Three go wild by jeep! Moab, Friday

Friday 7th August Moab.

We all slept in this morning after a warm and windy night. But yesterday's showery afternoon had given way to clear blue skies and we watched the mountains soaking up the morning sun, as we had breakfast.

We had booked a jeep for the day, but it took a while for us to get going and by the time we got to the Jeep place there was a queue, consisting of three excited young women and five voluble Italians who were hiring three jeeps between them with endless questions and translations and going-over-that-bit-again. I fidgeted in line and one of the rental people kept apologising and re-assuring me that he would have us on the road quickly.

Half an hour later I was looking over a pumped-up, soft-top Jeep Rubicon with big tires and a show-off paint job that was to be ours for the rest of the day. Until that is, we spotted that it had a broken shock absorber. The Italians and teenagers had already made off in the other jeeps and it looked like the off-road experience we had booked six weeks ago was going to end in the parking lot. The nice rental guy rang another outfit though who had one left and within another half an hour we were heading towards the mountains in a bright yellow jeep with fat tires.

Our route was to take us back to Canyonlands and along some of the tiny white tracks we had seen down in the valley floor from the mesa-top viewpoints the day before. To get there we took the Shafer trail, which was originally carved out by uranium miners decades before. We made for a Potash plant with its dazzling blue evaporation ponds, and then the road became a red rutted track and the fun began. The track twisted up the mountainside slashed with dried out washes and studded with boulders. We lurched and shook and Tom thought we were in a rollercoaster. He couldn't quite believe we were driving up a mountain. Nor could we frankly and sometimes we weren't entirely sure that the track we were on was actually a track, but feeling utterly in the midst of this giant wilderness was intoxicating.

We lurched and bounced ever-upwards, until all of a sudden we were skirting one of the ledges half way up to the great plateau. The river was a thousand feet below and the plateau was a thousand feet above us. It was a white-knuckle ride with only a few feet between our wheels and the crumbling edge of the track. Naturally it was during one of these teeth-gritting stretches that Tom piped up with "is it my turn to drive now?".

We made a diversion to a stretch of the White Rim Trail which cuts seventy miles through the desert and takes at least two days to drive. We did four miles of it along an ever-narrower track scratched out of the side of the cliff-face. We stopped at a natural arch overlook and PT and I got out of the jeep with wobbly knees, our mouths moving but no sound coming out.

We re-traced that bit of the route and of course we met other vehicles coming in the other direction which meant we had to push into passing spots on the VERY EDGE OF THE CLIFF. It was fine, really. There were literally several inches of rubble between us and certain death. Then back on the trail which became a series of steep switchbacks taking us to the top of the plateau. The view became ever more jaw dropping, with the horizon stretching further and further as we lurched our way up the rock face. Then we were at the top, on what felt like a mirror-smooth asphalt road, leaving the park.

The way down was on the Long Canyon trail, and soon we had left the tarmac and were going steeply down a sandy track with the canyon walls just a few feet away on either side. Round a corner and there was an enormous long boulder which had fallen across the track many years before - leaving just enough room to drive under the bit that was leaning against the cliff face. All too soon we were rejoining the road to Moab with a brief diversion to put our hands in some real actual dinosaur tracks.

We had the jeep for 24 hours so after a supper stop we headed back out to another trail to watch the sunset. We climbed up through great waves of slickrock for about fifteen miles before turning off onto a sandy forest trail to the plateau rim. The view across the broad valley below was stunning; the evening light illuminating buttes and mesas for miles and miles. We all ran around in the boulder field at the top for a while before winding our way back down the track. The sun set in front of us, burnishing all the slickrock a soft salmon pink. And so back to the now closed rental place, where we washed off the jeep and put the keys under the mat, picking up our RV for the short drive back to the campsite. We did about eighty miles off-road and it will be one of the great memories of this trip.