Utah - Canyonlands

To quote the Rough Guide to the USA, Canyonlands is "a bewildering tangle of canyons, plateaus, fissures & faults, scattered with buttes & monoliths, pierced by arches & caverns and penetrated by a paltry handful of dead end roads." The 527 square miles of the Park are split into 3 major sections & the entrances to each are 100 miles apart. In other words, you can't expect to see it all in a day - but we did what we could! We visited the Island in the Sky which looks out over 100s of miles of "mesas" that drop in 2000 feet steps to the Colorado & Green rivers. It was dizzying at times to look down & we caught only glimpses of the water. We had the place almost to ourselves. One of the trails that we followed took us to the edge of precipice, where we sat in almost perfect silence for almost an hour (quite a feat for Howard!) as we looked out over a seemingly never-ending wilderness. It was immensely peaceful. To cap it all, the day was brought to an end by a smouldering sunset spread across the horizon.