Southern Utah’s Amazing Parks and Monuments — Part 1 — 6/23 to 6/29/19

Before I talk about our experiences at Utah’s parks, let me update those of you who read my last blog post where I left you hanging as to what happened with our RV battery/electrical issue.  When we brought it to the repair shop, the guy spent a lot of time checking our batteries and had us do various things, such as revving the engine, turning on the lights, etc.  According to his battery checking device, our two batteries were at the end of their useful life.  This made sense because they were 7 years old.  So, we went ahead and replaced them, which actually wasn’t very expensive.  Karen and I were happy that the issue wasn’t something more complicated…and more expensive.  That being said, I wondered why he concluded there wasn’t anything wrong with the alternator, since I didn’t see him check it, but he said that wasn’t the problem.  So, off we went toward our next RV park destination.  Things were going along fine and we were feeling pretty good…until almost two hours into our trip when the low battery voltage warning came on again…ugh.  Given that we had already driven a couple of hours, we weren’t about to turn around to go back to the guy.  We decided that with our already established reservations to see Bryce Canyon and Zion, we’d see if we could continue with those visits and look for an RV specialist in a bigger city.  While we were in Zion, we got referred to a repair shop in St. George, UT that was less than an hour away.  We decided to go with them because they said if it was the alternator, they could replace it while we wait.  We did drive over there, they confirmed it was the alternator, and they replaced it in a couple of hours.  The battery gauge on the dashboard showed that everything was finally back to normal…so, $1,100 later 😬 (replacement the batteries and the alternator), the problem finally got solved!

To get you up to speed on our Utah park adventures, I need to go back a couple of weeks to the last week of June.  As our journey took us out of northern New Mexico toward Utah, we made a brief stop in Colorado.  If you look at the US map, you’ll see that New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona basically all meet at one corner.  The area around that spot is known as Four Corners, so it’s not unusual to traverse across those state’s borders frequently when you’re traveling in that area.  During our stop in Colorado, we went to a car wash and when they saw our MD license plates, we got into a conversation about what we were doing in this part of the country.  During that conversation, we were recommended to stop by Mesa Verde National Park.  That had not been on our original list of destinations, but when we were told it was 15 minutes from the car wash, we thought why not?

Mesa Verde National Park probably doesn’t get the highest rankings in lists of the “best” national parks, but, after all, it is a national park, so you know there’s going to be something interesting to see.  In this case, besides the fact that the park is essentially a huge mesa (a flat-topped hill with steep sides) at a very high elevation that provides great scenic views of the surrounding valleys and canyons, apparently it was home to the earliest Puebloan people dating back to around 750 AD.  Of the many things that made those people remarkable, there is one thing that we got to see in the park that really surprised us.  We had heard that they were “cliff dwellers”, so we expected to see big holes/caves in the sides of canyon walls where they had lived.  What we didn’t expect, was to see the incredible level of sophistication of these dwellings.  Words can’t describe it accurately, so hopefully the photos will do the “talking” for me!

After visiting Mesa Verde, Karen and I finished the drive into southeastern Utah at an RV park in Monticello.  By the way, it’s pronounced “Monti-sello”, unlike how we pronounce that word back east.  Monticello is about 50 minutes south of Moab, the city that is home to Arches National Park.  There are two other parks that are within 40 minutes from Moab — Dead Horse Point State Park and Canyonlands National Park — so, in hindsight, we might have picked an RV park closer to Moab since the goal was to visit all of those parks in a few days.  Having said that, however, Karen and I both felt that the drive from Monticello to Moab on US 191 was one of the most scenic drives that we’ve ever been on, so had we stayed in Moab, we might never have taken that drive.  Furthermore, along that drive, there is pull-off to see a natural-formed arch about 150 feet up a stone formation.  It’s called Wilson Arch.  We decided to make the climb up to the arch.  I’ve included some photos in this blog entry.  We can tell you this…after going to Canyonlands National Park a few days later and seeing the famous “Mesa Arch”, both Karen and I thought that this lesser-known Wilson Arch was actually more spectacular than Mesa Arch, so we were extremely happy that we had stayed in Monticello, otherwise we might never have seen it!

The day after arriving in Monticello, Karen and I decided to head up to Moab to take a drive through Arches National Park, kind of as a preview, assuming we’d go back and explore it in more depth.  As it turned out, we spent more time at Arches than originally planned, so it ended up being our only visit to it during this trek through Utah.  While we have seen many very cool and unique landscapes on our trip up to this point, I have to say that Arches took spectacular landscapes to a whole different level.  The huge, unusual-shaped, red rock spires, towers, arches, and walls that appear to have emerged out of flat ground around them left me in awe.  I know that we will see more like it as we continue our journey through Utah’s parks, but since this was the first one, it was really impactful.  I’ve posted some photos from Arches in this blog, but it just isn’t possible for my camera to do justice to what we saw.

When we were contemplating which national parks to see in Utah in case we couldn’t see them all, I posted that question to a Facebook group for full-time RVers just to see what responses I would get.  The responses were pretty evenly split on four of the national parks – Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, and Zion.  However, there were a couple of people who said we shouldn’t miss a state park near Canyonlands named Dead Horse Point State Park.  The pictures we saw of the park convinced us to check it out.  We also had read that since it was near two national parks that get most of the attention, it tends not to be as crowded, so it’s almost like a bit of a secret jewel.  For those of you who are friends of mine on Facebook, you may have already seen a preview of how amazing Dead Horse Point is.  Basically, the park is a very high-elevation mesa “peninsula” that is surrounded on three sides by 2,000 ft. deep canyons, including ones cut by the Colorado River, which can be seen, too, from the mesa.  I’ve included a few photos in this blog as well as a video clip from when I flew my drone from the mesa into the canyon and back over the mesa again.  While we were visiting the park, we noticed that within the park there were some campgrounds that could accommodate our large RV, so we immediately switched up all of our plans and decided that we wanted to stay in that park for a couple of days, which would make it easy to see more of the park as well as hop over into Canyonlands National Park, too.

The next day, we decided to go visit Hovenweep National Monument, because it had been recommended to us by the same person who had recommended Mesa Verde National Park.  Hovenweep is the site of six ancient Puebloan villages that were built between A.D. 1200 and 1300 and had been home to over 2,500 people.  The part we visited is essentially a canyon in which you can see the still standing ruins of parts of these villages – some in the canyon and others around the rim of the canyon.  One of the best parts of coming here was the lack of crowds -– we had the place pretty much to ourselves, which does a lot to help you really absorb the spirit of it.  On the lighter side, there was a sign on the entrance door to the visitor center that indicated there are rattlesnakes in the area.  As you can imagine, that heightens your vigilance as you’re walking around, especially when you know there aren’t other tourists who are blazing the trail ahead of you and scaring away the snakes!  We did end up seeing a snake, though it wasn’t a rattler, but because it was right near a bench we were about to sit on, it did make our hearts jump a bit when Karen spotted it as we were about to sit.  We could have easily sat down within a few feet of it and not known it was there.  The snake wasn’t the only wildlife we encountered.  We saw a very colorful lizard run across our path several feet in front of us and, despite that it was well aware of us, it did allow us to get close enough to get some photos of it.  Yes, the ruins of Hovenweep were certainly interesting, but I’d have to say the highlight was encountering the wildlife!

On our final day in this area, we visited Canyonlands National Park.  Canyonlands is huge and has four different “districts” you can visit.  We decided to visit the “Island in the Sky” district because it offered a scenic drive with views similar to Dead Horse Point State Park.  The other districts had fewer paved roads and were better choices if you wanted to go hiking in the back country for multiple days or if you had vehicles designed for serious off-roading.  While Karen and I were doing the scenic drive, she noticed that there appeared to be a way that one could actually drive down into the canyon and work your way over to the Colorado River.  When she saw that, we decided to head back to our RV first to pick up the dogs so they could come with us.  On our return to the park with the dogs, we talked to the park ranger at the entrance and he assured us that our Honda CRV should be able to handle the off-roading on the dirt/gravel road leading down to and through the canyon.  I’ve posted photos in this blog entry that show you the road and also show you how steep the canyon walls are.  I’d be lying if I told you that we weren’t nervous as we were driving down the canyon walls, doing switchbacks on roads definitely not built for the width of two cars.  As we’d be coming down, there’d occasionally be somebody driving up and while one car had to hug the canyon wall, the other had to get really close to the edge of the road that falls down into the canyon…and there weren’t any guardrails.  It would be hard enough to do this if the road was paved, but it wasn’t – it was a bumpy dirt road with loose gravel and stones.  I was white-knuckling the steering wheel and poor Karen had to try not to look over the edge down into the canyon.  I’m sure the dogs in the back seat just thought it was all great fun.  In hindsight, we wished we had taken video during the more harrowing part of the descent, but funny how you don’t think about that while you’re in the middle of it, right?  Anyway…we did make it down to the canyon floor and had fun driving on it as well as getting the unique perspective of how high and steep the canyon walls were.  We are glad we did it and we would definitely do it again, but I do have to admit that we opted to not make the drive back up the canyon wall – we took the easier, but longer route of driving out of the canyon by following the river until it allowed an easier exit near Moab.

As I’m writing this blog entry, we’re finishing up our exploration of southern Utah’s parks – we’ve been to Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon and are now spending some days in Zion National Park.  I’ll write up “Part 2” of this blog entry after we’ve completed our time at Zion!