Dead Horse Point State Park, Utah

After being immersed in the fascinating and fantastical beauty of the sandstone, I was holding my breath to see what we would discover at our next stop, Dead Horse Point State Park. I have a confession to make. It is often a mystery to me exactly where our next stop will be relative to where we were. I know about how long it will take to get there and sometimes roughly what direction we're headed, but Martin and the GPS take over and I just settle in for the ride.   After leaving the Moab area we stayed down by the river until the magic “brown sign” for the park appeared. We went up and up and up and up and up! 2000’ up. Then came out on this mesa which at one end had a narrow neck before it opened up again. The edges of the mesa dropped 2000’ down to the Colorado River. And of course it's that river, the Colorado, that created so much of the typical southwestern geography, the fairly flat, level surface that suddenly drops precipitously into these massive canyon landscapes.

While we were there we ogled the gorgeous canyon, watched sun rises and sunsets, hiked along the rim, learned some legends regarding the name of the park and caught a moonrise at the infamous “Thelma and Louise Point”, a point of land jutting over the Colorado that was featured at the end of the  Thelma and Louise movie.  (We also spent a day at Island of the Clouds unit of Canyonlands NP, but I'll talk about that in an upcoming blog about Canyonlands NP)

On to pics!

Looking over the edge to the Colorado River 2000’ below.

As to the legends surrounding the name of the park ... they range from a herd of horses that were pastured up there, didn't have enough water and smelling the water in the river below, dove off the cliff trying to reach the water (by far the worst legend to contemplate) to a horse dying up there of natural causes to just a metaphor, by the time a herd of horses was driven up to the point, they were "dead" with exhaustion. Not an uncommon sort of name in the southwest. 

More views of the canyon below

a lone juniper 

Sunset pics.

The haze of evening

Sunrise pics

first light down in the canyon 

“morning has broken, like the first morning…”

more late afternoon haze

We took a drive one day. The valley was stunning.

The road followed along the edge of the cliff and at one point seemed to disappear. But no worries, it just went under the giant boulder. Haha!


Another day we drove down into the valley along the Colorado and hiked out to a couple of arches.

Corona and Bow Tie Arch from a distance. (It doesn't look that far, but there is no shade out there and there is a rather deep gulch in-between that we ended up having to scooch alongside.)

It was a fun hike, a couple of chains up steep parts,

and a ladder (for the steepest section).

Then, as we were just hiking away, this appeared in the sky. Apparently it is "paragliding with a motor and fan" that are worn as a backpack by the pilot and since we were on BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land it was ok. The pilot put on quite a show for us.

which included going through Corona Arch!

That's not the kind of thing you see everyday. 😲

On our way back out. I was struck by the visuals of these tracks, the lines; horizontal and vertical, the colors; blue, reds and browns anchored by the gray in the bottom right.  That set me on another tangent, building the railroads and what an accomplishment, what a feat of engineering, manpower and coordination that was.  I hadn't really considered how flat, even and straight the rail needed to be for the train to run on it and what that meant when you were trying to build it across the entire country. I'm sure I was taught in school and said yes I understood and gave the correct answer on the test, but I don't think I really understood, really knew, until I reflected on this section of the track. What gave us the confidence to think we could do that? And what an incredible accomplishment.


One afternoon we drove down into the canyon to explore.

A close-up of the Colorado

Contrails and reflection at sunset

We particularly wanted to get to this spot, Thelma and Louise Point for sunset. This is it, just to the right is where the pivotal ending takes place as Thelma and Louise in their car plunge into the canyon and river below. We were a few minutes past sunset when we got there but took some pics anyway. It was still pretty, just not the gorgeous sunset shots we had hoped for …

when, to our amazement … 

we saw … 

the moon starting to peek over the horizon.

Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time. 🧡


Next stop: Mesa Verde National Park 






















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