Canyonlands: Day 1

We're Here (campground)

The Needles District was essentially our home base for this vacation. Though we did visit one other district, towns, and a whole different park, it was still the area we explored the most.

Day 1: Cave Spring and Slickrock

Cave Spring is an amazing first hike to do in Canyonlands. It follows a path through dense dessert plants, introducing you to varied species along the way. My favorite and most astonishing plant was the 'big sagebrush', not the most inventive name but pretty much calls it how it is. It huge sagebrush, standing taller than me, and nearly blocking out Kevin's line of site. Not to extraordinary maybe, but where we come from the sage brush tops out at about 3 feet. So obviously our assumption that life would be harder in the desert, not necessarily true

Anyway enough with the plants. The trail is red dirt to sand at times, when it climbs over the slickrock it is marked by cairns, small piles of rocks. Cave Spring Trail follows the edge of some rock formations, leading around to an abandoned cowboy camp, that still has many items left by the cowboys who once roamed this land with their herds. After the cowboy camp it continues to follow around to the Name Sake of the trail A small cave spring, on the walls are pictographs left before the cowboys by the natives of this land. Though its a short hike it has many features of most hikes at Needles, you climb two ladders, wind through dense brush, climb over slickrock and eventually find your car appear unexpectedly as you break through those big sagebrush. The loop is 0.6 miles and is extraordinarily easy.

Slickrock trail is a trail of astounding viewpoints and landscapes. As its name says its a slickrock trail, slickrock is a type of Sandstone as far as I can gather, called so because it becomes extremely slick when wet. Lucky for us it stayed completely dry for our trip and if anything was kind of grippy. The trail follows cairns all over the slickrock, this trail was marked fairly well and we didn't get lost once. Also on this loop are a four viewpoints that take short detours off the trail to scenic overlooks. We took all of them, they lead to great overlooks of canyons and gorges. Many times leading you to the brink of steep drops. We had our lunch at the third over look. the cairns end before you get to the precipice of the particular rock formation you are on, but we wanted a view with lunch. We climbed up a few more boulders and jumped (or were assisted over) a small chasm about 18 inches wide. Coming to an amazing over look of a gorge where we pointed out what rock formations looked like as one would draw pictures from clouds. We had lunch and headed back to the loop.

If cave Springs was an introduction to the terrain, Slickrock was an introduction to the geology. From each viewpoint a different and equally contributing aspect of the geology was seen. Mostly we learned that it was hot. We started the trail with hoodies and pants and by the end of the 2.4 miles we were in shorts and tanks, boys having abandoned shirts all together. We saw our first lizard on Slickrock and began our count. Jack also spotted a large yellow and black Daddy Long Leg and nearly died of fright, until we assured him it was a nice spider and wouldn't bite. Then he followed it for about ten minutes.