Dead Horse was our starting point for a somewhat long day. To be honest we could not recommend anyone bother to visit it. The iconic view can only be glimpsed from a dirt road; not from any of the park viewpoints. The park is overpriced and only really good for mountain bike riders.

The rest of the day turned out fabulous. At Canyonlands Visitor Centre we listened to another charming National Park Ranger on the subject of cowboy poetry (weird but true). It was really good. Also at the talk were a pair of siblings from Oregon who told us about the wildfire raging which means they have to wear masks to go outside. The fire is the reason for the haze in our landscape photos 850 miles away. The ranger informed us (with a straight face) that everything over 50 years old is considered to be an antiquity and so is preserved (left alone) in National Parks – even a falling down piece of fence.

We followed this with one of our favourite walks – the walk is not in the newspaper and all you get from the Visitor Centre is photographs and a description of where the walk starts from. Apparently according to google, if you ask a Park Ranger for a trail by thr correct name, if it is a grade II listed archaeological site they are obliged to povide you with information. We had the stone cairn marked trail all to oursleves and it was on the side of a cliff. Impossible to see the false Kiva, but well worth it when we got there. A Kiva is a partly subterranean place of spirituality for the Ancestral Puebloans (pre-Native American Indians), but while this looks like one, it might not be. Unfortunately while still listed as an archaeological site it was publicised before it was excavated, so no proper survey has been done.
What a walk – we both felt like mountain goats as we made our way up to the cave with a stone circle. The acoustics are stupendous and we had thunder roaring round the cave.

There really is a trail in this picture

Still our day was not over and we drove off road to see 112million year old dinosaur tracks. The tracks are very fragile so we had to walk on the boardwalk provided. Even so, to walk where dinosaurs walked 112million years ago is just amazing.

Another fabulous activity filled day in the USA.