July 12, 2013 Day three

Woke up happy to see it was NOT raining.  We were told by a ranger to expect that the morning would be nice, but the rains could come back again in the afternoons.  Better get going then.

The morning was spent on a long a delicious drive on Scenic Byway Utah 12.  This road connected Bryce Canyon with Torrey Utah (a bit outside of Capitol Reef.) It also went through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.  The drive was so amazing in the way that the scenery kept drastically changing, but was always spectacular.  We have come to believe that if you have the choice to take a road called a scenery byway, you should do it.

At the Grand Staircase (not really a staircase, more that there were layer after layer of rocks exposed going down like stairs in nearly 2 million acre federally protected land), we kept seeing huge blocks of sandstone carved into interesting shapes-some couple be a half-mile long.

In other areas we saw formations that reminded us of places like the Badlands of SD.  Some of the sites seemed pretty unique to Utah.

Utah has a huge percentage of its land owned by the Federal government, especially in Southern Utah.  One tidbit we found out was that there is a National forest and several other things in Southern Utah called “Dixie”.  We were on a hunt to find out why.  Thanks  to a ranger who looked it up on Google, we found out that someone tried to plant a lot of cotton in Southern Utah, and so named the area “Dixie”.  The cotton didn’t work out, but the name stayed.

Capital Reef National Park is really not on the way to anything.  You have to really want to visit it, but it is worth it.  This is an area that was settled by Mormon pioneers in the late 1800’s.  One of the unique things about their settlement was that they successfully planted fruit orchards and they called their community “Fruita”.  The orchards still live on today, and visitors can pick the fruit if there is some ripe while you are there.  Although we just missed the apricot season, we did get to buy a fresh apple pie which was delicious. 

The area also had amazing red rock cliffs, often topped with white limestone caps.  One of these supposed looked like the U.S. Capital Building, hence the name Capital Reef.  We would have liked to hang out longer, but the storm clouds were building, and they had posted warnings for flash flooding. So we thought we’d better move down the road.

Our ultimate destination for today was Arches National Park.  We arrived there at 4pm with the temperature at about 95.  Hot, hot, hot!  Luckily some things could be seen from the car, (and thank goodness for air conditioned visitor centers with orientation movies), and so we took a great drive around looking at even more amazing red rock formations.  Of course, quickly found ourselves getting out of the car and getting up much closer.  The temps cooled off a bit, and so we really enjoyed seeing and photographing some of the many stone arches in the Park.

This park is so filled with arches and “windows’ and other formations.   Around each corner is another magnificent site.

We checked into our campsite, which was lovely in the midst of shade and many fantastic rocks.  After dinner, we were pleased to attend a ranger talk about coyotes.  Ranger Mike did a nice job, entertaining and with a good use of both a personal story and a native American tale.  Time to try to go to bed, but first, how are writing this blog?  We don’t know when we will get Internet access to post, but hope to get it soon.

Thought for the day:  ″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi