withoutwhatifs

After spending a few days in Zion, we were heading out to our next stop, Bryce Canyon National Park. Bryce isn’t that far from Zion, so we drove straight through and per usual, headed straight for a campsite. Bryce is definitely not as popular of a NP as some of the others that we’ve been to but it was still pretty busy. It’s known for it’s “HooDoos” which are tall, narrow rock structures that stand high on their own.

Super side note: Ever since Tara told me about the “HooDoos” I have been singing the song from Labyrinth, which starred David Bowie and Jennifer Connolly. “You remind me of the babe, What babe? The babe with the power. What Power? The power of Voodoo, Who Do? (Like HooDoo) You do. Do what? You remind me of the babe. Seriously check it out, it’s a super creepy movie.

Luckily the campgrounds aren’t as full as you would think given the amount of people. So Tara, Murphy and I got a spot at the Sunset Campground. Tara and I hadn’t eaten so we got Murph squared away and headed to the lodge to get a bite to eat. When we were seated, we both focused in on one item… The Buffet. The ALL YOU CAN EAT BUFFET. No need to see the rest of the menu… We’ll both have that. The buffet had a salad bar, soup, lunch meat to make sandwiches, rice, meatloaf, ziti, green beans… it went on and on… Needless to say, Tara and I ate our weight at that meal. We definitely got our money’s worth, so we both rolled out of the lodge and headed back to the campsite. Once we were back Tara took a nap, and Murphy and I went for a walk in the woods near our site. We came across some bizarre fire areas, and a really strange, shelter-type structure. Obviously put there by the Utah Bigfoot. (Seriously, ask my dad, Bigfoot is in every state)

After Murphy and I got back, we all decided to go to the “Pet friendly” trail which ran between sunset point and sunrise point. We walked around for a little while and checked out one or two more view points. One of our favorite being Upper Inspiration Point (I think every park has and Inspiration Point) which was at an elevation of 8,100 ft.

That night, Tara convinced me that we should not only go for a hike tomorrow, but that we should go for a sunrise hike so that we could see the sun rise over the HooDoos. Tara spent about 30 minutes before we went to bed, getting everything ready. Water, sandwiches, snacks, first aid kits… she even got out the coffee, oatmeal and wind boiler so that in the morning all we had to do was heat up water, eat breakfast and go.

We woke up late (obviously) but we were still able to get to the trailhead before sunrise. We decided that actually hiking down into the HooDoos would prevent us from seeing the sunrise, so we found a bench and watched the sun come up. It was pretty impressive. I will say this though… sunrises are tough… staring at the rising sun for that long can’t be good for your eyes.

Anyways, once the sun had risen, we set out for our hike. The hike was going to be the Queen’s Garden – Navajo Trail Loop. Bryce Canyon has a number of short hikes and many are in and out hikes. They do all connect to others so that you can put trails together to make them longer. These two were going to be about 3 miles. The hike was great, definitely different than the hikes we’ve done so far. It wasn’t that difficult or strenuous (for the most part) but we got to see a lot of interesting rock formations like Thor’s Hammer, Queen Victoria, and Wall Street.

We finished the hike in just over an hour, most of which seemed to spent on the ridiculous switchbacks that followed the Wall Street area. As we approached the top of the trail, we were amazed to see the mobs of people. I mean, there were people everywhere. Obviously some kind of tourist trip (no one was speaking English) but this was crazy, we couldn’t figure it out, so we finished our hike and headed to a picnic table to have our sandwiches and some water. Once we sat down, we realized that while we were out on this beautiful serene hike, eight… as in one more than seven, tour buses had pulled in at the same time and dumped everyone right where we finished our hike. It was a mad house. We ate our sandwiches and headed back to get Murph.

While we were at the camper trying to decide what to do with the rest of the day and the next, we realized that Bryce is a small park, and we had really seen a lot of it already. There were a million other view points to go to, but driving all day in a national park, when you’re on a road trip, is really unappealing. So, we packed up and hit the road. Onward to Capital Reef National Park, with a very scenic drive through the Grand Staircase-Escalante…Utah is pretty incredible.

Driving into Capital Reef is a really impressive sight. It looks like a massive red rock wall that just continues to go on and on. Capital Reef is even less popular than Bryce, so there weren’t really any tough crowds to deal with, and we weren’t planning on spending much time here. But since Capital Reef is directly between Bryce and Arches NP, we wanted to at least drive through and take a look around. Without what ifs, right? The park is really small, but really different than the other Utah parks we had seen.

As we drove though Tara was reading informational bits from our guide book, and it said that the original settlers planted acres of fruit orchards. The town, and now campground are actually named Fuita. This was the first place in our entire trip that kind of made me appreciate New England. Driving though the canyon, there were orchards of trees with their leaves changing colors for the  season. The weather was mild and it just had a very New England fall feeling to it.

We stopped for a little bit and let Murphy stretch his legs. I’m not sure if this area of the park is actually open to dogs, but there was no one there and it was just a big field of nice green grass that Murphy thought was made just for him.

As I said, we weren’t planning to stay long here (plus the campground was full, it only had about 50 sites) so again, we jumped in the truck, and headed on. We knew that Arches only had two campgrounds and they were both booked solid for the next month. So our plan was to try to get close to the entrance so that we could head to a campground near the entrance (but not in the park) the next morning. This was only our second attempt at staying at a Bureau of Land Management site. The hard part of staying at one of these sites is finding it. Tara was working diligently on her phone trying to google the name of the spot, reading blogs from other people who have stayed here, and just  anything to try to find out where we were actually trying to stay. She was successful, and after turning off the highway, onto a dirt road, and driving for about 4 miles (past the NO TRESPASSING signs) we finally came to an open dirt area, where a couple other campers had posted up for the night as well. So, we set up and hit the sheets hoping to get a site close to the park tomorrow.