Uncharted water: Utah, National Parks and Trekking Part 1

We ended up in Utah at a great time of the year to see these national parks. The weather has generally been terrific, although last week we had a cold front move through the state and the higher elevations received some snow. One day when we crossed from one canyon to the next, it was snowing up there on the pass, but as you can see, we survived.

Here at Zion NP the leave are just coming out on the trees. At Zion, you enter the park from the bottom, as opposed to the Grand Canyon where you view everything from the top.

We arrived early enough to get a camping spot, and it is just terrific to be surrounded by the canyon walls. Phil and Chris grilled some garlic on the Weber and here they are having it with Havarti cheese for happy hour...yum...delish.

There are numerous hikes in the canyon, and they did several of them. One day they hiked all the way up to the top of "Observation Point", a gain in elevation of over 2100 feet in an eight mile round trip hike. They moaned a little about their legs and feet for a few days afterwards, but the views were terrific and it was a great hike.

We hated to leave Zion, but there are more parks to explore. The drive out of Zion was literally up the hill and through the cliffs following a 1.1 mile tunnel.

The next park was Bryce NP. Here you visit the rim of the canyon and look down. Any hikes are down into the formations. We arrived too late in the day to secure a camping site and the park wasn't quite ready for the spring crowds. Only one camping area was open and the shuttles weren't running yet so there was a lot of traffic and few places to park. All in all, a little disappointing, but not to take away from the interesting formations in the canyon. We visited some of the main lookouts, and owing to the little sore feet and crowded park conditions, we decided to move on towards the next park that evening.

We drove to Torrey, Utah, just outside of Capital Reef NP and camped there for the night to ensure an early morning arrival at the park.

Capital Reef NP is just a great place to stay. After the big, very popular parks of Zion and Bryce, it was refreshing to find a laid back and very relazing park. We were again down in a canyon, and it used to be a homestead and farm complete with orchards. Conveniently, there was an old home only a few hundred feet away from the campground that sold wonderful, fresh bakery, tea and coffee. There were wild turkeys running around the area and several horses in the paddocks for the rangers to ride. How does one get a job here?

We went on a hike with some people from Toronto we met at Zion NP, then invited them over for a beer and dinner.

One day we took the RV down a fairly adventurous road into a narrow canyon. All the way in we were hoping for a large enough turning area at the end, and luckily, there was.