One Last Epic Day in Utah

Our last full day in Moab we:

1) got up at the crack of dawn and drove into Arches one last time-- we hiked through the Windows region and saw a big-eared jackrabbit . . . for pictures, head to Captions of Cat;

2) drove through dirt, gravel, sand, and rock to Mill Canyon Dinosaur Trail and Copper Ridge Dinosaur Trail . . . Mill Canyon is the place to see a lizard sitting on a rock that contains giant leg bones of his long extinct cousin-- if a lizard could understand irony, would this be irony?-- and Copper Ridge is the place to see giant Diplodocus footprints right next to perfectly preserved Allosaurus footprints, you can see the claw indentations of the Allosaur and you can see where the herbivore made a sharp right turn, possibly to check out the lurking predator . . . this happened 150 million years ago but the footprints, pressed deep into the shale, look like they could have been made minutes before . . . kudos to our Toyota Sienna minivan for making it out to these sites, as the roads are suggested for only high-framed four-wheel drive vehicles;

3) drove out to Canyonlands National Park and hiked to the Mesa Arch, which sits atop a five-hundred foot cliff, and then climbed on top of Whale Rock, which offers panoramic views of the entire region-- you feel like you are on top of the world . . . and, as a bonus, the rock really does look like a whale, blowhole and all;

4) ate at the Moab Diner, which has great green chile verde sauce . . . I am sampling the chile verde sauce everywhere we stop, and this stuff holds up, though my favorite batch so far was at Snooze in Boulder, with a close second at Jilbertitos #1 in Glenwood Springs;

5) endured another dust storm, apparently whenever the weather is pleasant in Utah, it's not actually pleasant, it's foreboding.