Mid morning, after getting some rest and feeling somewhat refreshed, we broke camp and headed for the national parks. First on the agenda: Capitol Reef National Park. The description on our ipad indicated that this park has rock formations that resemble the nations capitol buildings. Huh. Didn't see those. I think we missed the loop to drive out and see those particular formations.
Instead, we kept to the road that goes straight through the park, with a couple of stops along the way, at Chimney Rock and the cool petroglyphs on the canyon walls. I couldn't get a picture of the petroglyphs, as they were too far away from where we were standing, and the ipad doesn't have zoom capabilities. It was awesome to see the pictures of a long ago people, these were the first time we have seen something like this. Unfortunately, the canyon wall has fallen in parts where the drawings were, and some have been destroyed.
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| Chimney Rock |
Capitol Reef was a very short drive, then it was on to Moab, the gateway to Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. Arches was probably the coolest park on this whole tour. It took us a day to see everything, not a huge park, but it is chock full of great things to see.
One word of advice: When you enter the park in the morning, drive all the way to the other end, and start doing your sightseeing from that end. That way, in the evening when you are tired and just want to get out, you will be near the entrance and can just go out. We got stuck at the far end in the evening, and got stuck behind all the slow moving vehicles heading back out of the park. There are very few turnouts, and even fewer passing lanes, so when you are stuck, you're stuck.
This is Balanced Rock, name is self explanatory. Most of these really cool formations have a short hike out to see them, or you can see them from the parking lot. But to get the best views of these you have to go out to see them. We took the short trail out, and were able to observe this from all sides. Incredible!
The variety of arches and rock formations, and even the cool dead trees that are everywhere, make this park quite enjoyable.
Double Arch was quite the hike. There were a number of arches in this particular place that was an easy hike out and back to the parking lot. Then there was the "primitive trail" to and around the double arches. Since we are the Hiking Fools, we had to do the whole hike. In some places along this trail, there was no trail, and we had to follow rock cairns on our way around. Since we are familiar with these, it was easy for us to follow the trail, but we did run across one woman who had no idea where the trail was and we kindly showed her how to follow the cairns.
While at the Fiery Furnace formations, we ran across this couple, I believe their names were Jim and Mary? I could be wrong on Mary's name, I know his name was Jim. They happened to have a nephew who is still currently thru hiking. If you would like to check out Stilt's and Muppet's journal here is the link:
We had a great conversation about prison ministries and religion and said our farewells as we headed back out to more hikes and formations.
Towards the end of the day and our multi hikes, we started getting a little tired. The day was extremely hot. We got through all of the hikes in the park though, and included some hikes that were on no trail maps whatsoever. We even found a road for 4 wheeling. We had to go over the curb at one of the parking lots to access this road. It was fun to see peoples faces as we left the parking lot, pulled up onto the sidewalk/curb, and head out into the wild. Unfortunately, the road was extremely short, albeit quite fun.
We knew we just had to come back for an evening hike to see Delicate Arch at sunset. We saw this arch from some of our hiking trails, but we wanted to save this hike for last. We went back to our motel for a couple of hours, then it was straight back to Delicate Arch. The park has hours during the day where you have to pay to enter. Not so in the evening. By 6:00 the toll booths are shut up for the night, and anyone can get back into the park for free. Very cool!
We started onto the trail at about 7:30pm. We figured that would give us enough time to make it up to the arch by sunset. We wanted to see the amazing colors that happen just as the sun sets. Well, the trail was steeper than anticipated, thus our hiking became slower. Halfway up to the arch, Mark kept saying we weren't going to make it. He said it not once, but a number of times. As I was getting upset with him for being negative and realizing he was probably right, I just kept going, for I was going to see the arch myself no matter what time I got there. Then watching people coming back down, I knew we had missed the sunset on the arch.
Finally topping the plateau that the arch sits on was an awesome experience. There it was, right in front of us, with a bowl in between it and us. I sat down on a natural wall just to take it all in. Mark went down around the bowl and ended up right at the base of the arch. The really neat thing about this park, is that people can get up close and personal with all of the formations. There are no fences keeping people away, and remarkably, there is no graffiti either.
As the sun set, we stayed around taking pictures and talking with people. The other remarkable thing about this park, is that we didn't feel overwhelmed with crowds. Taking pictures without strangers in them was fairly easy. You'll notice very few people other than Mark in all the pictures.
We made our way back down in total darkness except for our headlamps. On the way, our headlamps picked up the reflection of little tiny eyes. They were from little spiders that hung out in the rocks. The eyes showed up as blue. Very pretty eyes! Then we also snagged a viewing of a black scorpion in a culvert. Totally amazing wildlife out there.
So our day ended in the dark, but with the feeling of a hike well done!
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