We are at the start of our hike in Canyonlands National Park in Southern Utah. I'm standing on a sandstone outcropping looking at the trail from our camp. We are heading for those high sandstone towers in the back.
I am walking across ancient sandstone which has a lot of round circular pits in it. When it rains the pits fill with water and baby shrimp hatch in them. Right now they're dry but they're full of shrimp eggs from the last time it was wet. Originally they were from the ocean and they got trapped here when the ocean receeded.
We use stone cairns to find our way out here because it's easy to get lost. We call them 'ducks', like sitting ducks. My grandfather called them that, but I don't really know why? Do you?
The plants have a hard time here because there's hardly any rain. They grow in cryptobiotic soil. It's real hard and crusty. Bacteria and lichens are growing together to make it crusty. The crust keeps the soil from blowing away during windstorms and holds water so that plants can grow in it. One of the first things I learned was not to step on it. If you do, the soil blows away and it may take 100 years to form again.
Here's a Yucca plant growing in the cryptobiotic soil. It's leaves are like little knives. The indians made sandels and baskets and needles for sewing from the leaves. I wouldn't like to fall down on one. Once I fell on a cactus and got full of needles. My mom used adhesive tape to pull them out. Ouch!!!
Now, I'm in a cave looking out at the canyonlands. Pretty soon my dad and I will climb down the cliffs into the dry river bed below. It's like a big maze that we will have to find our way through.
This is me hiking along a cliff so that we can get down to the bottom of the canyon. It doesn't look too steep, but it really is kind of scary. We called one of these places 'scared Jean's pass' because our friend Jean got so scared, we had to put her on a rope so that she would feel safe. Another place we call the 'Crack of Doom' because you go right through the wall of sandstone towers in a crack, but you look down 100s of feet to the bottom. And, there's Dead Deer in the Crack Trail. We call it that because a deer fell into a crack and all you can see in there is it's skeleton. Poor deer.
On the way down the cliff, we find some neat places to rest in the shade. I'm sitting in a hole in the side of the rock. It was worn away by sand, ice and rain.
We climbed down the cliff and now I'm walking in the wash at the bottom of the cliff. It used to be a river, but now it's dry. When it rains, it will fill up again and it will be dangerous to be in. Once when it rained and we had to climb to a high place and wait. There's no water now, but you can tell that there is water below the sand because you can smell it.
When we hike, we see lots of things, like bleached animal bones, flowers, cactus, pieces of indian pottery. This piece might have been a pot that they kept water in. We leave it there in the wash for other people to see.
Barrel Cactus: 
We even found a black widow spider's nest. My dad likes to take a piece of grass and touch the spider web so that the widow will think she has a meal and come out for a visit. I think she's beautiful but don't look unless you can take it! She has a pure black body with a red hourglass on her belly. She's poisonous, but she stays in her web and doesn't jump out at you or anything. If you leave her alone, she'll leave you alone.
And we find really neat indian ruins under the cliff ledges where it's shady and were there would be shelter from the rain and snow. We don't go into the ruins because it would break them down faster and one day people wouldn't be able to see anything but a pile of stones. Here's an art photo of another ruin.
The indians here are called the Anasazi -- but they've been gone for 500 years. They left handprints and pictograms of animals and spirits on the sandstone walls.
In some places, they build really big stone citys. This one is called Mesa Verde. Here's another picture of Mesa Verde.
They grew corn in the washes and you can still find little corn cobs left over from 500 years ago. They used stones to grind the corn into flower.
