🏜️ Island in the Sky: What You Will Find

Island in the Sky is the northern one of the three districts of Canyonlands National Park in Utah. It is a mesa — a flat plateau at around 1,800 metres, standing roughly six hundred metres above the canyons around it.

The name fits. One road leads onto the plateau and it crosses a narrow neck of rock with a drop on both sides. Beyond it is a plain of several hundred square kilometres, from which only two drivable roads lead down.

The three districts of Canyonlands are separated by rivers and you cannot drive between them: from Island in the Sky to the neighbouring Needles district is over two hours by car, even though it is fifteen kilometres across the canyon.

Mesa Arch

One of the most photographed sunrises in Utah, and deservedly so.

The arch is small and stands right on the edge of the cliff. When the sun comes up it does not light the arch from above but from below: the rays bounce off the wall beneath it and light its underside red. It looks as though the stone were glowing by itself.

It lasts about twenty minutes. The walk to the arch is only seven hundred metres, so at five in the morning there are fifty cars on that small car park and a queue of tripods at the arch. People take it sportingly and make room for one another.

Grand View Point

The viewpoint at the end of the road, and the best overall view there is in the park.

From it you see the canyon system in three storeys: on top the plateau you are standing on, below it the broad white terrace called the White Rim, and only under that the canyons proper with their rivers, which from here are barely visible at all. It is exactly this stepping that distinguishes Canyonlands from the Grand Canyon — here you are looking into a maze, not into a single cut.

On the horizon are three ranges: the La Sal to the east, the Abajo to the south, and the Henry Mountains to the south-west, which were the last named mountain range in the territory of the United States.

Upheaval Dome

Upheaval Dome is a circular formation about five kilometres across. In its centre are rock layers standing almost vertically and chaotically jumbled, even though the surrounding landscape is made of layers that are very nearly perfectly horizontal.

For more than a hundred years geologists argued about its origin. One theory held that a salt dome had risen from great depth and pushed the rocks above it upwards like a giant bubble. The other supposed that a meteorite had struck here.

The decisive evidence came only in the early twenty-first century. Shocked quartz was found in the rocks — a mineral with microscopic deformations that arise only under the extreme pressure accompanying the impact of a large meteorite. Ordinary geological processes inside the Earth cannot produce such pressure.

Upheaval Dome is therefore now considered a heavily eroded impact crater around 60 million years old. It was originally considerably larger and deeper. What you see today is its central part, exposed by millions of years of erosion, which carried away roughly a kilometre of rock lying above it.

The White Rim Road and the Shafer Trail

Below the plateau runs the White Rim Road: a hundred and sixty kilometres of loop along that white terrace, all on dirt, only for off-road vehicles and mountain bikes. It takes two to three days with an overnight stop and needs a permit, because the number of campsites is limited.

You get down onto it by the Shafer Trail — switchbacks cut into the wall, visible from Grand View Point as a scrawl. They were built in the fifties for lorries carrying uranium ore; in the uranium rush Canyonlands was one large area full of uranium mines and adits, and many of today's tourist tracks are the original mine roads.

There Is No Water Here

You will not find drinking water anywhere on the plateau. The visitor centre has a tap in season, otherwise nothing — no springs, no stream, no restaurant.

The park recommends four litres per person per day, which sounds excessive until you are standing there at two in the afternoon in June. There is minimal shade on the plateau and the nearest shop is in Moab, forty minutes away.

On the other hand Canyonlands is far emptier than neighbouring Arches: around eight hundred thousand people come a year and most of them fit into two viewpoints on Island in the Sky. The park's third district, the Maze, is among the remotest places in the United States and getting into it takes a whole day even with an off-road vehicle.