Dear Jake & Amelia,
We headed for the campground at Dead Horse Point State Park, hoping for cooler temperatures at the higher elevation. We backed in between junipers and pinyons. The air was cooler.  The sky was overcast with heavy gray clouds. The canyon views were similar those from the Island in the Sky Mesa of Canyonlands.

We walked the Rim Overlook Trail. We came to the edge of the mesa. The ground dropped away not several hundred feet, but thousands of feet, straight down. We have stood at the edge of a number of cliffs on this trip. This edge was frightening. 

The canyons were beautiful. Layers of rock formations, purples, tans and reds, had been folded by water erosion into a complex pattern of jagged lines. The air seemed solid. Maybe we were looking through dust particles. The solid air and the flat light gave the illusion that the vast spaces were a flat plane. If you reached out you could touch them. But they weren't. The warmer colored ground at our feet dropped away into this vast nothingness. We hung back. This push and pull created a feeling of vertigo. We walked back to camp. We watched a beautiful sunset as the sun dropped beneath the clouds. That night it rained.

Nancy & Peter

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