After spending a week together for the race, we all went our separate ways. My friends headed home, and I headed over to a campground in Moab where I’d rented a little cabin for the next 6 nights. The cabin was tiny, with not even enough space to unroll my yoga mat. There was a bed, a bathroom with about 18 inches between the toilet the shower stall with no elbow room, one sink to double as the bathroom sink and the kitchen sink, a little fridge and a microwave. The room had one of those fold out tables that you can’t take any weight so you can’t really lean on it but the campground had good wifi which was great since I did have to work while on the road.

On the first day I got out to Arches National Park in the early afternoon. I learned that the afternoons are better for park access because the crowds all go in the morning. With having to put in some hours at my “desk”, that worked well for me. It felt so wonderful to have a sense of familiarity in the park. Even though we’d only driven through one afternoon last year, I had my bearings and had a plan. The goal for this afternoon was just to walk Park Avenue – strange name for a trail in the desert.

Arches, like all that surrounds it, is nothing short of magical. The views, the grandeur, the timelessness of it – it’s a lot to take in. There are a number of pullouts to stop and take in the views. One of my favourites is the view of the La Sal Mountains. In one direction, the mountains are off in the distance with this vast red landscape stretching from your feet seemingly all the way to the mountains. And in another direction there are the sandstone giants. It’s quite close to the entrance, so most people drive by in search the for better known attractions in the park. There’s a sign at this spot with a quote from a book by Terry Tempest Williams that reads “Perhaps this is what I desire most, to sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone …”

Perhaps this is what I desire most, to sit and watch the shifting shadows cross the cliff face of sandstone …

To take the time to observe the sandstone, watching the light change and the colours deepen, the shadows shift and feeling the wind on your skin is almost spiritual. All this wonder you get to soak in in the 15 or 20 minutes you stay in one spot gives you pause to contemplate the millions of years that these rocks have stood here, being reshaped and shifting in impossibly small increments. The wind does its part, as does the rain and the snow, the water the freezes in cracks widening them bit by bit. The recent cold spell meant all this was happening somewhere out there right this second. I am captivated by the impermanence of it. It’s impossible to grasp all that is occurring in that moment, and will continue to happen as I drive away and for hundreds of years to come. With our short 80 year human life span, our perception is too limited to even begin to grasp the timespan that has formed what lays before me, and how it will change in the next hundred years, the next thousand.

Park Avenue, is a short trail that meanders back towards the Park Avenue Viewpoint. In one spot a huge boulder hangs in balance between two eroding walls. Pondering when that boulder might shift, it again brings up the impermanence of it all – even when it’s carved in stone.

Over the next week I ticked off a bunch of the arches in the park, hiked to the Morning Glory Bridge from the Grandstaff trailhead, spent time at Canyonlands and an afternoon pedaling at Dead Horse Point State Park. On each adventure you are overwhelmed by stunning views of canyons and paths that take you along the most spectacular rock formations.

While I can’t grasp what it even means for these layers to have been deposited 300 millions years ago and then carved out by the rivers that still flow there today; it’s wonderful to contemplate.

Just north of Moab there’s easy access to one of the many sites with dinosaur tracks. The tracks are estimated to be 100 million years old and were left when this area was a delta that would have stretched from the Mississippi all the way north to Alberta. A crocodile slide is also visible – and now it’s a desert. To stand where another life form stood 100 million years ago, to stand in a desert that was once a river delta is awe inspiring. What will be here 100 millions years from now?