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Topic: Most Beautiful Places (Read 2 times) previous topic - next topic
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Most Beautiful Places
Yahoo Message Number: 19782
What a beautiful description! Makes me anxious to hop in Zoe and get going... Anyplace that makes someone wax poetic gets on my "must see" list.
I'm going to share a description of Dinosaur National Monument from a stop there last Fall that never made it to this list. Sarah and Mz Daisy are inspirational. The drive to the trailhead was in the RV since I don't have a toad and it was steep but not a problem.

From Dinosaur Natl. Monument, Utah

We'd been reading over trail descriptions and decided the most interesting in the "moderate" class was called "Jone's Hole."  It followed a creek down a canyon to the Green River, but it was a forty-nine mile drive from the Split Mountain campground....so we decided to go to Vernal tonight and camp in a private campground......instead of back to Split Mountain.

The drive out to the trailhead was itself spectacular....we climbed (drove up) a mountain to a high plateau where you could see great, towering, snowcapped peaks off to the Northwest. I'm not sure what they were, but I would guess that they were in the Uintas High Wilderness Area....where you have Gilbert, Kings, and Mt Evans, all well over 13,000 feet.

We came down from the plateau into a canyon at the National Fish Hatchery, the fish hatchery makes use of Jones Creek to rear trout.
We loaded up on water and snacks and camera and set off down the trail at Noon. The full length of the trail one way is 4 miles, but it doesn't loop and neither of us was up for 8 miles.
The weather was gorgeous, hot sun, cool breeze, almost chilly shade. The sky was intense blue and the light seemed to shimmer on golden leaves of cottonwood and aspen along the creek. The creek was like something out of a fairy tale, sparkling, lively, crystalline, full of movement, lined with rocks and cresses, little rapids, deep pools, secret fish.

The trail would follow the stream for a while, through shade and little meadows, then suddenly veer away and take us up to high desert areas of pinon pine, sagebrush and juniper: the air, rich with the smell of sun warmed resins. It's funny, when I pinch the sage or rabbit bush in my fingers and sniff, I think it's stinky, but walking a path surrounded by these aromatic desert plants  is like the very best perfume...I plunge into an intense hot pool of frangrance that wafts away a few steps farther on, only to resume in the next pocket of the sun's heat.
THe trail alone, with no other enhancements would have been enough of a wonder, but at about one and three quarter miles  we came upon pictographs, the best and most vivid I've seen! We took photos. These were quite vivid, amazingly preserved, considering they were probably painted between 3 and 4 hundred AD, and there were lots of them! I've seen the best rock art ever at Dinosaur.
Yesterday we climbed up a cliff trail to look at petroglyphs...these were quite spectacular too, but we didn't bring the camera....too much rock climbing to risk carrying a camera.
The last best thing about our hike today were the soaring canyon walls...in reds, oranges, and blacks...crowned and pinnacled, making the sky into an electric blue vault by contrast. I was constantly coming to a halt and staring upward, but like the redwoods, a photo won't do it justice....just hope my memory will.

Bonnie