Category: National Parks
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Hit and Run to Moab
Life after Zion is starting to feel like a hit and run. Hit the road, run through the sights and hit the road again. Driving Betty is heavy workload in graduating elevations with rumble strip lanes and dish rattling pavement. Exploring in the never-ending cold and rain is tipping the scales to tiresome. We keep…
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Ga-Ga for Goblins
Hoodoos are out. Goblins are in. Where hoodoos have an untouchable magical and mystical aura, goblins are weird and wild and in your face. As we transition from ‘reservations in-hand’ to ‘no reservations – no problem,’ we followed a hunch that the fully booked Goblin Valley State Park 100 miles northeast of Capitol Reef might…
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Capitol Reef – Andacite To See
Our two weeks under Watchman’s eye gave us a new sense of self. We left at day break with a general sense of direction to head east and not much in the way of reservations. It is a lot less structured than what we used to expect from ourselves and our colleagues as college prof…
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YES WE CANyon
When your primary vehicles are two wheels and six, any excursion normally made with four has to be “worth it.” Shower transitions to closet, dinette to living room storage, Comos on the back, slides in, jacks up, Betty barreling along, snarling traffic and the smell of brake dust in the morning. We were among the…
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Wetwalkers
Big hike and bikes require rest and stretch, best accomplished with a good book, laundry and a stroll downtown. After one western omelet, two Motrin, and a few chapters in Eric’s Streets of Laredo and Sheri’s Breaking my Cover – My Life as a CIA Spy, we gathered up our dirty canyon clothes, donned our…
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A Day In The Pits
Since beef and kamut soup takes 8 hours of slow cooking, our best while-we-wait activity was 11 miles outside the park in the Southwest Desert. Kamut is an ancient grain from Egypt that gets frequent mentions from Sheri’s favorite on-line chef, Cookie & Kate. It turns out, we have a pantry full of ancient grains…
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Next Time Bring Rope
If a trail isn’t closed, we’ve hiked it. Biked to it. Taken a tram to it. Pictured it. Blogged about it. Yesterday we were wondering if there was anything else in Zion to see. Anything else to explore. We’ve exhausted all the park gift shops, which don’t have Sheri’s want of a dashboard hoodoo or…
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Chasing Waterfalls
Neither snow, nor rain, nor cold, nor hail of last night kept us from making our appointed Zion rounds today. As we sat in the dark, listening to 6 hours of roof pounding rainplops and hammering hail … wishing we had enough bandwidth to stream the season finale of Game of Thrones … and wondering…
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Hoodoos to Hurricane
A loud thud woke us from our cryogenic sleep chamber and sent Eric scrambling into his flannels to investigate what outside forces were afoot. 6:38am and no apparent culprit, we pulled up the jacks to frontrun the looming snowfall. No electric means no coffee means no go without Joe. A few hundred yards outside the…
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Bryce Bryce Baby
What do you get when you mix switchback roads, a height size restricted tunnel, snow in the forecast, first come first serve dry camping and 8000 feet of elevation? Eric’s excuse for a 90 mile roadtrip to Bryce Canyon National Park. The Mount Carmel tunnel is a mile long and 16 feet wide. It is also…