Utah!

Many years ago, when I lived in the Colorado mountains, I had a t-shirt that read: Eat Drink and Be Merry For Tomorrow You May Be In Utah. Little did I know. Many years later I drove to San Francisco avoiding the interstate as much as possible and I accidentally discovered the paradise that is Utah.

This trip, I was headed for Arches National Park and took a small road intended to connect me with one of Utah's scenic highways. This road was beaten and desolate with more dips than a Frito party. A town called Cisco showed on my map but when I passed the sign for 'Cisco Landing', the arrow pointed to a small, totally abandoned collection of houses and stores that 'in need of repair' doesn't begin to describe. There was no other settlement in sight. I slept that night beside the Colorado River with deep red cliffs all around.

Arches...the name tells all. Once again, there are formations of reds and white-ish and every shade in between dressed up with a little copper green here and there, shaped by wind and rain since the beginning of time. There I met a couple from Seattle. Merry had white hair with a bright red swatch at her right temple. She told me all about the Juniper trees that can put a root out 100' looking for one drop of this area's 8-9" of annual rainfall. When it gets really, really dry, this tree has the ability to kill a portion of itself off and rejeuvinate when the weather is friendlier...and live on, up to 600+ years. Merry showed me her pocket of rocks and we laughed over my collecting tendencies while her partner, known to me as her "first and only husband" stood tolerantly by. Merry is character #1 and I got to be #2 by taking my shoes off and hiking those red sandy trails barefoot. Boy, did that attract attention!

Along Scenic highway 128

Coming into Arches in the morning

The ranger called it Utah Juniper

A fun stop in Moab