Island in the Sky portion of Canyonlands

Green River from Deadhorse Point

Our day started at Dead Horse Point State Park, which overlooks the canyons of the Green and the Colorado rivers. The point got its name since it narrows to 30 feet at one point, which allows the cowboys to corral the horses on that point. The legend has it that after selecting the best horses, one group left the rest to die of thirst on this point.
Then we went on to the Island in the Sky portion of Canyonlands National Park. This part of the park is 2000 feet over the two rivers. We went from viewpoint to viewpoint and each would get better. We took a hike to upheaval overlook. This part of the park looks different (colors are grays and browns) in soft hills then the rest. There are two key theories to what happened here: either a salt dome collapsed or a meteor landed here spraying this material around. The other interesting hike was to Mesa Arch, which has a beautiful view of Buck Canyon (the Colorado river canyon) behind the arch.

Shaffer Trail (1500 feet down)

We ended the day with a 4 wheel drive adventure, we descended the island on the Shaffer trail. Mary almost had a heart attack as we went down this very steep, mostly one lane, shelf road with a drop off of 1500 feet on one side. We descended along a good portion of this at less than 5 mph and were lucky that the 3 cars we passed were along portions where we had already pulled off for the view. Even when we reached the end of the cliffs, it remained and interesting road going through many washes and cliff edges as we passed by dry streams that led to the Colorado. We had seen this road from many of the viewpoints in both parks, and now we were on it. Well, it took us 2 ½ hours of driving to finally reach paved roads, but it was definitely a worthwhile trip that few take. We had dinner at Moab Brewery, the food was good and they had both a good amber and stout beer.

Colorado River along our drive