Petroglyphs and The Temples of the Sun and Moon

This morning we drove down to the vicinity of the visitor center for the Capitol Reef NP and checked out the Petroglyph Panel.

Our view of nearby Torrey and the rock wall overlooking the town:

This is a section of rock wall where petroglyphs are evident.  They're pretty cool, though thoughts of ancient astronauts did briefly fill my head.  The artwork is quite faded now, in fact, Martha had to point the first one below out to me.

The below pics have been enhanced to show the figures better.

There's a wooden walkway to guide you along the wall, and to keep people from actually disturbing the petroglyphs.

We then drove about 25 miles or so to the eastern entrance of Cathedral Valley BLM area.  The western entrance involves a small river ford and not usable by regular vehicles like the Honda CR-V we were driving.

17 miles later on mostly easy dirt roads, we arrived at the turn off for the Temples of the Sun and Moon.  Big, impressive rock formations jutting out in the middle of the valley.

I've been to these formations and valley before:  LINK, LINK2 with my Ural sidecar rigs.  This trip was to introduce Martha to the rock formations.  The rock formations are part of the Capitol Reef NP by the way.

We returned to pavement with no issues save having to deal with a group of bicyclist that had a clueless driver for their SAG wagon.  Guy kept parking the truck with trailer on the trail, blocking traffic!

After a late lunch, we made a shopping run to the small town of Loa.  On the way, we stopped at a auto parts store in Bicknell, UT where I managed to find a suitable bolt to secure the left mirror mount on Yagi, my TW200.  

Surprisingly, it had been impossible to find the OEM bolt at no less than five hardware stores in Moab.  So, I used a longer Hex cap bolt instead, and it works fine.

A short test ride to make sure the mirror was firmly mounted was of course required: