct tape his mouth shut.

I thought about staying until the stars came out so I could get a picture with them as the backdrop, but I would have had to stay in Green River another night. I didn't get home until 1 a.m. as it was.