Dead Horse State Park and Canyonlands, UT

Gnats.
Lots of gnats.
And a few mosquitoes thrown in just for variety.
Thank heavens we have a screen room tent! And there is a lesson learned. We ditched our old, heavy screen tent and bought a new, lighter weight one just before we left. 'Got it on sale for a super great price at a camping store. When we arrived here and decided it would be a good time to set it up, what with all the bugs and all, we laid the bag on the picnic table and unzipped it. Taking the posts out we suddenly were covered with a shower of beach sand. We are nowhere near a beach. It seems the tent had been used before, but not marked "returned". We just count ourselves lucky that there was no damage and no missing parts. Next time we should look as soon as we get home with something like that. . . but of course, we'll forget this lesson by then and do the same thing all over again!


We're camped in Dead Horse Point State Park, high up, with a bit of a view of the canyon edge.

The campground has no water, but there is electricity, and the sites are for the most part quite wide and well arranged. Ours is huge, with two tent pads and a picnic table that would seat 16 easily. All the table shelters have two-sided windbreaks with little cabinets built in. I think that's to protect things from the crows here that seem to be notorious for getting in to things.

We hit the visitor's center the afternoon we arrived so we'd have an overview of the area. At the  visitor's center viewpoint one is treated to the shocking sight of two huge swimming pool blue ponds at the bottom of the canyon.

These are solar evaporation ponds that are part of a potash solution mining process, explained in detail on the placard near the viewpoint. The blue color is due to cobalt that is added to the solution to speed the evaporation process. Once the brine has evaporated the consolidated minerals are collected and trucked out.

The next day we hit all the overlooks and a few short trails. The heat again slowed us down a bit, but we still got some great photos!

This is an amazing place. We're back to the multi-colored wedding cake layers we saw in Nine Mile Canyon, only this time we're on top, looking down, instead of standing in the canyon looking up.

The depth of the canyon and intricate loops in the Colorado River below are absolutely amazing.  For those interested in geology, here's a great diagram of the layers and their ages. It's hard to absorb how very old the landscape is, and what forces were at work over the ten million years it took the river to sculpt it into the wonder we see now.

Dead Horse Point is state property adjoining the much larger National Park, Canyonlands, which has the same geology, but also contains the confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers.

A tour of the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands occupied our second full day. The road travels the edge of the canyon on a fairly level mesa, with multiple pull-outs and short trails to view points. There seemed to be a raven perched by the trail to meet us at every stop, and I began to feel we were being followed!

If you think this area resembles the Grand Canyon you are right! It's a bit more photogenic actually, due to being wider and not as deep. The movie industry has taken advantage of that feature and used this area as a stand-in for the Grand Canyon in several movies. The list of movies filmed in the greater Moab area is quite extensive, and a tour to some of the sites is great fun for movie buffs.

Both parks are much less crowded than Arches was, probably due to their greater distance from a major highway - tour buses don't want to swing this far afield.

With plenty of electricity available we've been able to run the air conditioning a bit and get a little respite from the heat. Yesterday clouds started to form, which made for some nice photographs, and by late afternoon we were getting thunder and a few sprinkles. It rained quite a bit overnight, filling up all the little potholes that support those cute little gnats, and fluffing up the cactus. The clouds continued to sit down in the canyon all day, looking like wet cotton, so it's a good thing we did our sightseeing previously as there's not much to see now.

The park name, Dead Horse Point has some history to it, but it's hard to track down any real facts. The naming of the area is always attributed to a "legend" with no dates and no human source. There seem to be three slightly different versions of the legend that are repeated everywhere. One version is, "The point was used as a corral for wild mustangs roaming the mesa. Cowboys rounded up these horses and herded them across the narrow neck of land and onto the point.

The neck of the plateau that forms the point, which is only 30 yards wide, was then fenced off with branches and brush, creating a natural corral surrounded by precipitous cliffs. Cowboys then chose the horses they wanted and left the other horses corralled on the waterless point where they died of thirst within view of the Colorado River, 2,000 feet below." A second version says the cowboys accidentally left the corral closed off. A third version says that the cowboys left the corral open, but for some inexplicable reason the horses just stayed in the corral.

Sorry, but I don't buy any of them.  This is, I think, another example of sanitizing history. I do believe a herd of horses died out there on the point. But I don't believe it was accidental. During the late 1800's, when the event supposedly happened, the area was filling up with sheep and cattle ranchers. Everyone has heard about the range wars that were waged between the sheep ranchers and the cattlemen. What isn't usually discussed is the attitudes toward the herds of wild horses that ran the range at the time, competing for forage and tempting thoroughbred horses away from their corrals. Ranchers at the time put wild horses in the same category as a farmer does wild rabbits. They were a nuisance, and a drain on the system, so "get rid of 'em!" The wild horses were shot, poisoned, and worse. Some were rounded up and sold for a variety of purposes, but in those days, when a saddle cost $40, and a good horse $120 or more, a wild horse brought maybe $5. I think the herd in this "legend" was rounded up and killed on purpose. But that's too hard for people to hear, best to change history so it is easier to hear.

There's a display in the visitor's center that does the same thing, saying "horses originally developed in North America", uh sort of, but not exactly. It's true the Dawn Horse developed in the northern hemisphere, several million years ago, before the continents separated! There was no "North America", then. And the Dawn Horse is about the size of a dog, with toes, and looked more like a tapir than a horse.The Hagerman Horse also roamed the plains in this general area, several million years ago, but it is much closer to a  zebra than today's horse. All facts that the display conveniently skips over, probably because emotionally it's easier to bond with a "horse" than a tapir. There were never any true horses (as we know them now) here until the Spaniards brought them.

There's a great book on the subject, much of which is available online. The Wild Horse of the West (Walker D. Wyman -1963) Devoid of the emotion that colors the topic currently, Wyman recounts the history of feral horses and the attitudes and reasoning behind the actions of ranchers and farmers. It's interesting to note that the same arguments going on now regarding the wild horse herds have been repeated many times in the past. (I'll get down off the soap box now!)

For a tour of the canyon check out the album.