West - Day Three - June 25, 2005

It was another beautiful morning waking up in the desert. After a quick breakfast, I headed back up to Great Basin NP to take the tour of Lehman Caves. Having recently been to Carlsbad Caverns, I found this cave to be much smaller which made the experience more intimate. We saw beautiful cave formations - the standard stalactites, stalagmites, and soda straws - but also found two formations that are rarer in caves - shields and helictites. They don't know how shields are formed since they haven't found any that are still growing to be able to observe what is happening. They were fairly large and look just like a shield.

I finally departed to start the drive across Utah at 10:30 am PDT which rapidly became 11:30 am MDT when I crossed the border. I followed Route 50 through Delta and Salina before veering south on Route 24 towards Capitol Reef National Park. Again, the scenery was more remarkable than I expected it to be so there was always something interesting to look at and lots of twists and turns, not just straight highway (especially since I was not on the interstate). The weather today was more noteworthy....there were major storms in the area and they could be seen over great distances. I managed to avoid most of them until I approached Capitol Reef NP. I could see the major lightning strikes ahead in the distance and while I never ended up right in the middle of the storm, I could see the after effects as I drove through - lots of branches on the road, etc.


Capitol Reef is a giant fold in the earth that goes for more than 100 miles. It's hard to appreciate this from the ground but the aerial pictures in the visitor center were impressive. The colors here were dramatic - more so than even over in Arches and Canyonlands. It was a bit of a challenge to drive while wanting to look out the side windows constantly. The scenery was even more dramatic with the stormy skies above. Interestingly, the storms moved to the north so I didn't have to deal with rain while taking pictures.

From here, I worked my way continuing east on Route 24 to where it meets Route 70 and took that briefly to the turnoff to Moab. Having just been in Moab last fall for the bike trip I did, it was a familiar and comfortable place to reach. I didn't arrive until 7:30 pm so a long day of driving but with interesting stops along the way. And I began working through my second 'book on tape' - Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat". Drove a total of 419 miles this day. Somehow, I drove around the storms but they reached Moab as I was eating dinner at a restaurant in town - big claps of thunder and when I left, rushing water in the streets.