Southern Utah - a dramatic finale to our trip

  From the North Rim, we headed across the Colorado Plateau to stop at Zion National Park.  This had been one of my biggest goals in taking the trip, so I was particularly excited about the opportunity.  We were able to stay in a campground right inside the park called the Watchman Campground, named for the nearby peak that towers over it.  Zion is one of the most popular of the Utah parks, and justifiably so.  The dramatic sheer sandstone walls throughout the canyon provide endless astounding views in all directions.  We wore out our digital camera taking pictures, but none of them can capture the overwhelming grandeur of the site.

The park is well served by a bus shuttle system that carries visitors between the many sites near the park entrance.  We made good use of that, and spent much of our visit riding back and forth between shuttle stops.  Many stops also provide hiking opportunities, some much more demanding and dramatic than others.  We tended to hike the shorter and less demanding routes, but they were very dramatic and beautiful all the same.  We hiked up the Watchman trail, the Canyon Overlook trail, the Riverside walk, and a somewhat longer trail to the Emerald Pools.  All provided spectacular views and the occasional view of critters.

One rather surprising treat was the profusion of desert wildflowers along the hiking trails.  There were flowering plants clinging to rock faces in the most unlikely places, and the early June season was perfect for flowering cactus and many other small and delicate desert flowers.  We took lots of pictures.  There was a lot of seeping water coming out of the sandstone in some spots, and that created hanging gardens that were quite lovely and cool amid the heat of the day.

The shuttle system allowed you to put your bike on the bus, and I took advantage of that while Ivy was doing some afternoon drawing and painting.  By riding the shuttle to the end of the line up-canyon with your bike, you could bicycle all the way back downhill and stop wherever you wanted, at places that were not part of the regular route.  There were some lovely spots by the river and some very restful and beautiful places that I got to enjoy with a bit of solitude.

Leaving Zion after a very enjoyable stay, we headed north again for a brief overnight stop at the Kodachrome Basin State Park, a very charming and rather remote pile of sandstone rock in the outback of Utah.  The park was lovely and quiet, with glorious views all around the campsite.  This site is known for sandstone pipes, which are special formations that evolve in the area. 

We needed to stay one extra day there to wait for our preferred option, the Escalante Petrified Forest State Park, which didn't have space for that day.  We stayed in Escalante partly to visit a friend of Ivy's who lives there and partly to access the Bryce Canyon National Park nearby.  We hiked the Escalante park to see an elaborate collection of petrified wood, and enjoyed dinner with our friends and lunch in a local restaurant.  We also took a very nice tour of historic houses.  None of these were very grand, but they were lovely and had some fascinating history.

Bryce Canyon was covered in a single long day trip from Escalante.   We began by driving to the end of the canyon overlook road and enjoying the views from that spot.  They are amazing - you can see all the way across the Colorado plateau and down into the canyon.  The wind was blowing strongly across the bluffs, and we stopped for a picnic after a windy walk along the cliffs.  From there we worked our way back, stopping at most of the overlooks provided for tourists and snapping photos all the way.  The final view was the most dramatic, the so-called Bryce Amphitheater, a formation made up of hoodoos, individual human-like figures carved of sandstone, piled up around the canyon like a huge audience gathered in a theater for a performance.  It's quite a sight, and clearly one of the most popular views with the public, who were there in force.

We explored the country around Escalante, which is largely made up of the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, many thousands of acres of open land and gravel roads that are a bit challenging for our little tow car.  But we drove out to the Devil's Garden at sunset, a lovely valley of hoodoos set against a backdrop of a dramatic mountain range along the Hole in the Rock Road.  And we hiked one of the trails down along a canyon that carries one of the tributaries to the Escalante River.

Leaving Escalante, we drove the RV up and over the highway from Escalante to Boulder.  This road is well known for being steep and a bit treacherous, with 14% grades in several places and a hogback at the top with steep drops on both sides.  I was a bit nervous about driving it with the RV, but the rig performed flawlessly and we continued on over Boulder Mountain to the town of Torrey, located at the entrance to the Capitol Reef National Park.  This was our last national park in Utah, so we made the most of it.  The park is one of the less visited ones, but is dramatic and spectacular all the same.  And the remarkable thing is that the area all around the park is just as dramatic and sometimes more so.  The town of Torrey is surrounded by mesas and bluffs in red rock that could be a national park all on their own.  Our RV park had spectacular views in all directions.

Much of the park was originally a Mormon settlement, in which huge orchards were planted to provide fruit to the surrounding communities.  A unique feature of the park is that the orchards are being maintained in good condition, and park visitors are allowed to pick fruit from them when they visit.  Unfortunately, we were in the park a bit too early, and nothing was ripe yet.  But the orchards were lovely green oases in this desert country.

We drove to the end of the canyon road and hiked a canyon that was used as a pass through the mountains by early settlers.  There was one of those pioneer signboards where travelers left their names and dates carved in the rock.  The weather was hot that day, and our enthusiasm gave out after awhile and we headed back, but the views were endlessly overwhelming.

But our most exciting drive was along the so-called Waterpocket Fold, a huge wall of rock that was created by geological uplift and folding and created an intimidating barrier to early settlers, who had to spend a lot of effort figuring out ways to get through it.  The road that we traveled was a long and rather rough gravel road, leading along the face of the wall and turning inward at one of the Grand Staircase Escalante roads that climbed the face up to the top and its sweeping views.  We had a lunch picnic at the top of the grade, looking out over the valley and mountains beyond.

On the way back, we stopped at a short slot canyon along the road.  These slot canyons are a distinguishing feature of this area, narrow towering canyons cut by runoff that slice through the high canyon walls.  Some extend for very long distances, but most of those are difficult to get to, so we settled for this accessible alternative.  We found the roads through this country endlessly amazing and dramatic.  The country is cut through by canyons, mesas, bluffs and carved formations of every kind, and the views are so unending and varied that you can wear out your digital camera and never get to the end of them.

The next day, we embarked on our run back to Seattle.  The goal was to travel rapidly through the rest of Utah and Nevada to California, where we will visit the Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks.  And then a visit to family in northern California, and the run back to Seattle.  Home by July 1.  It's hard to believe that it's ending, but we are both quite ready to be home.