A feast for the eyes in Eastern Utah

The bleak end of the trip, east central Utah near Green River.
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The drive from Green River to Blanding, Utah, gets two entries, because of the incredible transformation that takes place along the way.   The story begins as we leave Green River, which looks much as we described in our Desert Breakdown story: bleak.  At the highway level, there is a pale yellow veil of very sparse shortgrass, but most of what you see is the gray soil beneath it.  The cliffs and mountains in the background are also gray; there are bands, rock-strata that are various shades of gray, but it is still gray.  This is not a colorful desert.

Odd pillow-like rock, southeast of Green River.
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As we turn down highway 191, we could see darker mountains in the background ahead of us.  It was not until we had gone another 20 miles that we began to see the world change.  The dry, dusty flats near Green River gave way to tight canyons and a closed in feeling that us easterners would find familiar.  The colors, however, were new, and we found ourselves surrounded by dramatic reds and browns, and a lot more vegetative life than we saw to the north.  We were actually traveling along the southern edge of Arches National Park.  We did not stay in Moab, though we now know why the hotel rates are what they are there.

Doorway to the Canyonlands, north of Moab.
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As we entered Moab from the north, we crossed the canyon of the Colorado River, still narrow enough to throw a stone across.  Our brakes screeched, and we turned down the River Road.  We pulled over at a siding to look at the river, and see what we can see.  The shrubs were quite thick at the river's edge, but between them, we could see people in boats moving down the river.  We heard bits of conversation drifting in across the water, and the occasional clunk of a paddle against the hull.  The cliff across the river was red with black vertical discolorations down the face.  One great oval fracture, with a vertical black stripe down the middle, made it look like a great lizard eye peering down at us.

The rock gets harder, redder, and the world gets greener as you go south towards Moab.
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Upon entering Moab, we were greeted by a sign in front of the Moab Rock Shop.  It was a sign from a different age, when cars were still new, Burma-Shave pickets lined the roadsides, and families on vacation were summoned to various road-side tourist traps along the way.  And so, we made Moab a stop.

GT