After a nearly sleepless night due to crazy blowing winds and sand in my tent I crawled out to a still very windy and decidedly cloudy morning.  After cleaning as much of the sand out of my tent, sleeping back and teeth as possible, the wind was still blowing.  I decided to just grab breakfast at McDonalds, post my blog and head up to the park.  Cooking in camp would have been an exercise in futility…

So I headed up into Canyonlands National Park – Island in the Sky district.  The park is a vast formation of canyons and other amazing formations formed by the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers.  It’s split up into three districts that are each more inaccessible than the last.  The one I visited is generally the most accessible and was the closest to Moab.  The views are beyond any words that I could come up with – nothing short of awe-inspiring.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to take my word on this for the time being as I had a bit of an operator error with my camera.  At some point getting into and out of the car with the camera it seems I had unknowingly switched it to fully manual mode – which is fine if I had been paying attention.  However, I got lost in the views and was simply snapping away and I never review them until later because in the sun (ok it was cloudy today) you generally can’t see anything on the camera display.  After getting back to camp tonight I discovered that virtually all of my shots from today are uncorrectably overexposed…

So, since I have to drive past the park entrance on my way to Bryce Canyon tomorrow I think I will run into the park and try to capture at least a few images.  It will add a couple hours to my drive but I can’t leave here without some true visual evidence.  Pics to come!