Canyonlands and Dead Horse

The next day was spent exploring Canyonlands National Park and Dead Horse State Park.

I swear, that the views while driving through Canyonlands seriously could have been taken straight out of the movie cars. When you see the vastness and the unreal heights of some of these canyons, it seriously seems as if the Earth was just cracked in two by a giant axe.



The canyons just drop straight down. Right behind these logs, it was such a sheer drop, we wouldn't let the boys get out of the car to take a picture.



We didn't get too many pictures in Canyonlands. We mostly drove to see things, and hiked a little. Hiking, as far as we could see, in the Canyonland Park is not very kid friendly; even for kids with as many miles under their belt as ours. they were rugged steep climbs down the canyon faces, that often times I couldn't even find a trail head for by the signs, just drop offs. LOL... not that I'm a spoil sport or anything, but I'm just not keen on the idea of on of my kids falling off the side of a massive drop.









This is right by were we stopped to eat lunch. Boy was not too happy about being as close to the canyon ledge as we were. Even though it was a good 10 or so feet behind us, he wanted to make a hasty retreat as soon as this picture was taken.



We actually weren't going to go out to Dead Horse, but the internet said they had dino fossils at the vistor center. They lied. There was one TINY dino print, which we could barely see, in the flower bed in front of the visitors center. However, it the views were neat, and they informational hike they have is kind of cool, since you can see the salt flats were they make salt. And the drive out to the place mentioned in the legend of Dead Horse point is a bit unnerving when you see how narrow the land bridge is that you're driving over. If you want to read the legend of how the place got it's name, check it out here.

It was after seeing all this that we kind of felt like we'd seen all that we had to see, and were going to head home. After playing a bit more at our camp site, we packed up and started to drive home. About 10 or so miles out of Moab, Mr. C and I started talking about all the cool things we'd seen and what else would have been awesome. That's when I mentioned Dinosaurs.... yup, dinosaurs. So what do you do when you have a car full of boys covered in red dirt and two spontaneous, impulsive grown ups... You pull a u-turn and head to the Dinos!