The Creepy Not Creepy Trailside Encounter
May 18, 2026 — Day 55
Sun Outdoors Canyonlands, Moab UT
Today’s adventure is driving the Gemini Bridges trail. This is an easy “off road” trail. It is in scare quotes because a Subaru could do this trail. But it’s legit off-road and some of it is, shall we say, interesting.
Now the thing to know about off road photography is that a steep road never looks steep in pictures. So when it looks steep? It’s steep! Here we demonstrate that photographic phenomenon.
We hope nobody’s coming around that bend!
This is why we have a Jeep. We can explore way, way, way off the beaten track!
We got a life bird here, the Bullock’s Oriole. We used Merlin to ID the sound. It gives us an idea of what to look for. In this case it is gorgeous yellow/black bird. It would be a life bird for us, so we stopped. And then we saw it, the pair were almost posing for us in the greenery off to the right.
The clouds were dense but there were peeks of light that lit up areas. It was cool to watch the holes in clouds move along lighting up various parts of the vista.
There was a bypass off to the side, but it was so torn up the rocks were actually easier.
Oh, another example of why we travel with a Jeep.
We made it to the short trailhead for the Gemini Bridges trail, a short trail with great views and adventure. There was a single guy in a white Jeep, just sitting there. We found that odd, but hey you do you and we’ll go have fun. We got on with our hike.
Ahh, Gemini, The Twins, there are two arches here! (susan here: someone drove their vehicle across one of the arches and fell to their death here. It used to be that you could drive down to this point but not after that tragedy. I’m not really sure how you could manage to put your vehicle off one of these arches. Presumably they chose badly and took a bad line.) And people die jumping from one to the other. Madness.
We had to do the 2 jump photos.
Coming up out of the trail we met a couple, the guy, who turned to be the guy is the Jeep, asked us “How are you feeling?”
Odd. And a bit creepy.
We got super spooked. Then he said that he is our neighbor back at the campground. Paul then recognized him because he had gone over to say hello a few days ago to admire their RV. It has a built in garage for bikes! He put off shaking hands because he didn’t want to infect anyone. So creep-a-zoid averted, but it was super weird for a second.
Of course there are cows in the road. Open range is pretty much everywhere in the southwest. The young one seemed curious while the momma is “Come along child!” because she’s certainly seen cars many times before.
