Collect Stamps in Your Adventure Passport

Before rubber rafts, when wooden hulls were shaped for straight lines across lakes, not rivers, a man named Powell dared to explore the last unmapped and unknown rivers and canyons of the west. That placed him squarely in Utah, in 1869. They were successful, proving that "running rivers" could be done in the deepest canyons, and wildest water in North America. It took another 50 years before Bus Hatch and his family near Vernal, Utah began taking boats down the Green River, just for the heck of it. Norm Nevills in Mexican Hat, Utah gave his horse trough a float down the San Juan River on his honeymoon... and started one of the first commercial operations after designing his own wooden boats. By the 1960's surplus army rubber pontoons changed the industry forever, the rest is even more river running history.

Arches National Monument was set aside in 1929 when Ed Abbey, famed monkey wrencher for the environmental movement, was just a babe. By the late 1960's Arches was prepping a promotion from "monument" to "park" and Abbey was right there in the lonely backcountry working as the one-and-only backcountry ranger. Abbey's time spent in the desert (feeling conflicted about keeping it to himself and sharing the beauty of arches with the "tourists") is cleverly documented in his nationwide-environmental-cult-inducing book "Desert Solitaire".

Arches National Park boasts the highest density of natural arches in the world with more than 2,000 - 43 of which have collapsed since 1977. 150 million years in the making, and we are lucky enough to see the show!

The senses reel in any form of flight, but ballooning remains one of the only forms of flight unhindered by turbulence, vibration, or...well, a steering wheel. You'd think that after Kitty Hawk, ballooned flight would simply deflate; but there's nothing quite like a balloon ride - and that's not just a bunch of hot air! Adventure awaits every single balloon ride because no two flights are alike. Tremble not, your pilot knows the ropes. He also knows the terrain and can point out various formations, spires and canyons drifting in silence beneath the wicker floor. Wait, why wicker? We can fly to the moon and back, but we're still using wicker baskets? Ask your pilot. There's a fabulous reason!

While the National Parks were still relatively empty, and the mining boom was all but forgotten by the early 1980’s, a new and unexpected renaissance was about to hit the hills of Moab. An entirely new sport called “mountain biking” marked the beginning of a Moab’s modern reputation as the “Adventure Capital of the West”. Mountain biking was pioneered in Marin County and Crested Butte, but Moab, Utah was the place where mountain biking sparked public imagination. It was a clever ploy by Hank Barlow to launch the first issue of “Mountain Bike Magazine” with photography of people riding the new pedaled contraptions on the rolling slickrock hills with red rock cliffs and blue skies blazing in the background - a cue taken from film director John Ford perhaps? It worked; and the rest is mountain biking history.

When iconic western film star "The Duke" John Wayne was filming "The Comancheros" in 1961 he called Moab the place "where God put the West." No one has ever disagreed. But did Moab's gigantic western backdrop make the Westerns, or did the Westerns make Moab iconically Western? Good question to ponder as you saddle up, trot out of the corral, and ride off into the sunset amongst the very same scenery - perhaps on the very same trails - that John Wayne himself rode on his way to a rescue. So quit wastin' daylight, paint 'yer wagon, and saddle up for scenery that's as purty as a little red heifer in a flower bed.

The word "Jeep" is instantly recognizable as a rugged 4x4 vehicle - synonymous with "Yankee Ingenuity" from WWII and almost every conflict since. But the origins of the name "Jeep" are somewhat more obscure... Some say it came from "G.P." which stood for "general purpose" vehicle. But many, particularly in Moab, argue that a Jeep is anything but a general purpose vehicle. In Moab its specialties are especially well known and utilized.

That's right, Utah's slot canyons are the birthplace of the modern sport of canyoneering. What is canyoneering? See if this helps: Mountaineers climb up, Canyoneers climb down, and Pioneers trek Westward...to Utah where they can descend ropes into the myriad slot canyons that drain Utah's world famous Colorado Plateau. The pioneers of the sport all claim first descents in Utah, sooo... yeah, it's pretty much legit. You know, the word "canyon" comes from the Spanish Conquistadors, trying to describe what they saw in the desert as "narrow valleys between cliffs". There was no word for these unique features of the southwest, so they used the Spanish word for "pipe", or "long tube".

When flying is what you do, being grounded in the dirt doesn't seem right... unless that dirt (in the form of canyons, towers, arches and bluffs) is the very reason for taking flight! There is no other place on earth quite like Moab, Utah - and Redtail Aviation knows it. Their pilots are not just pilots, they are "Air Guides" connecting every dip of the wing to something spectacular on the landscape below. You'll know your guide loves the land just as much as their beloved plane and that your air tour was their best one yet!

When New Zealander Sir William Hamilton invented the water jet engine in 1953 he needed a way to prove its’ power and superiority. What better way to get notoriety than to take it up-river against America’s powerful Colorado River in the popular Grand Canyon? At the time, no one considered that a motor would even be remotely successful in an upstream test against the notoriously venomous Vulcan Rapid (known today as Lava Falls). “It was a nine day current-bashing marathon that saw the Hamilton Jet negotiate all obstacles, including the mighty Vulcan Rapid. Four boats made it up the Colorado River in 1960, all powered by Hamilton waterjets.”

Heralded from New Zealand and Australia, to Waikiki and California’s shores as The Duke of surfing, (move over John Wayne) is native Hawaiian, Duke Kahanamoku. A competition swimmer, Duke easily won Gold and Silver medals in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics and went on to popularize the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing - and as early as the 1940’s used the technique of stand-up paddleboarding to deliver surf instruction in low surf. In the 1990’s the technique merited its own lesson, aside from wave surfing. In 2003 the introduction of Stand Up to the “Buffalo Big Board Contest” was met with overwhelming popularity. Since then, boards have been designed specifically for Stand Up Paddleboarding. Thanks Duke! We salute you, while trying not to fall off our boards!

1983 is the year the "Humvee", or "High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles" were put into production - and 9 years later released to the public as "The Hummer". During that time the economy of Moab, Utah transitioned from busted uranium mining to bustling recreational tourism. You might say it was a different kind of rock that attracted the new crowd: Slickrock.

Slickrock, slippery to a horse's hooves, was found to be exceptionally "grippy" for rubber tires. First it was the "Fat Tires" of motorbikes & new-fangled mountain bikes, then the Hummer, and now all sorts of 4-wheeled "rock crawlers".