Trail to Peak: The Adventurous Path
Hiking, Exploring, Travel & Adventure
An Ode to Moab
“Hey dude! How’s the desert treating you?” asked our friendly neighbour, looking a little like Bon Jovi meets a wizened 1960’s flower child. He looked us carefully up and down, sussing out just what type of Moab visitors we might be.
Some people come to Moab’s desert to drive through Arches National Park, stopping to take photos of magnificent sandstone features and do short but satisfying hikes to the bases of awe inspiring arches and natural stone bridges.
They love the drive through this breathtakingly beautiful landscape from the comfort of their air conditioned vehicles, rolling along a smooth carpet of asphalt that unfurls before them, stopping and viewing canyons and rock formations at picturesque roadside turn-outs to their hearts’ content.
Some come to hike through the desert landscape, marvelling at the sand, the rock arches and mounds, the dwarf-like juniper forests, the cacti shapes and the tenacity of the extremophile animals, vegetation, cryptobiotic soil and microbial life that call this harsh environment home.
Some come to paint the incredible palette of the desert here: the rusts and coppers, the magentas and soft purples, the dark charcoals and light greys, the teals, sages and emerald greens, the oranges and the burnt umbers, the soft beiges and tans… and all those wonderful golds. The colours meld together so beautifully in the harsh desert light.
With fascinating shapes that lie in the rock pillars and towers, in the rolling waves of sandstone, in the skyward reaching stone arches and in the awkwardly twisted shapes in the dwarf forests of juniper, there is plenty of inspiring subject matter to paint and sketch. There are the contrasts of prickly pear cacti and the smooth, rounded mounds of sandstone, the jagged piles of fallen rock rubble and the massive, yet smooth cliff faces.
And then there is the artist’s conundrum: how to capture the sheer scale of the landscape in a way that does not overstate it, making it seem trite and trivial.
Taken at a local café, these paintings capture the patterns, lines and curves of this landscape in captivating, imaginative ways.
Some come to marvel at the depth and breadth of the numerous canyons of the area. With names like Dead Horse Point State Park and Horse Thief Canyon, you just know that there are intriguing stories to hear, and a wild west persona to experience. The canyons are cut deeply into the high desert plateaus and are astonishing in their breadth, depth and scale. Some argue that they’re best experienced on horseback (and there numerous outfitters ready to accommodate).
Some come for fossil hunting, searching out the fish fossils and the famous dinosaur tracks and bones of the area. And some come to rock hound, searching out copper and uranium treasures, searching for those delicate desert roses and marvelling at the way manganese creates a dark varnish on the stone of the cliff faces. They do this all while tromping about and exploring, first hand, the impact that salt has had in moulding, shaping and sculpting this landscape.
Some come to see and wonder at the ancient rock art, their imaginations captured by the Native American history of the area. The intricacies of some of the paintings, and the alien nature of some of the body shapes leave lots to the imagination.
Some come to explore the glory days of the wild west, or the second gold rush time, brought on by the discovery of uranium here around the time of WWII. Uranium is still mined here to this day.
Some come to peacefully raft down the mighty Colorado River…
…while others get their thrills jet boating up its course. Some come to zipline through the slickrock and skydive into the desert, catching their adrenalin rushes through the air rather than on the water or rock. Others come to peacefully pass through in hot air balloons.
Some come to climb, pitting their fingers, fists and bodies against the incredible cracks in the sandstone cliff faces. Cracks that might one day, a millennium down the road, become canyons. They shimmy up “chimneys” and they climb to the top of massive stone finger formations to balance, at quite a height, on a platform of rock no bigger than a chair seat.
Some come to do canyoning, scrambling over boulders, rappelling down waterfalls and plunging into pools in the deep recesses of narrow slot canyons. Yes, even in the desert.
One of the most popular reasons people come here is to drive jeeps, dune buggies and dirt bikes on sandstone that rises up out of the desert, like rolling waves of petrified sand dunes. Known as slickrock, the sandstone is anything but slick. It is grippy and textured. These people are here to pit man and machine against nature, to do the impossible on the steep and rugged terrain.
And some come for the Most Outrageous American Biking.
They get their thrills from tearing through the desert at great speed on curving singletrack trails with terrific flow, plunging into sand traps, thumping down bouldery drops, hurtling down the impossibly steep slopes of that slickrock and powering up the sandblasted and scoured mounds of sculpted rock, traversing their slopes at impossible angles.
Those last someones would be us.
As a post script… while we might think MOAB stands for Most Outrageous American Biking, there is a Mexican restaurant in town that serves pillow-sized burritos, named “Mother Of All Burritos” on their menu. We might’ve enjoyed those and their margaritas too…
If You Go…
- Moab is a busy town, especially around “Jeep Week” when the jeep enthusiasts descend on Moab in droves to ride the slickrock in massive convoys. This occurs in the week leading up to Easter, every year.
- The Moab area has been carefully developed with multiple users in mind. Jeep trails rarely share their paths with bikes. The trail areas have been developed separately, for the most part. Sometimes their paths do cross, or bikes need to travel along the dual track jeep ways for short periods of time… we have found (both times that we’ve been to Moab) that jeep users are very respectful of bikes and conscious of the dust they kick up and the effect that has on the lungs of riders. I distinctly remember a long uphill slog we did once where an entire convoy waited at the base, behind us, turning their engines off until we’d summited the hill. We’ve never felt pushed by the jeeps.
- Know that if you go during Jeep Week, everything will be busy. The restaurants, the grocery store, the gas stations…
- That being said, Moab is increasing in popularity due to the wealth of things to do and see and experience in the area. So book early, even outside of Jeep Week. There are plenty of hotels, some bed and breakfast spots and a few Air BnB places in town.
- Try to find a place with some kitchen facilities as the restaurant scene, while plentiful, is crazy busy…. even at 9 pm there are lineups. You might want to just eat in, after a long day on the trails. Know that the grocery store is crazy busy, but it has plenty of checkout counters open, so it’s not too unpleasant to shop there.
- The Moab Brewery has great food and terrific craft beer. However, like the town of Canmore, Moab is suffering from a labour shortage… it is hard for people who make service industry wages to live there affordably. As a result, the brewery, when we were there, was understaffed and had to have many of its tables empty, despite a lengthy line up at the door.
- Learn where the traffic lights are and use them. It is very difficult to turn left onto Main Street at many times of day.
- Campsites in the area can be very, very basic. There is a terrific rec centre in town that campers go to for the showers.
9 Comments on “An Ode to Moab”
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Trail to Peak: The Adventurous Path 
Great memories come to mind, and smiles envelope my face -as I look at your photos and read your stories. We’ve always used tents and trails when visiting southern Utah, there’s always been space available in state parks or BLM lands (beautiful spots, some 20 yds from the banks of the Colorado River) and grand overlooks in the state parks -the key variable always being adequate supplies of potable water. Thanks for the memories, Sheri… and the new ideas!
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You’re welcome! Those BLM lands, with their very lose restrictions, are quite something. We don’t really have anything like that in Canada that I know of.
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Looks like you guys had so much fun in Moab. You weren’t kidding about shortage of accommodation. I couldn’t get RV sites for all the time I want to be in Moab. So we will have to do some boondocking in BLM land while we are in the area.
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Good luck with that! It’s a pretty special place though, so once you’ve found your spot, you’ll love it there. When are you heading to Moab again? Is it soon?
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In 4 days. Right now we are about 130 miles south of Moab.
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Ok! I have posts scheduled to go up. I hope my petroglyphs one goes up before you leave there!
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It’ll go up May 11.
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Dang. If you weren’t already situated in one of the more beautiful places in the world I’d think you’d be fixing to move…
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Nope. Never. 😉 I love it at home. But this landscape is so out of the ordinary, it shakes things up a bit and makes it amazing to visit. Part of the enjoyment and the sense of awe and wonder comes from the novelty factor.
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