Canyonlands National Park

    Canyonlands National Park is located in south-central Utah and is broken into three main parts due to the Colorado and Green rivers meeting inside of it. Since we had just visited Arches, we could only get to the Needles district without backtracking across half of the state.

    The Needles district is named after the prominent spikes of rock that line the tops of the canyons we drove through to get to the visitor center. It's a popular destination for four-wheel drive vehicles, but we didn't feel like getting a flat in the brutal heat so we stuck to the main road. To be honest the scenery seemed a bit repetitive after all of the Great Basin desert we had been traveling through.

    The highlight of the park was a small stop on the way in. The site is called Newspaper Rock and it contains petroglyphs from ancient paleo-indians, more recent tribes and even some pioneers scratched names and pictures into it. It was fun to see all of the varying stuff and nothing overlapped so it seemed like each person just wanted to add their mark.