Toward Devil's Garden on a Snowy Day
It never got warm enough to melt most of the snow, although the sun did some work on the slickrock. I didn't draw today, as I thought I might--I'll save that for tomorrow. I headed out to Devil's Garden, at the end of the main road into the park.
The trail was shoveled out for about the first third of a mile. After that it involved trudging though the snow a bit. I wasn't wearing boots, so the footing was a challenge. Out by Landscape Arch the trail began to rise up onto sandstone fins. They've apparently re-routed the trail where Wall Arch collapsed this summer, just after I got here in August. I'll ask a ranger tomorrow, but it seemed as if the trail now runs up along the middle fin shown here, which would be a moderate challenge under good circumstances, and not possible over snow. I wanted to get another half mile or so along that trail, out where you walk up and along a series of fins overlooking Fin Canyon. Oh well. Another day.
Photographs just do not do the job here. Think of these as stickers or emblems for the real thing, which is so dramatic and capacious as to defy articulation. Here, a jet trail over the "Petrified Dunes," which aren't really legible in this image.
And finally a shot of a big old mesa, just give a sense of these things as architectonic masses on layer cakes of softer stone (at the very bottom).