Rather than look for some random pullout on the side of the road, we rolled the dice and approched the Entrance Gate at the State Park at 10:30AM, a full 4½-hours ahead of the "official" check-in time.
The attendant was more than happy to issue us our camping pass, but explained that if we found our campsite was still occupied, we would have to wait until after noon or until the current campers left. She also mentioned there was plenty of room to park our truck and trailer in the overflow parking lot at the entrance to the campground if we needed to wait.
But our luck has been running good lately and we found our campsite empty and ready for us to move in.
After lunch it didn't take us long to get out and explore the park. First thing we did was drive to the end of the road where you'll find Dead Horse Point.
At the Point you can see for miles in all directions. We easily identified several locations that we had explored while at Canyonlands National Park.
After checking out the Dead Horse Point Overlook we made our way over the the Visitor Center/Gift Shop/Museum to see if there was anything of interest there.
What we learned was how Dead Horse Point State Park got it's gloomy name, as you can imagine it's not a happy story.
Back in th late 1800s the cowboys in this region would round up as many wild horses as they could and drive them out onto Dead Horse Point. The Point has 2000' sheer dropoffs all the way around down to the Colorado River and there is a bottle neck of just 30-yards wide at the entrance, making it easy to trap the horses in a relatively small space by creating a fence.
On one such roundup the cowboys inexplicably chose the very best horses from the herd and then left the rest of them to die of thirst by leaving the small opening in their fence closed off.
Later, when the horse carcasses were discoved by other cowboys, the name Dead Horse Point was given to this high plateau.
I warned you it wasn't a pleasant story.
Somehow the glass back on her phone got cracked and the crack went right over the lense of the camera, making photos look hazy and out of focus in the lower left hand corner. We've been dealing with it by cropping the "bad spot" out or by fixing it with a built-in filter that came with her Samsung Galaxy S20 phone.
So now no more fixing will be needed since she is currently the proud owner of the brand new Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. It has a 200MP camera with a 10X zoom, so the pressure is now on for her to amaze you even more with her photos from here on out.
Here are a pair of photos from around our campsite using her new phone.
Would you like to be notified of new blog posts?
