Sunday, April 26 - Canyonlands!

 It was very windy again overnight, so our sleep was intermittent. The yurts really make a lot of noise when it is windy and a few times I was scared by the force of the winds. It wasn't just me, because our friends in the other yurt agreed that the strength of the wind was scary. Despite the poor sleep, we were still up a little earlier than expected for our transition day. We packed the car, said goodbye to Avi and our new friends.

First, we headed to nearby Canyonlands - Island in the Sky District, which was very close to our yurts in Dead Horse Point SP. While the park is large, the area accessible by non-4-wheel drive car was not. We skipped all but one short hike. The one we did was a loop out to Mesa Arch, our favorite of all arches. The shape and size combined with the view through the arch made it hard to walk away from, even after 20 minutes of viewing from all accessible angles. We eventually finished the loop, toured the rest of the park and viewpoints, and headed out.

Mesa Arch - aptly named because it is high on a mesa, providing dramatic views through the arch.

Crazy that there are plants that seemingly are growing out of the rock!

Panorama view of the canyons

I loved the look of this crazy tree - definitely something from a Tim Burton movie.

Not sure of the name of this arch - but it was massive. I took this from the car. You can see how tiny the person under it looks.

Our next destination of the day was Canyonlands - The Needles Distric. While this is the same park, because it is completely divided by the Green and Colorado Rivers, it is a 120-mile drive to get from one section to the other. 

We stopped in Moab on the way for a charge and lunch. Our third day in a row at the Tesla Charger and still no issues with those; hate to admit it, but they are the easiest to use and often are lower cost than other charging stations. Lunch was more of a challenge. Our first choice for lunch didn't open until 4:00 on Sunday. Our second choice had a wait of 30-40 minutes. We headed across the street from that one to Fiesta Mexicana, an average (at best) Mexican place. Our meal was just okay, and we headed south towards The Needles.

On our way in we crossed through Bears Ears National Monument. There we found Newspaper Rock, a huge rock packed with petroglyphs which spanned a period of more than 1,000 years. We were both impressed. 

Our road into The Needles section was full of massive walls and monoliths. Once we entered the park we must say we were disappointed. Even more than Island in the Sky, this park had few roads accessible by cars and few areas for short hikes. We toured the entire park section in less than an hour and headed out. We both agreed the drive to get to

the park was more impressive than the park itself.

We headed south to our Monticello for dinner and our campsite for the evening. Dinner was at a local Thai / Sushi place which was OK. It clearly used to be a western-themed restaurant which has been turned into the Thai place. To camp for the night chose the only campground we could find in the area that took reservations to make sure we didn't get shut out. When we arrived, we could see this would be an experience for sure. The owner had taken a patch of his 30 acres, spent a few bucks on porta-potties and picnic tables, and called it a campground. From the looks of it, I got the feeling we were the first campers there since last fall.

The ground was uneven due to the clump of grass everywhere; between the grass clumps was extremely fine red dusty dirt that managed to get everywhere, including on the inside of our car.

We drove around, picked the spot closest to the bathroom (it wasn't that close), and got set up. It got cold and windy quickly that early evening, so we made the right call to finish our set up immediately and head to bed early, before dark. We couldn't build a fire and there was nothing to see or do there. At least we slept well that night as the wind did not bother us in the car. Until...