On the Road Again

Continuing our National Parks of the West Tour, we headed east out of Torrey to Moab, Utah, and Arches National Park.

We left lands of red Wingate Sandstone and the whitish Navajo Sandstone and traveled Route 24 that followed the winding course of the Fremont River.

In the roughly 70 miles from Torrey to I-70, we encountered an entirely different terrain.
The hills along the route appeared uniformly greenish, but I don't know if it was the rock itself or some type of growth on the rock.

In nearby areas, the hills seemed grayish, similar to piles of ashes. Even though the scenery was either uniformly green or gray, there was an intriguiing beauty to the scenes, but one that we were drawn to for only a few moments.

There were only two small towns between Torrey and Green River, and the landscape was not very conducive to any type of agriculture. Nearing Green River, Utah, we begain seeing a bit more color in the rock formations.

Approaching Route 191 to Moab, we saw these formations appearing on the high desert. The clusters were small in number and widely separated.

Our curiosity grew.

Soon after we reached our campground just south of Moab, the winds began to pick up.
The next morning we had gusts of 35-40 miles an hour. When we commented to people over lunch that we thought it was really windy today, one person's reply was: "Could you see the mountains?"

"Yes."

"Then it wasn't very windy."

I still think the angle of this tree's branches shows that there was a pretty good wind. Anyway, we'll see over the next two weeks.

By evening, the wind had died down and we could see the La Sal Mountains very clearly.

Along the west boundary of the RV Park was this rock wall.

Even before we entered the National Park, we felt as though we had found several geological and meteorological matters to study.