Darkavich's Daily Ramblings

We got up and had a hot breakfast. This hotel didn’t have free continental food, so we ate at their restaurant. We headed back to Capitol Reef National Park.

We stopped at the visitor center, got our passport stamp and purchased an audio tour CD. We listened to it while we drove. This was a good cd, and I recommend getting it if you come here. We reached the first stopping point at the Grand Wash Trail and walked for about 1.5 hours.

We were supposed to come across some narrows, but after about an hour of walking, we gave up and turned around. The canyon was spectacular and it was amazing to see how 15 million years of water erosion has created this canyon.

Here are a few of the photos

After walking the canyon, we continued the driving tour. We came across an area called the goosenecks

We learned all about the small town that was created. There was a single family home that was home to a family of twelve. They all did not sleep in the house though. Some slept on ledges in the cliff while other slept in the the wagon. Now, why he didn’t just build onto the house I don’t know.

After Capitol Reef National Park, we drove to Bryce Canyon National Park.

We arrived at Bryce Ruby’s Inn, the first place that was booked 🙁 Fortunately, they had rooms across the street. We checked in and went to forage for dinner. We ate at the Ruby Inn restaurant. We had their buffet.

After dinner we drove into the park. It was only about a mile from the hotel. We just missed the visitor center by 20 minutes. We grabbed a park map and drove to one of the scenic overlooks. This was inspiration point. The view was INCREDIBLE. The sun was just about to set and the colors of the hoodoos were amazing.

The sun went down, so we drove back to our hotel. On the way back we saw another group of mule deer. They were grazing on the side of the road.

Once we got back to the hotel, we planned our day for tomorrow and went to bed.

We got up and ate breakfast. They didn’t have fresh waffles, just the frozen ones. After we finished packing we drove to Canyonlands National Park. We went to the needles visitor center to get our stamp and pick up a map of the park. We toured the park and took pictures of the unique rock formations.

We saw the wooden shoe arch, it’s an arch that when looked at, looks like a wooden shoe. What do you think?

After Canyonlands, we took a scenic route back over the mountains and by two lakes. This seemed to actually be a quicker route back to the town we started from. It was just over the mountains, rather than around them.

We stopped and ate lunch at A&W. I think the last time I ate there was in high school. I forgot how good their root beer floats are. Only thing is that they use soft serve ice cream now. It was just as good as I remember though.

After lunch we headed to Natural Bridges National Monument. This park has three of the most impressive natural bridges in the country. A natural bridge is a span of rock that was originally over a river/water. This is what separates it from an arch.

We drove to all three monuments. At the third one, we walked the .2 miles down the ravine so we could stand underneath the bridge. Fortunately, nothing fell from it while we were underneath it. That would have ruined a great trip 😀

Yes we did really go all the way down there!!

One the way back to the main road we ran into a sign that pointed out a unique rock formation. It is called the Bears Ears. Angie couldn’t make the connection, can you?

Back on the road we headed to our overnight destination. This took us over the mountains and over the northern edge of the Colorado River and Lake Powell. We stopped at the Hite overlook. This was an old mining town, during the uranium frenzy. After the mining died out the town sort of shutdown and is pretty much a ghost town.

We arrived at the hotel in Torrey, Utah. The hotel is just outside our next destination Capitol Reef National Park. Our room had a fantastic view of the mountains from our balcony.

We grabbed dinner and headed to bed.

Today we drove out of the mountains and into the Utah desert. We actually had a 20 degree temperature increase. We reached Arches National Park

This park is home to some of the most amazing rock features. All of which have been created by millions of years of sediment being laid down when this area was covered by ocean. Then millions of year of erosion have left us with what we see today.

We spent over 4 hours in the park today, so we really had no time to do anything else today. We drove to Moab for dinner, then headed down to Monticello, Utah for the night. This was the closes town to our next destination; Canyonlands National Park. We checked into the hotel and hopefully we can get to sleep early. It is a little bit loud here, so hopefully we will get a good night sleep.

Today was pretty much drive day, but we planned to stop at two locations and drive until we got tired on the way to our next destination.

The first place was Promontory Summit, Utah to visit Gold Spike National Monument. For those of you that are not railway buffs or american history for that matter, this is the place at which the transcontinental railway was completed.

The site is where the Central Pacific and Union Pacific united to inaugurate cross-country rail travel. This happened on May 10th, 1869. We just got there a few days too early to see them re-enact the driving of the final spike into the ground. They hold a ceremony every year on that date.

The original engines have long been scrapped, but new replica engines have been built. They have updated them for safety but have kept the original look. (e.g. they didn’t use rivets because welds are stronger, but used hidden welds so you could not see them, and put in fake rivets to give it an original look.)

After watching a video about the building of the railway, we took a driving tour that drives over the same path that the railway was on. We passed a section of railroad that was built in both directions. This happened over a 250 mile course because no specific meeting point had been chosen and because of typical government inefficiency each railroad company was paid a partial amount for each section they graded. There was no incentive for them to stop grading.

After Gold Spike, we headed back to Salt Lake City. We stopped near Ogden for dinner, then headed over to our second stop; Temple Square.

We took their short 30 minute tour. Unfortunately, the Tabernacle is under restoration, so we could not tour it.

After the tour we decided to head out as far as we wanted to drive before we got tired. This took us to Price, Utah. We checked into the hotel and sat in the spa for a little while, then headed off to bed.

We got up and packed, we thought about staying another night in Yellowstone, but because a lot of the park was still closed we figured we could do the rest of what we wanted in a day. This was also helped out by the fact that the southern entrance to the park was still closed. This meant we would have to adjust our itinerary a bit.

We skipped breakfast, as we had plenty of food from leftovers. We headed back up the road and stopped at all the geo-thermal sights along the way that we could get to. We stopped at the following locations:

Biscuit Basin, It was very smelly but had some spectacular views of the the pools. Here is a picture of the Sapphire Pool

Midway Geyser Basin; this area had a very large basin that was filled with water and water spilled down from over the top of the rim. One area was so smokey and windy that you were engulfed in sulfuric fumes. I have some great video of it I will upload when I get back home.

Fountain Paint Pot; Here we saw some very unique fountains. During this loop some stupid kids were putting their hands in water. I wanted to kick them in the butt and push them over for being so stupid. Well, one thing they probably don’t realize is there are TONS of microbes in that water that will probably make them sick. It will serve them right.

Here is one of the mud pools

On the way to the next area, we took the Firehole Canyon Drive: This had an awesome view of the waterfall at the end of the drive.

Mud Pots; On the way we saw lots of bison, elk and a fox. We drove down to the lake, but pretty much everything was closed. We headed back to the Mud Pots, but they had all the trails closed because of bears.

There were some springs across the road from the Mud Pots that smelled even worse than the Mud Pots. This was called Sulphur Cauldron. It sure was aptly named.

One of the interesting things was that this side of the park is pretty much flat with snow and meadows filled with trees. A very different look than the other parts of the park we had been to already.

After looking at all the hot springs, mud pots, and fumaroles, we headed over to the canyon area trails. This is an area that follows both the north and south sides of the Yellowstone River. We stopped at the south rim first then we drove to Artist Point for a spectacular view of the lower falls. After taking photos, we drove back to the upper falls viewing area.

Fortunately for us, all of the strenuous trails were still closed. Most of them decended 300 to 400 feet down the side of the canyon. Our legs had about had it this week.

Here is a view of the lower falls

This is a view of the upper falls

After driving the canyon trails, we headed out to the western entrance to the park. On this road we saw more wildlife than on any other road we have been on. We saw LOTS of bison, elk and even some wolves. On the way out of the park, there was a bald eagle area, but we didn’t see any.

We stopped at west yellowstone at the McDonalds to grab a bite to eat. We then looked at the map to figure out what to do next. It turns out that most everything at Grand Teton National Park was closed this time of year, so we decided to skip it. We are going to head to some of the other parks in Utah. We drove to Idaho Falls for the evening and then grabbed dinner at a local diner.