Utah, Part 2

I loved the campsite in Canyonlands and desperately wanted to stay. But I wanted more to see the remaining three parks in Utah, so I packed up and left. I was okay with the decision to leave when it was 90 degrees by 9 a.m.

I took UT-95 through Glen Canyon toward Capitol Reef National Park. As good as the drive into Arches NP was, this was better! It cut through a deeper canyon (Glen Canyon National Recreation Area) with equally brighter colors but more dramatic views. There are a handful of photos in the album from this drive. Here is one of the better ones.

Moving north to Hanksville, to reach Capitol Reef NP, I needed to move west on UT-24. After filling up at a gas station carved out of a rock, I made the turn. Weirdly and instantly, the landscaped changed. It went from bright red rock canyons to industrial greys and maroons. It gave me a funny feeling, For awhile I thought it was industrialized land and then I realized it was real. And it's freaky.

Capitol Reef National Park
The part of the park located on UT-24 was really cool. Here's a cool photo. But the park had a weird set up and gave me even weirder feelings.

First of all, the scenic drive through the park was closed. Second, the park has about 20 miles of paved roads and perhaps 100 miles of unpaved roads. You need a high-clearance 4x4 to really explore the park. I don't think a Nissan Sentra fits that category.

After driving the mile or two of the scenic drive, I was a bit freaked out. The park just gave me this feeling of not belonging here on Earth. The colors are funny. Now I look back at the photos which turned out well, and it looks really beautiful; but for some reason it scared me at the time, so I left.

I wasn't planning to make it to Bryce Canyon National Park that day, assuming they wouldn't have camping available so late in the day. But I tried anyways. Once again, I got lucky. I found a pretty nice campsite.

Bryce Canyon National Park
After arriving, I just hung out at camp, as it was already dinner time. I decided to spend the entire next day exploring the park.

I began Day 22 reading my bible and thinking about how to attack the park. Like several other parks, the books said Bryce is best experienced by hiking. I read in the park's guide the Queen's Garden/Navajo Loop Trail is the best 3-mile hike in the world. I thought I'd try it out, but add another spur to make the hike 6.6 miles and hopefully take up a little more of the day.

The book was absolutely correct about hiking to see the park. The roads of the park are located on the canyon's rim, while many of the trails go into, and later, out of, the canyon. Seeing the canyon from any angle above is fascinating, but once you've seen one overlook, you've seen them all. So I got down in it.

And it was amazing! The light and bright, orange-colored rocks made an impeccable contrast with the sky. Camera's can be good at exaggerating the color of the sky. But not here. This was the bluest sky I have ever seen. I made it to the bottom of the canyon and Queen's Garden.

I continued on my hike, except I read the map wrong and made a wrong turn. I ended up on a horse trail, but by the time I realized I was going the wrong way I was back at the top of the canyon!

It had probably only been three miles, and I wasn't ready to quit for the day. It was a great workout getting back to the top of the canyon and I wanted to complete the world's best 3-mile hike. So I went back down the Queen's Garden trail again!

I finally found the Navajo Loop and began to climb back up the canyon. That was a workout, but it was an awesome climb. Here's a photo from the bottom of the climb and one from the top. It climbed about 300 feet in a half mile. There are steeper trails out there, but this was still a workout.

I can't argue the park's boasting of the hike. The only hike I have completed so far which comes close is the Hidden Lake Trail at Glacier NP. This leaves a good point for a couple asides.

Demographics and Generalizations
I, certainly unlike some, realize the fine-line between generalization and racism; and I find the most important part of a generalization is to realize it's never always (love using opposite extremes together) the case. But this summer has been a funny one in that regard. Here are a few things I've found.

National park visitors are 99.9% either white or Asian. What I hadn't experience until I reached Bryce Canyon was the number of Europeans. I would find this in many of the following parks in Utah and California as well as Grand Canyon. I reason this is because August is vacation month for Europeans and also these parks are close to large airports. But unlike the parks before this, where Asians and white Americans seemed to be somewhat equal in number, Bryce Canyon was almost entirely European.

This led me to reflect on two ideas, or perhaps questions. The first is the simple Why? The best answer I can think of is because these parks are that great - they must be some of the best preserved, most accessible landscapes in the world. And also, there are many more foreigners than there are Americans. Suddenly, it makes sense.

My second idea was I wonder how many Americans live their entire life and are never able to see these spectacular landscapes. Perhaps some simply don't want to or don't care about the landscape, while others may simply choose their vacation time (if they even have the means to vacation in the first place) on more resort-like spots. This has given me a great perspective on what I am doing out here, has made me appreciate it even more and has provided me with an ever bigger realization for what several people have had to sacrifice for me to be able to do this. Thank you to all who have had an impact.

And for a quick generalization: While the typical American tourist hikes in their 1990s jeans and tennies with a tucked-in, cotton t-shirt, the typical European woman hikes in a bathing suit top or rolls their shirt up, while men often don't wear shirts at all. If you look at the left side photo from the top of the Navajo Loop climb, you'll see a bathing suit lady. I eventually asked the lady to take my picture. She tried to do so backwards and upside down. This gave me a good laugh and reminded me of an opposite experience I had two years ago at Mount Rushmore when I handed my other camera to an older gentleman who tried to look through a viewfinder that didn't exist to take my photo. He missed me completely. And this is why I don't like to ask people to take photos of me.

Two Cool Plaques
The first one is a Lyndon B. Johnson quote, which read:

If future generations are to remember us with more gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

Well-stated. Not many people maintain this type of thinking. We tend to think the solutions or inventions we create are the correct ones, when undoubtedly there are consequences to come of which we have not yet thought. The national park system is a great system for that reason: it leaves the landscapes as they were (with a few exceptions).

The second was a Paiute Indian Legend:

Before there were any Indians, the Legend People, To-when-an-ung-wa, lived in that place. There were many of them. There were many kinds - birds, animals, lizards and such things - but they looked like people...For some reason, the Legend People in that place were bad. Because they were bad, Coyote turned them into rocks. You can see them in that place now; all turned into rocks; some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding on to others. You can see their faces, with paint on them just as they were before they became rocks...

Note this is a legend and not a geologic fact.

Before I move on to the next park, I'll leave you with a photo of another Inspiration Point. A little better than Grand Tetons?

Zion National Park
I began Day 23 by moving on to Zion National Park. I was planning to move through the park quickly and on to Las Vegas to meet my parents for dinner.

Zion was beautiful. It still is. But I didn't have a great experience. Zion had more than 2.6 million visitors last year (Yellowstone is around 3 million), and it is significantly smaller than many of the other popular parks. It felt packed. They have a decent system where you have to park and take a shuttle into the canyon. But there are two problems with this system. First, the visitor center does not have adequate parking. Second, the lodge is in the canyon. Both of these equate to a shuttle system much too crowded.

I couldn't find a parking spot and had to drive clear through the park and park in town to take a different shuttle and later transfer to the canyon shuttle. I lost a lot of time doing this. I also ripped my new day pack, which didn't help my experience.

Zion is no doubt beautiful, but within the canyon it doesn't change all that much. Therefore, many of the short hikes are very similar. The longer hikes are supposedly amazing, but I did not have the time to complete them. I left the park later than I had wanted to, frustrated with the poorly-executed shuttle service, excessive crowd and that I didn't have a great experience because I know how beautiful the park is. But given its proximity to Las Vegas, I'll be back (and in the fall when it is much cooler).

Utah Album

Next Post: Nevada, Round 2