I tried to wash some of the dirt off the interior of the car with Meguiars soft gel in an ice bucket. It looks a bit better. Lord knows how all that junk got inside the car.

Then, already hot again, but not too hot for top down, through Capitol Reef NP. I went down the scenic drive in the park a bit, and it was great, but then it branched into two gravel roads. I turned back; I did enough driving through rocks and dirt yesterday.

Then US 95 south. This started a bit slow, but turned incredible too. Some special features not seen before: very interesting quasi-periodic natural sculptures I did not get a good picture of, "corridors" cut through the mountains, and a river crossing. A real river, with water in it! After all these deserts, I did not know they still existed.

I met up with some thunderstorms on US 95, but they were short lived and they had the great result to lower the temperatures to a very nice temperature behind them, absolutely perfect for top-down.

Where US 95 dead-ends, I took a nice enough US 191 south a bit and deviated from there to UT 262. An excellent choice, even if not marked scenic on Rand-McNally. Unjustified. It is great.

It did get too hot for top down again, and I reminded myself that I should have known this. The US gave this land to the Native Americans, after all. Served them right: I saw oil derricks pumping oil out of the ground all over the place.

In summary, southern Utah gave me the idea I was on a different planet. Probably on Mars, the Red Planet. You can be way up in the mountains and see forever wherever you turn. And all the expanses your eyes can reach are shades of red and brown, with millions of dark green pock marks on it. Maybe a small mountain or two is dark black. But there is not one spot within the miles and miles and miles that you can see that looks familiar, resembling the grasslands, and plowed fields and corn fields, and urban areas, and rivers and lakes, that you might find on planet Earth.

Going into Colorado, following US 160, I was definitely back on planet Earth, A beautiful, hilly, green, busy planet Earth, but first and foremost, a planet I know, a planet I have grown up on. Dense, truly green, plant life, water, and rain. Yes, definitely rain. Enough to lower the temperature for more top down driving.

And lower it beyond that. Only hours after I considered with some concern the possibility of getting stranded on an unbearably hot, and absolutely deserted, desert road in an Indian reservation driving top up with the AC running at full blast and having 1.5 eyes on the coolant temperature gauge, I was suddenly running the heater on my hands to keep warm.

I stopped at the Red Lion Inn in Pagosa Springs. No green Lion would be appropriate after southern Utah.

Pictures (click for larger size):