Canyonlands, part 1

Can you believe that this place is only about 6 hours from my house but it has taken me 10 years to visit Canyonlands? It lived up to all of my expectations. Of course, we stopped first at Newspaper Rock, which I would re-name Archival Rock because I really don't expect to see new stuff up here each day.

We had two nights in the backcountry in the Needles District and because we had to carry all of our water, that was plenty of time. Here's our first campsite in Devil's Pocket. It turns out that the devil has a bunch of tumbleweeds piling up in his pocket like pocket lint.

 The highlight of the next day was hiking the Joint Trail. Joint means a gap between rocks. This part looks amazingly like a train tunnel:

 Then it gets narrower:

 Finally, we hiked out the end of the trail, then walked back above the trail to have a look. I'm sitting on the edge of the "joint" that I had just been hiking through a few minutes earlier. Amazing how straight, narrow and flat that trail is!

 Here's a nice panoramic of the Needles, overlooking Elephant Canyon. This is a sneak peak of our next day's hike.