Our next stop was the park visitor center, where we were two of only about six people browsing through the exhibits at 9:30 in the morning.
The rangers were excellent, and gave us a hiking itinerary that was both challenging and scenic, charting a route for us through the heart of the park’s most beautiful area. We packed up some food and a lot of water, and headed out for an 11-mile loop through “Chesler Park.” The trail included a fair amount of rise and fall, some of it through “slot” canyons that were so narrow we actually had to turn sideways to get through some of the tighter spots. The geologic character of the Needles is radically different from anything we had seen earlier that week, featuring colorful arrays of spires and thousands of mushroom-like sandstone formations called “Hoo-doos,” formed by eons of blowing, scouring sands. The landscape is literally breath-taking. These photos can’t hope to convey the vastness and tremendous numbers of these formations