My third trip to Moab. If I could fly directly into Moab, I would probably visit every year. Instead, the closest major airport is Salt Lake City, yielding about a four hour drive to get in. Since it's also a four hour flight, it pretty much kills a day for travel on either end of the trip. Too bad, because Moab has so much to offer I could spend weeks. There are two National Parks within shooting distance, one just outside town, so hiking is de rigueur. It is a mountain biking Mecca -- I am barely a dilettante mountain biker but on my second trip there I spent multipole days on the trails to the point of exhaustion. You can rent those ATVs (or they call them OHVs now I think) or jeeps and barrel or crawl around some very remote backcountry. Rock climbing -- you bet. Moab correctly bills itself as America's outdoor playground, and they ain't kidding.
That's not to say it's without issues. A visit to Arches National Park highlights just how busy it can get. Arches is one of the most popular National Parks, and visitors have doubled over the last few years. By late morning, waits to get into the park are over and hour. Wait times in excess of 2 hours have been clocked. It's easy to see why. Arches is chock full of 1-3 mile hikes to, well, arches, of all shapes and sizes. Magnificent red rock formations everywhere. It is paradigmatically beautiful and something you can do without any particular skills or athleticism. Families abound. The flagship hike is a three miler round trip to Delicate Arch (uphill there, downhill back). It's a wonderful hike, but you will not be alone.
When a National Park starts to get too busy, something has to be done. At Zion, once the season starts, they institute a shuttle service. You can drive in the park, you have to park your car and take the (free) shuttle anywhere in the park. It sounds inconvenient, but it works very well. Arches is planning on taking a different tack. They are going to have scheduled entry windows. You will have to reserve your entry window ahead of time. It will be interesting to see how this will work out and how behavior will change to accommodate it.
I will make an unpopular statement. Price would be another way to modify demand. Some of these parks could use surge pricing of some sort to smooth the demand curve. That would be grossly unpopular, but it would almost certainly work in an economic sense. For the time being, most parks are in the $20-25 range for a three-day pass. The deal of a lifetime is $80 for an annual pass that gets you into any park, anywhere for a year. I picked one up in the Everglades and I intend to use the hell out of it.
Politically, the Park Service itself is peopled by folks who wear their Progressivism on their sleeves, thereby righteously alienating half their customers with the tone and tenor of their displays and discussions. On the other hand they take hits from the Left because there are not enough black people as either rangers or visitors. They make enormous land grabs against the wishes of State and Local interests because they see themselves as a bulwark against evil corporate polluters, yet they can't afford to manage the land they have and can't raise prices without making the parks even richer and whiter. In short, they are a thoroughly contemporary institution.
And yet, despite the crowds and the controversies, they are wonderful. Spending time in a good cross-section of them should be on your to-do list for life. I'm glad I have been able to to that and hope to continue. If they want to charge me to line-skip like Disney, I'd happily pay the cost.
Like they ask at the beginning of every Tough Mudder, "When was the last time you did something for the first time?" Well for me it was the next day, when I went whitewater rafting. The Colorado river is the essential water source for the entire Southwest. I have seen it in various places -- Lake Havasu, Lake Mead, through the Grand Canyon, Lee's Ferry, Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam, through Canyonlands and Moab -- but this was the first time I would actually ride it.
For a daily whitewater trip from Moab you generally have two options. One is the Fisher Towers stretch of the river, maybe 20-30 minutes out of town. This has Class II-III rapids and is a great family adventure with opportunities to swim and picnic lunch. A bit more intense is a trip through Westwater Canyon, which Class III-IV. The Fisher Towers trip can be done on a half day basis, but Westwater is a full day affair. Of course, I chose Westwater. You will take a bright and early tour shuttle nearly to the Colorado border to put in. The first half of the day is generally easy floating along with some light rapids. You stop on the banks for lunch and once you put back in, you get to the bigger stuff. You will get wet. You might fall in. It's like a series of short choppy roller coaster segments in a water park.
River rafting is truly a good time, although guide-dependent. To navigate among the rocks takes skill and experience. Using oars, the river guide directs the raft to the most propitious channels. He (they are exclusively men as far as I saw) is also you tour guide, and social director. There will be 8 people in your raft and for the course of the day you will be close friends. The guide needs to manage the personalities as much as the river. If you had fun, you should tip big.
I got a big kick out of rafting and I hope to do it again, maybe an overnighter down a more challenging river. I'd also like to try a paddle raft where everyone is involved in maneuvering. It goes on the list for future trips.
The last day in Moab was a jeep tour up through the backcountry of Canyonlands National Park (CNP). The first time I was in CNP, nearly a decade ago, I remember as I was leaving the park looking off to the left and seeing a steep jeep trail of switchbacks going down into the canyon and thinking how cool it would be to take that back to town instead of the highway. Well, I finally got to that trail (called Shafer trail) but this going up instead of down. From just outside Moab there is a road called Potash, which, not surprisingly, runs past a Potash plant. It runs, like many things in the Southwest, along the Colorado river for a while, passing a huge red rock wall on one side with elaborate petroglyphs, then turns into the a canyon jeep trail.
Interesting story: Along the way you note and enormous excavation site. This is the location of a former uranium mine. Many years ago, when the price of uranium dropped, the mine shut down. In time people came to the conclusion that the leftover dust from the mine was getting into everything everywhere and potentially responsible for a number of cancer cases. So there is now a 300 million dollar effort underway to literally dig up all the dirt, load it on to trucks and ship it out in railroad cars to a place 30 miles north, where it will be dropped in a hole and covered with some concoction of shale and sand that will prevent it from contaminating the planet. The things we get ourselves into.
Alrighty. Further up Potash Road you come to the actual potash plant, which given the state of affairs, has to be one of the most closely environmentally monitored facilities imaginable. After that you come to the trail proper. The first thing to note is that however high you think you are you can still go higher. You can inch your way up the trail to magnificent overlooks (including the spot where Thelma and Louise went into the "Grand Canyon") only to realize you've got a long way up to go.
Another thing you realize is how astonishingly stupid people can be. This is a real 4wd trail. In dry weather I might attempt it with 2wd, but I would at least want a high-clearance vehicle. You will however, encounter people taking their rental cars through -- just your basic Chevy Malibu -- causing untold stress and damage and, if you do get stuck, you might be looking at a couple of grand to get your car out. Also, if your rental car had a GPS tracker or you did any damage that was obviously from off road, it may be even more expensive than a tow. That rental agreement specifically forbids you from taking the car off road.
It is not hard to imagine how people get themselves into this. I am given to understand they are often foreigners who just think it's a dirt road until they get in too deep. Admittedly the only posted warning is a sign that says "High-Clearance, 4wd recommended" but there is no policing whatsoever. But the rock crawling is real, and the heights and cliff edges can be knuckle-whitening. You would think folks would turn back when they realize this, although maybe they just keep thinking the worst is over. It isn't. Whatever the case, if you make it through, there's a real sense of accomplishment to it.
And that was that, yet there is still more to do and see in Moab. Three times is not enough. I can't wait to go back.
