Day 13

Friday June 21. We just drove down 14 miles of dirt (sand) road in Navajo country. Now I know why they all drive pickup trucks around here. Thanks, GPS, for trying to take us the most direct way to our destination, but you've just added another twenty minutes to our trip. What we lost in total mileage was more than made up for in forced slow speeds and road hazards.

We spent the night at a free campground near the Navajo National Monument in Kayenta, Arizona. It was our second night camping in the desert after the night before when we camped near Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah.  Both nights were windy and chilly, but nothing compared to the cold of those Wyoming nights.

After we left our Park City hotel two days ago, we went to Arches National Park in Moab, Utah. It was pretty amazing driving through the now-green mountains in Utah's ski country and watching the landscape turn into dry, brown rock cliffs and then into the orange clay of the desert south.

We had originally planned to go to Arches and Canyonlands National Park in the same day since they are right near each other, but as it got later, we realized we wouldn't have time to do both. We watched the sunset at Arches and then drove to a free campground about 40 minutes south of Arches and right outside of Canyonlands. Our plan was to get up early and go to Canyonlands in the morning, which we did, but it took much longer than planned to get there. We were only 11 miles away, according to the GPS, but we had to drive over, down, and back around to to get into the park: a total of 78 miles and nearly an hour and a half of driving.

Canyonlands was beautiful, but it felt like much of the same as Arches (not at all surprising since they're in the same geographical region). We did get to tour some cave dwellings where there was visible evidence of the ancient people who lived there hundreds of years ago, including soot-blackened ceilings and petroglyphs (pictorial drawings). 

After Canyonlands, we headed to the Four Corners. It wasn't really on the way to our next stop, the Grand Canyon, but both of us had wanted to stand in four states at once ever since we'd learned about it in elementary school. So we drove the two and a half hours south and a little east to where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet. The highway we were driving on took us back through Colorado to get there, and it was strange to pass the "Welcome to Colorful Colorado" sign again after all the traveling we've done in the nine days since we first saw that sign on the opposite side of the state.

Four Corners was a relatively quick stop. We each stood where all the states meet, then we stood there together and had someone take our picture:

We would have stayed longer and thought of more creative poses to do that incorporated the four states and our various limbs, but there were lots of tourists trying to take their pictures there as well, so we couldn't really hog the space for ourselves (even though our poses would have been awesome and everyone else was lame and unoriginal). We spent some time walking around and looking at the vendors' wares--lots of jewelry, house decor and various trinkets--all handmade by Navajo people. The Four Corners is actually located in Navajo Country so we weren't able to use our National Park Annual Pass to get in, but the $3-a-head admission fee was by far the cheapest we've seen so far.

I still have no doubts that the $80 park pass we bought (which covers the entrance fee for both of us at all national parks and monuments) will more than pay for itself before we've completed our road trip. Aside from the Four Corners and a few state parks we visited in Missouri, all of our entrance fees have been waived, and I've noticed they've been adding up: $25 per vehicle at Grand Teton, $25 at Yellowstone, $10 at Arches and $10 at Canyonlands. No doubt we'll be saving another $25 at the Grand Canyon and wherever else we stop at afterwards. Buying that pass was definitely a smart move.