UPSTAIRS, DOWNSTAIRS

"Canyonlands"!  We had no idea what was in store for us when we visited that national park yesterday.

We entered at the north portal only to learn that there are two completely different parts to the park.

The northern end is the "overview".  "Everything you see here will be from above" the ranger explained.

"You will be looking down on all the formations."

It was like seeing a thousand smaller Grand Canyons in one place.

Here is the Colorado River basin, ala millions of years ago:

Looking over a sort of prairie, with the river basin in the background.

I was standing on the foreground ledge, barely visible here by a slight color difference. 

 "Below" is a thousand feet down:

 Little purple wildflower survivors:

 Just on the other side of this arch is a shear dropoff of hundreds of feet:

 This arch is on a plateau too, but the edge was not so precariously close:

To see the southern part of the park we had to drive back to Moab and south for 2 1/2 hours - there

is no way to connect within the park.

Before the entrance is a rock face as big as 2 garage doors, completely covered

with prehistoric petroglyphs.

It is called "Newspaper Rock" for a good reason:

There is hardly a hand-print-sized space that is blank.

I chose to show here my favorite pattern as a close-up rather than the entire wall:

Now we were back on the "bottom" and once again all the formations were high above us:

This looks like a milkweed pod, but it grows straight up on a single, tall stem from a type of cactus:

These formations were different from any we had seen all week. 

I called them "steam tops" because I imagined how, after all the cataclysms

happened which formed the other shapes, these little mounds popped

open to let out all the steam.  I could almost hear the

"blup, schlop, blup" boiling on the tops:

The southern park is called "The Needles", for this reason:

I scrambled up a boulder to see what I could see from

this little "window". 

Nothing, really:

We had ideal weather in all the parks, but as we

left The Needles, a storm boiled in, with lightening and

thunderous clouds: