You can see in all degrees for a good while and everywhere you look can take your breath away. The distance and elevation is pretty dramatic. When you’re on a flat part of the mesa looking around at the other mesas it’s easy to forgot you’re no longer on ground level. The ground is littered with plants. from 100 feet above the patterns apparent at ground level are more obvious. Picking out a bush leads you to find dozens of what appears to be the same plant. The great distance you can see while atop the plateau  makes it impossible to forget about human activities. Prior to summiting the mesa i felt much more secluded. From the cabins there is a feeling of being engulfed in the raw power and primal beauty of nature. There is nothing but imposing mesas, crumbling rocks and arid plants as far as the eye can see.  I now know that this is  but a pocket of paradise in the middle of the state.

This mesa is very similar to the one East of the cabins that we explored the day before.  The plant life is similar and the ground is covered in the same basalt rock chunks and pale brown soil.  This one however is covered in longitudinal grooves that include there own slightly different ecosystems.  In the small valleys that these grooves form there are huge sage brushes and game trails winding through the relatively dense vegetation.  There are cattle hoof prints made when the soil was muddy, they are deep and offer shelter for spiders to build there webs in.  I feel exposed here and yearn for the safe secluded feeling I get in the valley.  Although the view is absolutely gorgeous I feel somewhat out of place as I see cars roaring down the highway.