The alarm goes off at 4:30 a.m. Time to shower, get dressed, fill our water bottles with coffee from the hotel, and by ten to five we’re in the car, heading back to Canyonlands.

Our goal is sunrise. It was supposed to be a sunrise reached after a hike of over an hour, but the fatigue that had built up over the past few days and the lack of sleep led us to reschedule this experience for a more “achievable” timeframe.

It’s a quarter to six when we park at Mesa Arch, along with about fifteen other cars and an American family who yell at us because they thought we were park rangers.
After a few minutes’ walk, we arrive at the arch, which is faintly lit by the twilight and packed with Asian tourists waiting to snap the photo of a lifetime.

But we hardly care about the arch right now. We care about the sunrise. So we climb up beside it, settle in, pull out the cookies we bought last night at 7-Eleven and the coffee in our water bottle, and enjoy the perfect breakfast as a warm, radiant sun peeks over the horizon, illuminating a boundless landscape of canyons.
We spend nearly an hour admiring the dawn of a new day, the colors, and the endless sky above us.

We wait for the Asian tourists to thin out, take our photos by the arch, and walk back up the small hill to the parking lot. We then head back toward the park exit, but before reaching the hotel, there’s one last stop to make.

At a certain point, a narrow dirt road branches off from the main one. We’ve got some seriously rugged jeeps, so we hop in and spend twenty minutes bouncing and jolting along the dirt road through the steppe of the Canyonlands Plateau. “Asians definitely don’t make it out here,” we say to each other.

And that’s exactly how it is: at a certain point, the road ends and we have to continue on foot. By now, walking doesn’t faze us anymore, and the sun is still too low to warm the air—it’s absolutely wonderful. After passing a few shrubs, the plateau suddenly gives way, and there it is before us: Malboro Point.

It’s hard not to tear up in a place like this. A pair of monoliths rising in an endless valley, carved out by millions of years of water and air, cut only by the morning sunlight. We take photos, fly the drone, and silently contemplate the fact that all this wonder was underwater just a few thousand years ago—and how much more wonder still lies beneath the surface of our oceans.

But it’s 8:30 in the morning, and after our coffee, our basic needs are starting to kick in. We turn around and drive back to the hotel. A light breakfast and a power nap before we hit the road again.

We grab a quick lunch at the McDonald’s in Moab and hit the road heading north. We have almost two hours of driving ahead of us before our next stop. We stop at a quaint and wonderful Area 51-themed knick-knack shop, where we buy souvenirs and some dried worms to try.

We head toward Capitol Reef as the sky begins to fill with dark storm clouds. A fierce wind picks up, but that doesn’t stop us from throwing open the sunroofs and windows and racing out as soon as we find a dirt road. We pass by the Mars Research Center and climb what are called the Blue Bubbles, hemispherical hills with inexplicably layered colors. The view from the hills is truly spectacular, with bright reds and whites that, with the right phone filter, glow blue.

But that’s not all. Before we get to the hotel (and finally enjoy the pool), there’s one last spot you absolutely have to see—perhaps the most beautiful one so far.

It lies at the end of a white-and-yellow dirt road; it looks like a lunar landscape. Suddenly, the road ends, and an endless view opens up before us. There are no words to describe or even begin to understand what this landscape means—it is just silence, wind, and tears.
Our eyes don’t know where to look. Every color, every shade, every hill, rock, and monolith seems to come from an alien planet. It really feels like we’re on an alien planet. We take photos at the most terrifying yet liberating spot of the entire trip and get back in the car.

A few minutes later, and we’re at the hotel. At a decent hour, finally.
We finally treat ourselves to a dip in the pool, do some laundry, have dinner at the hotel restaurant, and wrap up the evening by finally sipping on some cocktail balls and a few beers around a small gas fire pit under the stars.