Capitol Reef & Escalante

The next stop in our tour of Utah was Capitol Reef National Park. To get there, we drove through Grand Staircase Escalante on a twisty road at the top of a mountain. Much of the drive looked like this:

5-26-15 - Awesome Views in Escalante

There was a great cafe in Boulder, Utah where we had lunch (Hell's Backbone Grill) and finally we arrived in a land filled with huge red mountains:

Capitol Reef National Park

"Twin Rocks"

Chimney Rock

"The Castle"

Capitol Reef also has petroglyphs from the Fremonts and Ancestral Puebloans, easily accessible from the main road.

Petroglyphs

We only had time for a short trail, so we did the popular 2-mile Hickman Bridge trail, which takes you out to a big arch. The scenery along the way is not bad either. We saw this baby sheep right at the beginning and then Nathan and I got separated ("I was looking at a bird") and never found each other again until we met in the parking lot.

Hickman Bridge

We spent the night in Torrey, Utah and left bright and early the next morning for Zion National Park. I thought nothing could top the drive through Escalante, but there were some incredible vistas on this road too, including more red rocks and a lush, green valley that we drove in by ourselves for what seemed like hours.

First view of the green valley

There is no place like Utah!

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.