Moab - Day 3, Part 2

At this point we really started to get cold as the temperature started to drop.  Thankfully, there were a few options to cut back across toward the trailhead to save us some time as we were freezing but we did miss out on visiting two of the five points on the star.  We completed about 4.5 miles of hiking in just a bit over two hours of time...though it did feel like quite a bit longer than that to us!

After warming up and getting some snacks we traveled down the road over to the Canyonlands National Park.  Our first stop was at Mesa Arch which you can see above.  It was nice that this was only about a 10 minute hike from the parking lot and was a bit sheltered from the wind which was still quite chilly.  What is amazing is that we have a shot of this without all these people in it, which seemed to be crawling all over the area.

This is actually a picture of what lies through the arch looking down into the canyonlands.  It was pretty amazing, as have been most of the views in these parks.

We traveled a bit further into the park and found this Upheaval Dome spot.  It almost looks like something from another planet.  I took a picture of the description of what it was to get a sense of the size of this thing.

 All around is this red sandstone dirt and then this almost greenish yellow sand juts out of the ground creating this impressive scene.  There is a short 1.5 mile hike the traverses around the side to a series of two overlooks which we took.  It looks like a much longer hike will take you down and around to the actual feature in the dome but we didn't have enough time nor were all parties willing to take on such an adventure at this point in our trip.