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Excerpt from "Utah's National Parks" by Ron Adkinson and published by Wilderness Press Introduction When one tries to visualize Utah's canyon country, images of towering mesa's and buttes, sheer and colorful cliffs, and yawning defiles appear in the mind's eye. Canyonlands National Park's 337, 570 acres have all that and more. Within the vast and remote reaches of this magnificent park are two great rivers and the gaping canyons they have carved, broad and open desert flats, wooded buttes and mesas, a maze of serpentine canyons, extensive grasslands, woodlands of pinion and juniper, a rainbow of colorful rocks, and more than 100 square miles of slickrock fins, buttes, and spires. ...If one desires to avoid the crowds encountered in most national parks and enjoy some of the most majestic scenery on the Colorado Plateau, Canyonlands beckons. The park consists of three separate districts-four if one includes the rivers. Each is distinctly different than the other so Canyonlands is like three parks in one. Island in the Sky District The lofty, wedge-shaped Island in the Sky mesa juts south into the vast Canyonlands basin towards the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers. Two arms of this highland, rising more than 2,000 feet above the river canyons, diverge near the southern terminus of the mesa... ...Vistas are what the Island is noted for, and visitors will not be disappointed as they gaze over the entire length and breadth of the Canyonlands National Park and beyond.
The Needles District Some people consider The Needles to be the most beautiful district in the Park. The vast reaches of this large district contain a maze of serpentine canyons and tens of square miles of banded slickrock spires, fins, cliffs, buttes, bluffs, and knolls, all colored in shades of white and red composed of one of the older rock formations in Canyonlands-The Cedar Mesa Sandstone Vertical relief in this jumble of rock standing rock varies from a few feet to as much as 800 feet... ...From the rim of the Colorado River, broken cliffs and ruined walls plummet 1000 feet or more into the narrow gorge the river has carved. the oldest rocks in Canyonlands are exposed here in the depths of the great canyon.
The Maze District Many people have gazed out from the overlooks in the Island and Needles districts of the Park into the labyrinth of colorful slickrock canyons and tall pillars of red rock in the Maze District, but very few have braved the treacherous 4WD roads and long hiking trails to reach that remote beautiful landscape. Once lovely, the Maze is becoming a more popular getaway, but is still by no means crowded...The Maze is truly on of the "last best places" where the persevering and self-reliant will reap the rewards of their labors in one of the most rugged wildernesses in the nation... |