Having spent about an hour to navigate the 3 miles of the Dugway at 5mph to reach the top of the huge Cedar Mesa on which the Natural Bridges National Monument is located, we started rethinking our original plan of going all the way to Moab before calling it a night. It was getting close to 6PM which was the latest we could call in to cancel our reservations at the La Quinta, Moab. So, we thought we'll take a quick peek at the Natural Bridges National Monument and guage whether or not it's good enough for us to spend a bit of time there and stay over in Blanding for the night.
Worth it was. So, I reached out to my cell phone to call and cancel the Moab reservation. Tough luck. No bars - no signal. But eventually we found a pay phone outside the Vistor's center and we had a toll free number. So, I called up La Quinta around 6:15 and they were happy to cancel my reservation. No fuss about the 15 minute lapse. Woohoo! Now we can spend as much time at the Monument until it gets dark, since downtown Blanding was pretty close by; plus, we can always come back in the morning, if we really wanted to.
Since the sun already started to set, we couldn't get any decent pictures of the Natural Bridges though we hiked down for about 40 minutes to get up close to one of those before setting out onwards to Blanding.
The roads were pretty deserted so we could speed up a bit, but the area was FULL ofPrairie Dogs and we remember having stopped briefly to give way for a Caribou shortly before we reached the Monument. So, we decided to take it easy and cruise along at a slow pace.
We still can't figure out what's with these priarie dogs, but the moment our headlights would fall upon them hiding in their shallow burroughs, they would panic the hell out of themselves and rush onto the middle of road towards the car instead of running away into the fields. Duh! No wonder there were not so many cars driving out in the night in these areas. It's so sad that their panic and the intrusion of the highway traffic into thier homes is driving these creatures to extinction. It was depressing to see so many of these lying dead in the middle of the road run over by speeding cars. Click here for some coolPrairie Dog pix.
Not wishing to crush these cute little creatures to death under our tires ourselves, we decided to go ever too slow - like 20 mph on a 50 mph road. And even at such slow speeds, we really had to veer the steering hard to skip running them over for at least a couple of time that night. This routine would continue the next 3-4 nights much to our distress.
We ended the day in Blanding, Utah and set camp at the Four Corners Inn for the night.
Please visit my Blogger home at Ganesh Davuluri's profile for more travel photos and travelogues from our Utah trip and from our Chile trip.
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