Exploring the wild Canyonlands

Well, that was quite a thrill ride this day! One of the highlights of the entire trip! We got up very early in the morning (thx Proximus) and got at the Tag-a-Long checkpoint at 7:15 am in order to start our grand off-road adventure with Kealan, our driver and guide. We started and drove north out of Moab towards Potash. That's not really a town but the name of a place where they process potassium. The Ford four wheel drive stopped low next to the Colorado river, changed into its 4x4 mode and we started driving all the way up from the bottom to the top of the Canyon! We stopped at "Thelma and Louise"- point, where they shot the ending of that film! Actually it's called Fossil point, because they used to find a lot of fossils of marine animals up here. We also saw Dead Horse point, and finally survived the Shafer Trail Road. We didn't buy the sticker though, nor the T-shirt. The trail ends in the so-called Island in the Sky, a green table mountain or Mesa caught between two rivers: the Green river and the Colorado river. The guide explained a lot about plant life and the geology of the Canyonlands.

We extended our program and went for the jetboat afternoon on the Colorado river. This way you get a view from way down low that river. There's a point in the canyon, besides the river which they call the Grotto. It has amazing acoustics, so every year, begin September they hold a classical concert down there during the Moab music festival. The tickets are a bit overpriced to a mere 200$, but apparently it's worth it for the 150-so listeners..
The second guide prepared our noon lunch, drove the bus with the boat hooked up, and finally raced the river for about 3 hours. He also mentioned that Moab made millionaires out of uranium prospectors, radioactive ore of which the mountains were rich. So they have their own little tchernobyl waste deposit down there, which is being cleaned out by the truckload. We also saw some thousand year old Indian petroglyphs on the rock walls and a spot where you could find petrified trees. Good thing we went for the boat ride in the afternoon, the temperatures rose to 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius) but on the boat is was nice and cool. He knows his river and all the sandbanks, that man! With a big smile on our faces he let us go to our hotel. We had fun in the swimming pool and had another American dinner at Denny's