Great Adventures

4/6/18 Moab - exploring Needles portion of Canyon Lands NP. The day started off with a visit to a great tourist trap Hole N The Rock. This is actually a 5,000 sq ft home that was carved by blasting, hand chisels and mining drills by a couple in the 40 & 50's. Originally it also included a dinner. Of course we took the tour of the home for $6 bucks each. Amazingly it was quite interesting. The "cave" took over 20 years to dig and is quite large inside with 7 to 8 ft ceilings as well as a working fireplace. The flue for the fireplace with drilled through 65 ft of rock. The home maintains a constant temp of 67 to 72 degrees year around. There is natural light into the home with two large opening in the rock, one natural and the other carved. There is no other heat source other than the fireplace.

Jeep was covered with license plates.

Now to the National Park at Needles

This was not adtually in the NP but along the way. The site date backs 2,000 years and is called Newspaper Rock It is a collection of petroglyphs all on one rock. No one really knows what the purpose of this really is, story telling or doodling??

Wilson Arch is named after Bates Wilson, the man largely responsible for the establishment of the Canyon Lands NP.

Wooden Shoe Arch

Sights along the way

Spring starting to bloom in the desert

The needles section of the park is a considerable distance and the best we could do was a long range picture.

Very different rock formations here in this part of Canyon Lands. Most of the rocks here are mushroom shaped or thin columns referred to as Needles

Interesting that this huge mushroom shaped rocks are sitting on top of a solid stone slab that is hundreds of feet in diameter. No idea how these rocks found their way to sit on top. Glaciers in theory were not this far south.

Camp site at a mushroom rock.

This is very large mushroom shaped rock with an very large overhang creating a cave-like condition. The overhang was nearly the entire circumference of the rock.