Cedar Breaks National Monument

To celebrate our 10th Anniversary, Nathan and I dropped the girls off at Grandma's house and took a weeklong trip to Utah. I was expecting the parks (Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, and Zion) to be neat, but what I wasn't expecting was how incredible every single piece of Utah really is. I got absolutely no reading done in the car because every inch of our drive was amazing and so different from the preceding mile. We flew into Las Vegas and drove through a desert sprinkled with Joshua Trees, then tree-covered mountains, snowy hills, and finally, all in the same day, ended up in Cedar Breaks National Monument, an orange, snow-covered canyon erupting from the side of a mountain range with dark storm clouds on the horizon. I'm glad we started with Cedar Breaks because it was impressive, but things just got better and better as our trip progressed. We only spent an hour or two in Cedar Breaks, but it was a good introduction to one of the most impressive states I've ever visited.

5-25-15 - This marmot greeted us as we parked our car.

Cedar Breaks Canyon

Me: Enjoying Day One

Many of the signs throughout the park warned about lightning strikes and with a storm rolling in (and the fact that the only jacket I'd brought was a thin fleece, which didn't hold up well at 10,000 feet), we decided to quickly head to Bryce Canyon National Park, our second stop of the day.