Canyonlands National Park is an American National Park located in southeastern Utah near the town of Moab. The park preserves a colorful landscape eroded into numerous canyons, mesas, and buttes by the Colorado River, the Green River, and their respective tributaries.
The park is divided into four districts: the Island in the Sky, the Needles, the Maze, and the combined rivers—the Green and Colorado—which carved two large canyons into the Colorado Plateau. While these areas share a primitive desert atmosphere, each retains its own character. (Source: Wikipedia)
Establish: September 12, 1964
Size: 337,598 Acres
Rank: 23
# Visitors in 2018:
(April 2016) My boyfriend at the time (and now husband!) and I spent one day visiting the Island in the Sky district of Canyonlands National Park as part of a long road trip out west. We stayed in Moab and drove about 35 miles to the Island in the Sky Visitor Center. From there, the Island in the Sky Scenic Road goes another 6 miles to a fork in the road; 5 miles NW takes you to Upheaval Dome and 6 miles SE takes you to Grand View Point. There is no exit from this road, so we had to back track to Hwy 191 at the end of our day in Canyonlands.
Our first stop was Mesa Arch. We didn’t quite make sunrise, but the early morning light was beautiful and we saw very few people. It was too tempting not to get right up into the arch itself, but there is a very steep fall off with no guard, so we didn’t linger long… the view was breathtaking!! Walking around the Mesa Arch gave other spectacular views into the valley and the La Sal Mountains in the distance.
Our next step was Upheaval Dome. We hiked much of the way around the Dome and surrounding area. According to the Canyonlands park website, Upheaval Dome is approximately three miles across. Its rock layers are dramatically deformed; in the center, the rocks are pushed up into a circular structure called a dome, or an anticline. Surrounding this dome is a downwarp in the rock layers called a syncline. Geologists do not know for sure what caused these folds at Upheaval Dome. To us, it looked like a huge crater with a green mountain in the middle… pretty spectacular!
Our next venture inside the park was to finish driving the rest of the Island in the Sky scenic drive to Grand View Point. Here, we saw another spectacular view, this time of deep canyons cut into the valley. From a distance, the canyons looked like they were imprinted into the flat landscape from above, with no inlet or outlet. They looked like tentacles. As always, I loved capturing the big picture and zooming in to get the details of the shapes, colors, and textures.
Driving the Island in the Sky scenic drive itself was a delight. We stopped often along the way to take in the vistas; everything was so vast. The light at that time of day gave everything a painterly feel…. so gorgeous!
We only saw a tiny portion of Canyonlands during our 1-day visit and look forward to a revisit sometime in the future. It appears that the next easiest area to visit is the Needles district since there is paved road access. We would also love to explore ways we can get into the backcountry. For us older folks who don’t relish carrying our own gear and camping, we could consider an AWD, boat or horseback trip.