Shabbos dispersed camping just outside of Canyonlands National Park was pleasant.  Today we drove into the park and visited the Needles District visitor center:

The park is divided into three districts by impassible canyons channeling the Colorado River (right), and the Green River (left).  The Maze has no paved roads and takes hours to reach, so we decided not to try to get there.  Later this week, we will drive North to Moab and visit the Island in the Sky district:

Leaving the visitor center, we drove to the Elephant Hill trailhead and hiked towards Chesler Park, where the needle formations for which the park is named can be viewed:

There was a narrow canyon to walk through:

The kids spotted ancient hand print pictographs on this rock.  B is looking for more:

All along the trail we saw mature cryptobiotic soil.  We were careful not to “bust the crust”:

Cactus in bloom:

At last we reached Chesler Park and could look out over the needles in the distance:

There was also a nice arch here:

We went back the way we came back through the narrow canyon:

Returning to the visitor center, the kids handed in their workbooks and received their Junior Ranger badges:

Agave in bloom:

Here we only have tenuous Verizon voice connection with our backup phone, so we decided to drive up to Moab this afternoon.  On the way back to the highway, we stopped to visit Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument, where Native Americans have been fashioning pictographs for over 2,000 years:

Continuing north, we stopped in Moab for groceries, diesel, water, and dumping sewer tanks.  BLM lands in the Moab area for the most part do not allow dispersed camping due to the amount of use the area receives, so we continued north on highway 191 for 12 miles to a dispersed camping location on Utah state SITLA land.  See the trip map for today’s drive and our current location.