Our destination of the day today was the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. Canyonlands is separated into 3 sections, two of which, Horseshoe Canyon and Islands in the Sky, we’ve visited in previous trips. This last section of the park was a new one for us and it reaffirmed why it’s one of our favorite parks.
While it was a HOT day, the hiking was exactly the type we like. There was lots of scrambling up and down rocks and very few other people to share it with. We began the day by tackling the Slickrock Trail. We circumnavigated the edge of a mesa with views into the surrounding canyons as well as the more distant buttes, mountains, and mesas. We used our trail guide to identify them, and when I got to the feature named Molly’s Nipple I knew we’d need an appropriately posed photo.
A little later in the day the girls dove into a pretty thorough explanation of the differences between mesas and buttes (I’m still not sure, maybe they’ll explain in their post). In any case the discussion led to Molly saying “So Molly’s Nipple is a butte?”. Followed by me, obviously replying, “it sure is”. It took her another second or two to realize what she’d said. For obvious reasons that exchange made the quote book.
For lunch we found a nice air conditioned spot in a parking lot and enjoyed PBJ&C. For our entertainment a raven appeared and discovered that a car parked near us was left with the windows rolled down. It spent the rest of time we were there pillaging anything from inside the car that peaked its interest. We later learned from a ranger that ravens have figured out how to open the saddlebags on motorcycles to steal the food inside.
After lunch we did a couple other short hikes. The first to a site that was formerly a cowboy camp and prior to that a shelter for ancestral Puebloans. The second was to an amazingly well preserved granary used by ancestral Puebloans over 1,000 years ago. All in all, a pretty solid day on the trails.
We’re now on our way back to Moab where we’ll find some dinner and maybe go for a swim before bed.
