So when town takes 5 minutes on a bike to get from one end to another, there’s rarely traffic…..
First, we went for a hike up a canyon 5 minutes from town – nice and scenic, although there is quicksand in the area:
But then driving back to town – like I said, 5 minutes away – we were presented with this:
Bad news: stuck in traffic for 40 minutes. Good news: nice scenery while you’re stopped. The problem was someone who decided to turn their pickup into crushed metal, right on the bridge over the Colorado river. No idea what happened, but there are more than enough accidents caused by people watching the scenery instead of the road.
Back in the old days, 150 years ago, one of the barriers to the exploration of the West was the Colorado river (called the Grand river back then). Moab came into being originally because this was a good place to cross with a ferry. It’s still somewhat like that – to avoid the traffic jam, we could have driven to the next bridge upstream (an hour detour), or to the next bridge downstream (a three hour detour). We elected to just wait it out.