Moab Trip

 Today I did a little exploring around the state of Utah and paid a visit to the city of Moab.

From what I saw Moab seems to be more of a tourist destination in Utah, since it is near a lot of popular hiking/biking trails, as well as a few famous rock formations such as the Red Rock Formations. I didn't do any of that during my trip, but what I did do was visit a couple of interesting looking locations that caught my eye when I looked up Moab in the first place.

The first was a location called Moab Giants. It is basically a Dinosaur themed park that you can visit and walk around for the day. The most famous part of Moab Giants is their Dinosaur Walk, which is a short circular trail that has life sized dinosaur statues dotting the full length of the trail. Most of the statues are of dinosaurs that used to live in Utah, so you get to see first hand just what kinds of critters used to live in the area back in the day. And as much as I love dinosaurs, I am not ashamed to admit that I am very happy we humans never crossed paths with some of these animals when they were alive.

Moab Giants also had a little museum that included a look out tower to give you a view of the surrounding country side.

These reconstructions of both a modern day Paleontology lab, and a lab from the 1800s when dinosaurs were first discovered.

As well as a statue of what ever this thing is. Don't ask me what kind of dinosaur this is supposed to be I have no idea. But it was too wonderfully ugly to not want to take a picture of.

The second location I visited was Moab Museum which held artficats from the Native American tribes that used to live in the area, to stuff left over from the first settlers that decided to call this place home.

I think the most interesting thing about the museum to me was a small section that talked about how Moab apparently saw a bit of a boom from the early to mid 1900s due to the discovery of Uranium in the area. Which wound up bring a lot of money into the city during the Cold War when the race was on to build as many nuclear weapons as possible. That means that this Utah city, which could have been the setting straight from a Spaghetti Western film at one point, actually had to worry about things like nuclear radiation and having the equipment to protect against it ready and on hand for its citizens.

It turns out that the Moab Museum was also housing a traveling display at the time which was about the art of Navajo style weaving. The three pictures below are of rugs that were made from wool in this style. And I certainly found them to be very beautiful pieces of art.