Wrapping up the Grand Circle

Now in an attempt to get more caught up to date on this blog, I am going to try and cram a few days into a quick summarized post. Apologies for this lack of detail, but hopefully by doing this I will be able to keep everyone more informed on current happenings instead of recounting episodes that have occurred weeks in the past. So here we go.

That morning we woke at Capitol Reef National Park and after consulting the with the park rangers we decided on 3 hikes that we thought would perfectly complete our Capitol Reef

experience. The first was a short interpretive trail that lead to

many pictographs and petroglyphs along the bottom of the canyon wall. Next we traveled a bit down the road to do a 2 mile hike that ended at another natural bridge called Hickman Bridge. This hike provided much of the same views that we had at Natural Bridges only this time we started at the bottom of the canyon and didn't have to climb down and out of it to reach the natural bridge. Our final hike was to be the longest. We drove along the 10 mile scenic roadway until we reached a small slot canyon to do a hike named

Grand Wash. The name is pretty self explanatory but it derives from the fact that the trail follows a flood route down into and threw a canyon. This was easily the best hike we did that day. It started out with a wide, would be river bed, but the walls slowly converged inward as you traveled farther and farther into the canyon until eventually near the bottom of the trail the canyon again opens up as it leads into the valley. On the way into the canyon, our eyes strayed forward and upward as we watched the canyon grow taller and closer around us. After we turned around and as we left

the canyon, our eyes drifted to the ground. There we found many, amazing looking, rocks and stones, pocketing many as souvenirs along the way. Among the rocks we found many geodes and kept around 6; some of them the size of my fist! Also an interesting

side note about the canyon is that it was a known hideout of Butch Cassidy's, though the exact location within the Grand Wash is unknown and probably lost to time. After this we left Capitol Reef and headed for Bryce Canyon. This consisted of a long but beautiful drive through the Grand Staircase National Monument. We made many stops to enjoy the scenery of this drive but didn't do any hikes nor see anything that wasn't on our

main path. The next day we spent at Bryce Canyon National Park. We decided that we would spend at least a full day at both Bryce and Zion and were willing to spend 2 days at each place if necessary. Bryce Canyon turned out to only need one full day of our attention. When we asked the park ranger at the visitor center about which hikes we should do, he was nearly bursting with enthusiasm as we told him we had 2 days to spend in the park. I am sure that the park rangers get asked all the time about what can be done in a couple hours, especially at Bryce Canyon which has Zion so close to compete with, and it seemed refreshing to this guy that we were interested in spending some

significant time at his park. He told us about many hikes and then culminated in saying that we could just do them all together in what is known as the Figure 8 hike combining 3

different hikes creating a figure 8 through the main portion of the park. This loop is 7 miles and only took us about 3 hours to complete. It takes you down into the canyon and you weave in and out of all the hoodoo's, climb many hills that provide striking views of the canyon, then plunge back down into their towering depths. After this awesome hike we drove to the end of the canyon, stopping at

most of the lookouts. The day had become increasingly cold and now it was almost unbearable to stand at the canyon edge too long for fear of freezing to death, so we kept

our viewings short and sweet. While looking at all of the points of interest on the maps, Katie noticed that there was showers available at the lodge so we stopped in and both showered up for the price of $2 a person. Refreshed, we hit the road and headed south to sleep outside of Zion National Park. That night we were treated to severely intense winds that shook the car as we slept and left me to wonder often if we would be woken by our van being wrenched over onto its side. Having made it through the night, we made our way to Zion Canyon National Park only to discover that it was covered in rain and clouds. We consulted a park ranger again and she

told us that all of the hikes that we had hoped to do would not be safe or advisable while it was raining out. The two hikes that we were interested in doing at Zion were Angels Landing and The Narrows. The Angels Landing hike has sheer cliffs on either side of a 2 ft. wide ridge which has 1500 ft. drops on

either side. With the rain making the sandstone slick we knew we couldn't risk this hike. The Narrows is a hike that you take through the

river. The entire hike is in the water and you hike through narrow slot canyons much like the Grand Wash in Capitol Reef only now there is actually water flowing through the canyon. This hike was not recommended during the rain because of the quickened and heightened water as well as the cold temperatures that would be associated with it. Therefore we submitted to less adventurous hikes. We decided to visit all of the Emerald Pools. These are small pools that have a green algae on their floor giving them an

emerald hue. The 3.5 mile trail that connected them all was only enhanced by the rain, giving new life to the rivers, pools, and waterfalls that surround the trail. To get out of the rain for a bit we headed outside of the park and ate lunch at the Majestic View Lodge, home of the Zion Brewing Company. This place really did have a great view of

Zion Canyon and we watched the clouds slowly break from the comfort of the indoors. After our food we decided to drive to the far end of the park. This road

took us through a 1.5 mile tunnel and spat us out in a completely different terrain from the canyon on the other side. We stopped at a few lookouts and also spotted a small

group of bighorn sheep which we walked near and managed to scare away. After this we took the road back through Zion to the town of Springdale just outside the park where we spent the night watching Legend of the Guardians on the town's IMAX movie

screen. As we left the canyon and headed north to sleep at the same rest area as the night before we encountered a snowstorm that literally took visibility down to nothing. We rolled along at 30 miles an hour, scared that any moment we would fly off the road due to the pounding wind. We made it safely to the rest stop and bundled up tight in anticipation of our cold night.