Rocky Mountain, Arches and Canyonlands National Park 8/11/11-8/19/11

The air was drier if not cooler, suggesting that the fall season may arrive again and not just be a fabricated memory designed to help me cope with the summertime humidity. The hike up Alum Cave trail will be my last ranger led hike of the year. The route has become as familiar as the living room of my home. Along the way I'm able to name everything from peaks to plants with relative ease. For the return trip, the heat and humidity has returned and my uniform pants begin to feel like a pair of greased skinny jeans made of wool-lined bubble wrap.

By 7PM Caitlin and I are on a plane, thankfully headed West towards drier air. We look out the window at the main ridge of the Smokies and have all the major peaks named within a few minutes. Gazing at LeConte, Cammerer and Guyot I think back on all the seasons of trips up and down their slopes. The Midwest landscape is too distant or cloud covered to see much until we begin lowering into Denver. In the late evening light its hard to tell what's a canyon and what's a ridge. The ground looks desolate and harsh and I wonder where the heck the Rockies are. When the plane touches down I'm finally looking at the Front Range. From this distance they are not that impressive, looking like the Chilhowee Mountains after a hit from an errant weed-eater stroke. Over the next few days I'll come to appreciate and respect these mountains much more. Two full days in Rocky Mountain National Park and one of the hardest hikes of my life will accomplish this fairly easily.

Looking toward the Front Range

Appropriately named "The Boulderfield"

Caitlin near the Summit of Longs, questioning sanity and possibly choice of husband

Summit View from Longs Peak

Our first 14'er

We spend the biggest part of Tuesday driving I-70 from Denver to Moab, watching the landscape change from mountains to high desert over several hundred miles. Our experience in the Rockies set the bar high, so Caitlin and I were prepared to be disappointed by Arches and Canyonlands. Despite triple digit heat and an unusually high number of foreign tourists in both parks, we enjoyed the clean and open space of the desert quite a bit... just not as much as the Rockies.

Side trip to Colorado National Monument

Landscape Arch-Arches National Park

Mesa Arch-Canyonlands National Park

Arches and Canyonlands are good all the time, but they are amazing for about a half hour around sunrise and sunset. They're best experienced in relative solitude, something we unfortunately didn't get despite how early or late we got out into the park. I'd like to see these places again on some Winter morning somewhere in the future.

The Windows-Arches National Park

Caitlin and our fellow park ranger/grad school buddy/vacation host Chris Stefanides

After a week of seeing nothing but incredible new country my suspicion was that the Smokies would've have loosened their spell on me. What I've found to be the case though is that home has taken on a newness itself. A week in the dry air of the West has allowed me to see the familiar from a different angle, in the same way we know light by dark.

Over the next few days I'll try and upload the rest of my photos to my picasa album if anyone wants to browse through them.