Before I forget, I wanted to say something to those of you who have subscribed to my blog and receive the blog entries by email. First, thank you for subscribing — I know that you all have busy lives and many things compete for your reading attention, so I appreciate your willingness to spend your limited time reading about our journey! Second, I subscribe to my own blog so that I’ll receive the same email that you do and can see how it presents. I have noticed that the email version sometimes does some strange spacing and breaking up lines of my blog entry…and I wanted you to know that I’m not doing that intentionally. My best guess as to why it’s happening is that after I’ve composed my narrative and then insert the photos (as well as resize them), that seems to cause the strange spacing and line-breaking. If you want a better visual experience, I recommend that after you receive the email, click on the title of the blog entry so that it takes you to the web version of the blog.
I’m writing this blog entry as Karen and I are spending our last day here in southern UT. Tomorrow, we’ll be starting to move northward again, with our first stop planned for Provo UT. A few weeks ago, when I first checked the average temps in Provo in July and saw 95 degrees, I immediately thought we should just skip right by it and head further north. We have some commitments that make stopping in Provo a logical place, so we’ll stick with that plan. Funny enough, now that we’ve been getting 102-degree temps for the last week while here in southern UT, the low-to-mid 90s forecast in Provo for this week now looks refreshing. 😉
Picking up from where I left off in my last blog entry (Part 1), after we left Canyonlands National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park, that’s when our RV battery/electrical troubles began…and I won’t take you through all of that again. Originally, we planned to drive to the Capitol Reef National Park area and stay there for a couple of days to give us time to see that park. Due to the craziness around our RV repairs and the need to reschedule reservations for our Bryce Canyon visit to follow, we only were able to drive through a small portion of Capitol Reef. It certainly had the red rock formations we’ve been used to seeing in this part of Utah and it also had the mountains and canyons landscape. The one thing that Capitol Reef is particularly known for is that it surrounds the “Waterpocket Fold”, which is a 100-mile long “wrinkle” (technically a geologic monocline) where the west side of the wrinkle sits at a higher elevation than the east side. It’s assumed that it was created by the same continental collision forces that created the Rocky Mountains. If we pass through this area again in the future, we’ll make an effort to explore Capitol Reef more.
Since we left the Capitol Reef NP area assuming our RV troubles were over, when the low battery voltage warning hit us again, we shortened our drive and stopped short of getting to Bryce Canyon. Doing so meant that we were going to have our Bryce stay shortened to basically one full day…if we didn’t want to give up our Zion reservations. Again, since this was all happening around the July 4th holiday, we were finding it difficult to find any decent RV parks that had openings, so we decided to stick with our reservations and consider coming back up to Bryce after Zion, if we felt that we didn’t get to see enough of Bryce in that one day.
When you have dogs with you as you’re RVing, each time you are going on some type of outing away from the RV, you have to decide whether you’re going to take the dogs with you or not. There are several factors to consider. Purely on the emotional level, how are we feeling about leaving them behind in the RV…especially if it’s going to be for several hours? If we’ve taken them on some recent outings, then we’re less likely to feel too guilty about leaving them behind. At this time of year and in this part of the country, with the temps starting to be in the 90s and 100s, our dogs are panting pretty hard after just a few minutes walking around outside, so the idea of taking them on a hike means having to carry a lot more water than we normally would. Also, if we decided we wanted to go to places such as restaurants or shops and the dogs aren’t permitted to join us, that would mean having to leave them in the car, which we won’t do once the temp is near 70 degrees. Another factor we have to attend to at these national and state parks is the extent to which they’ll let us bring dogs on trails. Some parks only allow dogs on a few select trails. Finally, and this speaks more to our dogs than dogs in general, our dogs grew up on a farm, so they never were leash trained…and it shows. Bodhi, our young guy, is constantly pulling and is frantically sniffing the ground in every direction, looking for signs of other dogs and/or food. Luke, being 11 ½ years old and a mama’s boy, is generally more nervous in unfamiliar surroundings and isn’t sure what to do, so he can be a little spastic. Put the two of them together and it’s guaranteed that Karen and I won’t have a serene walk in nature when we have them with us. Yet, we feel guilty when we leave them behind too much.
So, why did I just write the previous paragraph? Because it helps provide context for how we did our Bryce Canyon exploration…and how we think about exploring any new park or area. Bryce Canyon has an 18-mile scenic drive that will take you from one end of the park to the other. Along the way, there are various scenic overlooks and pull-outs that you can stop at to see key points of interest. Given that, the plan that Karen and I agreed upon was that we would head out in the car with the dogs sometime mid-morning and drive the 18-mile road, making a few stops along the way, but thinking of it more as a reconnaissance mission that would allow us to come back around 5:00 pm…without the dogs…and do some more thorough exploring/hiking of the areas that we determined were of most interest. At that hour, we figured the crowds would start to dwindle, the peak heat would start to recede, and the evening sunlight would be really nice for photographs. If we stayed long enough, we might even see how the sunset looks in the canyon.
Well, I’m happy to say that our plan in the previous paragraph actually worked out really well. Bryce Canyon around the July 4th holiday weekend was pretty crowded, so using the morning just to drive and make a few quick stops helped minimize how much we had to deal with the crowds. Karen and I did come back later in the day and the crowds had dropped off significantly, so we were able to be more leisurely in our stops and we did a couple of short hikes. In addition, we stayed for sunset at an area called “Sunset Point”, which overlooks the canyon and surrounding areas…and were treated to some great colors and lighting. Bryce Canyon is very different from Arches and Canyonlands – it’s known for its “hoodoos”, which are tall, thin spines of rock typically protruding from a basin/canyon. The photos I’ve posted in this blog entry show the hoodoos. These unusual formations and their bright orange/white coloring are one of the main reasons that I would put Bryce Canyon really high up on my rankings of the most spectacular national parks.
When we completed our day at Bryce Canyon, Karen and I felt that we saw as much as we wanted to see in the one day, so we were comfortable with moving on to Zion National Park and not feeling it would be necessary to return to Bryce on this trip. Karen was able to get us two nights at a campground within Zion, which was a real score. Though the park didn’t have water/sewage at each site, it did have electricity, which is our more important utility, since it lets us run our air conditioning in the RV without having to turn on our generator (which isn’t allowed in some national/state parks). Our generator is essentially a diesel engine, so you can understand that between the noise and the exhaust, it wouldn’t be welcomed in these peaceful parks. The national and state park campgrounds are much more like the environment you’d imagine when you think of camping – lots of trees, grass, etc. – so they are aesthetically more pleasing than many of the RV parks we’ve seen and stayed at, where the park is a big dirt/gravel parking lot divided up into sites…some with no grass or trees. Sadly, after the two nights at the Zion campground, we had to move to another RV park that was 30 minutes from Zion, but at least it was a really nice RV park, so I’m not complaining.
Zion is very different from Bryce Canyon. At Bryce, as well as at Canyonlands, you spend most of your time on the rim of the canyons, looking down at the spectacular formations, rivers, etc. In Zion, it’s the opposite – you spend most of your time on roads and trails down at the canyon floor/river level and look up at the rock formations and massive canyon walls. Initially, I’d have to say that after seeing Bryce, I was actually not as impressed by Zion. But…Zion grew on me each day we were there as we spent more time exploring the various parts of the Zion Canyon. I can’t emphasize enough how much the temperatures played a factor in our visit to Zion. While Bryce keeps you at an elevation closer to 8,000 feet and the temps stayed in the low 80s, exploring Zion is mostly done at the 4,000 foot elevation, so unless you stay in the shadows of the canyon walls, you get exposed to 100-degree heat at this time of year, which isn’t great for hiking. If we were to do the southern Utah parks again in the future, we’d be better off planning for an early Fall visit rather than a July visit. It’s all part of our learning, right?
Let me wind up this blog entry with a couple of observations. If we could turn back time, besides doing the southern UT trip in the Fall rather than the dead of summer, I’d also choose not to try to see all five parks in the span of a few weeks. There’s just enough similarity among them that by the time you get to the last ones, you can’t help but have a little visual fatigue and even the most spectacular landscapes don’t look quite as spectacular as they would to you if you had seen them with “fresh” eyes. With that in mind, I’d also recommend doing the parks in the reverse order that we did them. We started in southeast UT and looped around to the southwest seeing Arches first, then Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce and Zion. I’d recommend doing it in reverse order because I felt that Zion suffered a bit from how unusual/spectacular Arches and Bryce were and from the fatigue of having seen so much red rock, canyons, stone formations, etc. over the course of the last couple of weeks. I think that seeing Canyonlands, Dead Horse Point State Park, and Arches toward the end of the visits would be less impacted by the fatigue simply because they are so different and spectacular.
