Grand Staircase - Escalante and Arches!

We leave Bryce Canyon bright and early, as usual (!), and start our long drive into the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument (created by Bill Clinton against much local opposition by Utahians or whatever they're called). The road through the park is amazing, incredible views over canyons, gorges, mountains and so forth. Of our whole trip, this is the place that has Brian saying, "We have to come back here!" Behind Emilie, in the photo above, are Capitol Reef, Arches, spires and hoodoos, cool chasm canyons, high mountain aspens, and more picturesque pieces of the red rock American West than you can shake a stick at.



The road also takes us through Capitol Reef Park, with dark red reefs (falaises)



Until we finally reach Arches. Oh, who does not love Arches? Well, certainly Utahians are proud: they have it on every license plate!



The price to pay for such popularity is that the park is very crowded, especially, guess what, on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend... We still catch a couple of views without too many baseball-capped heads,



and opt for the quieter walk far from the main arch rather than lining up with all the tourists to have our picture taken under the arch


(yup, we love a good zoom).



We also take a glimpse of the Landscape Arch, which is in danger of crumbling any day - the beauty of arches also come from their ephemerality.


And we catch our one and only western sunset



We leave Arches and enter Colorado at night (hence no picture) and this is where our luck in finding great spots for the night stops abruptly. Between 10pm and midnight, we stop at every motel in Grand Junction (there's a championship game in town, all rooms are rented out to the teams and fans); Parachute and Rifle (no kidding, theses are real towns!) where all the rooms are booked by truckdrivers and temporary workers from the booming natural gas fields; and Glenwood Spring, a very touristy Rocky Mountain town where, on a Saturday night of a long weekend, guess what... everything is booked! We finally find a room that is not a complete ripoff and collapse around 1am, cursing our disorganization and failure to foresee that we'd have trouble after being warned so many times.