[This post is part of The Accidental Photo Adventure]
Arches National Park
“Welcome to your national park. Now go home.”
Yep, it happened. It’s October 1, 2013, and the new US federal budget didn’t get approved. In the most visible immediate impact, all national parks were closed. Apparently roads, overlooks, and campgrounds stop working without funding.
This was the scene at the entrance to Arches National Park in Southeastern Utah, with park rangers barricading the entrance and turning away traffic:
I’ll spare you a political rant, but I’ve been incredibly frustrated by the lack of common sense being applied – this almost seems designed to make the public irate. In many cases, more effort was being spent to deny access than just to allow it to continue. E.g., barricading and patrolling open-air monuments and memorials. Locking rest stop toilets that are literally nothing more than a toilet seat over a large hole in the ground. Among the petty actions, the National Park Service even took down its website, claiming it “wasn’t being maintained”.
Plan B
Anyway… we decided to hang out in the motel for the morning in case the politicians came to an agreement and the disruption was short-lived. As the day wore on, it became evident that we needed to make other plans. And so did other folks – by mid-morning, the area was already losing massive amounts of business; one hotel had 3 tour buses cancel immediately, costing 50% of their bookings.
We took the opposite approach and extended our stay by an extra night, holding onto hope that sanity would prevail and we could resume our itinerary. Meanwhile, we considered other activities for the next couple days.
Dead Horse Point State Park
As luck would have it, we’d passed a turnoff on the road to Canyonlands. It was for one of Utah’s state-run parks, and it had an entirely different vista of the canyons below – essentially, it overlooked the upper section.
And, boy, were they busy. By some accounts, they had 10 times their normal volume of visitors. I’m sure this was greatly influenced by their proximity to both the town of Moab and two major national parks.
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Intro | Day 1: Getting Started, Zion | Day 2: Zion
Day 3: Red Canyon, Bryce Canyon | Day 4: Capitol Reef, Canyonlands
Day 5: Dead Horse Point | Day 6: Monument Valley | Day 7: Grand Mesa
Day 8: McClure Pass, Aspen, Garden of the Gods | Day 9: Wolf Creek Pass
Day 10: Durango & Silverton Railroad, Albuquerque Balloon Festival
Day 11: Pre-dawn Balloon Launch, The End | Trip Prep | The Gear
FotoMomenti – My Comrade’s Portfolio
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Bit Twiddler's Rant 