Oh The Things We Find! 06/26/20

Portal RV Resort, Moab, Utah

(A malicious man’s) malice may be concealed by deception, but his wickedness will be exposed in the assembly. ~ Proverbs 26:26

There were several interesting discoveries today! We love it when God takes us on a tour of the unexpected! I’ll leave it to you to decided which was the most interesting. 😊

First up, Wilson Arch. It seems to be a popular destination, as there were several cars in the parking lot, and people all over the rock when we arrived. We had to wait to take our turn at picture-taking.

We’ll come back to this, but we certainly won’t have any trouble finding it! : )

Not the easiest trail we’ve been on.
It was a bit slippery because of the sand, plus we were wearing tennis shoes instead of boots.

We made it! Now to wait for our picture time.

We went exploring around the top, away from the crowds . . . .

. . . . and when we returned, there was no one around! Bizarre!

Walking down seemed a bit harder than going up, but we made it. : )

On to another arch. This one’s called Looking Glass Rock. Are you getting tired of looking at pictures of holes in rocks yet? 😊 This one held a surprise for us! It was also too difficult for me to get all the way up to. I can do many things, but climbing up steep, slickrock just makes me very nervous. I seem to picture my feet slipping out from under me and doing a face-plant onto the rock, or sliding down into a precipice of which there’s no return. Silly, I know. But now you know my weakness.

Even Blaine had to rock climb here. It wasn’t possible to walk upright.

It didn’t go quite so easily for me . . .
But I know my limits, and once I reached it, I stopped and waited.

Look what I found while I was waiting!
I don’t know how they made it raised, but it seemed pretty appropriate at the time. : )

I’m not sure what you would call what these college-aged kids were doing, but they seemed to be having a wonderful time! Blaine sat and watched them, and I sat on the rock in a safe place and listened to them whooping and hollering. I couldn’t see them from where I was.

So here’s what Blaine found on the other side of the arch. Do you see it? Him? The guy swinging from the rope? They’d leap off the ledge, swing around, slide down to the ground and then take the rope back up so the next person could have a turn. Crazy people!

Later, as we walked around to the other side of the mountain, I was able to watch from the safety of the ground. 😊

Gotta go down before you can walk around.
This is my favorite mode of transportation in situations like this. : )

There they are!
That’s a girl on the rope now, and just before I got my phone out to take a picture,
she was – – – believe it or not – – – hanging upside down.
On purpose.

Their rope is dangling down through the top of that rock with the hole in it.

Blaine decided to take a drive on down the sand and gravel road, just to see where it would take us.

There’s a few houses and a bunch of solar panels over there. Wonder what they’re doing out here in the middle of nowhere??

This was our lunch view today. Once again, we ate in the front seat of our Jeep because of the hoards of gnats wanting a piece of us. Nice view though! Those are the La Sal Mountains. People ski up there in season, and there’s still some snow left.

And what a place we ended up in! We turned up at Needles Overlook! Blaine had originally thought it would be too far away, but here we are! And what a spectacle it was!

We took a zoomed all the way in picture of Six Guns, but it was horrible (too far away), so I just marked where it is. It still looks exactly like it does in the information board picture.

We are 2000’ above the canyon floor!
I always look over the edge from a safe distance. : )
Despite how one of the next pictures look!

I’m quite certain I’m not as close to the edge as this picture looks!

Beautiful patterns in the barricade sandstone!

Such a marvelous place to sit! So still and quiet! A rare find!

Interesting platform. Wonder what they use it for?
We originally thought maybe telescope viewing, but there’s no way to get up there.

Maybe it’s just for what Blaine’s using it for – – shade.

An odd place to tuck away a bench, but when shade’s at a premium, you do what you can.

Heading back, and we watched as interesting clouds were forming.

Looks like rain up there, but we never saw a drop.

Remember the picture from our drive to Needles that had the solar panels and houses in it? On the way back, we turned up the road to check them out and try to get a better picture. You have to realize, these houses are literally out in the middle of nowhere, and yet they seemed like nice places.

Imagine our surprise when we discovered the houses were built up against the rock mountain! I don’t mean like the mountain was their backyard, I mean only half the house shows because it’s tight up against the rock and most of the house is inside the rock – – like a tunnel house. It was the most unusual set-up we’ve ever seen. And there were kids around, jumping on trampolines, etc. and gardens, and more solar panels and . . . . it seemed to be a regular self-contained community.

Can you believe that?!?!?
And you can see how the chimney smoke is discoloring the rock above.

So I Googled it.

I typed in “community on 8-mile road moab” (8-mile because that’s the name of the road we were on), and voila! I discovered it’s a Mormon polygamy community! There’s an entire article on how they live, but here are the interesting highlights from theatlantic.com:

A small community of fundamentalist Mormons, about 15 polygamist and monogamist families, have established a unique home for themselves, living in modern homes literally carved into the side of a massive sandstone rock in the desert south of Moab, Utah. Rockland Ranch, informally called “The Rock,” was founded about 35 years ago by Robert Dean Foster, who set out to create a safe, remote space for a Christian community that embraced plural marriage. Large houses were built by using dynamite to blast caves into the sandstone cliff, then finished into relatively modern homes complete with running water, electricity, internet access, and more. Reuters photographer Jimmy Urquhart was recently invited to visit and photograph The Rock, and returned with these images, a rare glimpse into a unique Utah community.

Enoch Foster, a fundamentalist Mormon practicing polygamy, along with his first wife Catrina Foster and several of his 13 children from his two wives, enter the Charity House at the Rockland Ranch community outside Moab, Utah, on November 2, 2012. The “Rock” as it is referred to by the approximately 100 people living there in about 15 families, was founded about 35 years ago on a sandstone formation near Canyonlands National Park.

(The article had a better picture than the one we took.)

Catrina Foster, a fundamentalist Mormon practicing polygamy, brushes her daughter Christa Foster’s hair, 9, in their home blasted into a sandstone cliff.

Enoch Foster works in his kitchen with his first wife Catrina Foster and their daughter Evangelina, 1, the youngest of his 13 children from two wives.

All I can do it quote a Miranda Lambert song – – “It takes all kinds of kinds”.

Further down the road towards home, we found a remnant of another ‘rock house’.

Pretty disgusting, but amazingly, everything was dry. And there’s no mold.
Certainly a different climate than we’re used to in Ohio!

What’s he doing stopped out here?
Lunch break after a delivery to the Mormons?

On the drive out, before we stopped at Wilson Arch, we went past Hole n’ the Rock. Remember the picture from the beginning? Well, we stopped to look around on the way home. What a very interesting and kitschy place! It’s all free, unless you want to tour the house for $6.50/person. (Wonder if this is where the Mormons got the idea for their houses?) Anyway, we didn’t want to pay, so here are a couple of pictures I found on-line.