Monument Valley & Utah

Heading north after visitng the Grand Canyon we took a small "dinosaur tracking"tour of a desert flat. There were loads of dinosaur footprints, fossils and we even saw a full size dinosaur skeleton in the sand. I was like "why isn't all this in museums, but reading about the area apparently there's tons everywhere and we did end up seeing more footprints on a walk later that day - they're everywhere!We'd both been well looking forward to seeing Monument Valley and, as you can see, it didn't disappoint. We camped at a campsite on a ledge looking over the national park on the first night and then took a horse trek into the valley in the morning. (You'll see in the pic we accidentally bought a junior tent thats even too small for me to lie straight in! But luckily it'll only have to do for a few nights!) Unfortunately the battery ran out on the camera before we got to the best bits on the horse trek! Nevermind. If you've been following my progression (!) I finally got to gallop on this trek! Quite a bit actually cos we wanted to get in as much of the valley as poss and there were only 4 of us on the trek. It tired us all out cos the heat was blazing. My white horse (along with my white shirt) had turned orange by the end.

After visiting a Navajo Reserve and seeing their crafts, later that afternoon we drove through Southern Utah to make our way north upto Salt Lake City. Totally unexpectedly it was stunning - we travelled through several plains and canyons (including The Valley of the Gods where Thelma & Louise was filmed) that had immense rock mountains and formations and some of the bizarrest landscapes - sometimes moon like. When we stopped and read a little about them, it was crazy to learn that some bottom layers in the rock were over 100 million years old. At one point we were walking along a ledge hundreds of feet up at a viewpoint when we spotted a big rock that had tide marks on it from when the sea had been at that level...! That and all the dinosaur stuff just makes you feel so insignifcant in the grand scheme of things...