Anyway, we'll get to that in a minute. So this morning I got out pretty early and headed back to Arches, since 
it was honestly too late to see much last night. Arches is less well known than some of the other parks in the Southwest but honestly it has some of the most unusual sights of anywhere I've been. As the name implies, there are more than 2000 natural stone arches within the park, some keyhole small and some are massive. I went to a couple, but the more bizarre is called Landscape Arch. From base to base the span is actually 300 feet even though at some points the actual beam(?) is only about 6 feet thick. Apparently in 1990 a 180 ton slab of rock fell the few hundred feet to the ground, hence not being able to walk underneath it anymore. However, I was able to walk right up to it and honestly I think I stared at it for about 20 minutes. I mean, it just doesn't make sense...300 feet across, tons upon tons of stone, just almost floating there...just bizarre.
it was honestly too late to see much last night. Arches is less well known than some of the other parks in the Southwest but honestly it has some of the most unusual sights of anywhere I've been. As the name implies, there are more than 2000 natural stone arches within the park, some keyhole small and some are massive. I went to a couple, but the more bizarre is called Landscape Arch. From base to base the span is actually 300 feet even though at some points the actual beam(?) is only about 6 feet thick. Apparently in 1990 a 180 ton slab of rock fell the few hundred feet to the ground, hence not being able to walk underneath it anymore. However, I was able to walk right up to it and honestly I think I stared at it for about 20 minutes. I mean, it just doesn't make sense...300 feet across, tons upon tons of stone, just almost floating there...just bizarre.So after a couple of hikes I headed south to Monument Valley. Most of you have probably heard of it before, or certainly seen the area in movies. It's pretty iconic for Westerns and its really beautiful. Although they call it a 'valley,' its more of a flat plain with these huge red buttes that seem to just rise a thousand feet high from nothing. As you drive into the area too, you pass another iconic movie landscape, highway 191 about 13 miles north of the v
alley is where Forrest stopped running. It was pretty neat actually, because when you drive to the spot you know it automatically. I recognized it the second I crested over the hill. I had wanted it to be sunny and bright, but the weather wasn't exactly cooperating. It had been raining on and off, and that continued in the park. At first I was a little disappointed knowing that my pictures wouldn't quite come out as well as I'd hoped but as I was at one of the lookouts, the rainstorm changed to a thunderstorm. A desert thunderstorm in Monument Valley, thats something pretty unexpected and pretty awesome in reality. When you experience a thunderstorm on a desert plain, it looks
entirely different because you can see so much further. Hence I'd see four or five bolts every few seconds and some might have been 50 miles away. Although the photos might not be quite what they could be, I felt pretty lucky to experience such a rare event.
alley is where Forrest stopped running. It was pretty neat actually, because when you drive to the spot you know it automatically. I recognized it the second I crested over the hill. I had wanted it to be sunny and bright, but the weather wasn't exactly cooperating. It had been raining on and off, and that continued in the park. At first I was a little disappointed knowing that my pictures wouldn't quite come out as well as I'd hoped but as I was at one of the lookouts, the rainstorm changed to a thunderstorm. A desert thunderstorm in Monument Valley, thats something pretty unexpected and pretty awesome in reality. When you experience a thunderstorm on a desert plain, it looks
entirely different because you can see so much further. Hence I'd see four or five bolts every few seconds and some might have been 50 miles away. Although the photos might not be quite what they could be, I felt pretty lucky to experience such a rare event.So on to the really unexpected episode... I pointed the car to the next destination Carlsbad Caverns, NM. Thats not real close, about 550 miles. I knew that I wouldn't quite reach the whole way tonight but I figured that I'd get close. I had to drive through the Navajo reservation which is actually really large, it takes up a good 100 miles by 100 miles. Thing is, the road system there leaves something to be desired, but the GPS doesn't really know that. Well it was directing me and told me to drive from highway 59 to 591. Now 591 isn't paved, but it was really wide and seemed fine. I figured that it was probably just going to be for a minute or two so I turned. Well pretty quickly the road became more or less nothing, as in it became nothing more than a couple of tire tracks. I followed as per the GPS waiting to get back to a main road and then the sky opened up and it started hailing like crazy. So there I was no civilization in sight, driving on what could have been a ditch honestly with no cell phone reception. Not the brightest of moments. The GPS lost me and so I had to try to find my way back to an actual road. I'm pretty sure that I was actually driving on a riverbed for a few minutes and I almost got stuck a few times. Finally I found my way back to the unpaved but large road and just followed that until it got to something paved. Apparently I didn't do too bad because it actually had me saving time from when I turned off the road before. Alls well that ends well, but it could have been REALLY bad.
So here I am in Roswell, NM finally, about 100 miles from Carlsbad so I'll be getting up pretty early to see the Caverns then on to Texas!
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