Canyonlands - The Needles lower portion

After nearly getting blown off of the Needles overlook, we headed down into the canyon to get a bit more unclose and personal to the structures.  

This display is about 40' across and 20 or so high - full of ancient drawings!

The road to the visitors center is 32 miles, so you have to want to get there! You do however pass by Newspaper Rock, a national heritage site.  This rock has dozens of petroglyphs on them!

This drive also takes you through a corner of Bears Ears National Monument, but with all the cool structures close together, one doesn't realize where one park begins and another one ends!

We are pretty sure this is called Sixshooter, the Southern one, within Bears Ears Nat'l Monument.

Note the car on the second curve for scale. This wall is impressive!

Once again, some of the rock structures are pretty amazing.  Being at the base certainly gives a person a better sense of scale, to some degree.  Until a car passes, or a person on the trail ahead, it's really hard to determine the size - trust me, they're big!

The needles structures are recognized by the white striping that runs through most of the formations in this area.  There is a high concentration of it in this area, but we also saw this in Arches and on other drives in the Moab area.

The balanced rocks and hoodoos are all over the place, certainly around every corner!

As Tom was waiting in the air conditioned truck, I circled around the loop at the end of the park for some photos.  This cheeky, young raven was begging for a snack.  Unfortunately, we saw several people tossing food their way so the bird isn't going to leave the area.  

Canyonlands has a numerous amount of it's own arches, this Wooden shoe arch is one of the smaller ones. 

A selfie with the DSLR!  

This is the historical display of a camp at Cave Springs.  It shows both recent - cowboys and a much earlier area of indians having lived under the large overhanging stone. 

The view from on top of the overhanging stone.  This trail starts back at the 'cowboy' camp, around the overhanging rock, then up two ladders for a bit of scrambling before you get to this point.