Take the Long Way Home

Once we reached Capitol Reef National Park we were greeted by massive crimson and white cliffs that rose from the ground in a series of rifts. The park got its name from the shallow seas, which used to cover most of Utah and the Western United States, that left behind tons of fossilized reefs and animal remains. Come to find out it was very difficult to discover why the park was named as it was because the only information the visitor center gave us was about the settlers in the area, not about the geological formation of the park. Either way we finally got the information we needed to do some hiking in the area and set out to find the trailheads. The first trailhead we reached took us to three natural water tanks carved out of the sandstone by many years of flash floods. The trail was accessed by a dirt road that wound through a car sized slot canyon! It was incredible to drive through the canyon hemmed in on both sides by towering cliffs of sandstone! There was water in all but one of the tanks, but trust me it was certainly non potable! We did some rock scrambling in the area before we decided to head to the next trailhead. 

The first settlers through the canyon signed the canyon walls to leave their mark. 

The second hike we did was to Cassidy Arch. It is named after the famous Butch Cassidy, who was thought to have used the slot canyons in the National Park to hide from law enforcement. You could not see the arch until you had hiked in about a mile and a half, but as soon as you mounted the last hill it was suddenly below you! We were able to walk out on the arch and take pictures, and then using the Cairns as guides returned the way we came.

The last hike we did that day took us into some smaller canyons, which had interestingly formed walls. The walls had been eaten away by erosion in small pockets all the way up the cliff side. It created a perfect habitat for birds to nest and some great holds for climbing! One thing you should know is that if there are rocks nearby and if they are in anyway climbable, we will attempt them if even we do not top out! When we reached the end of the hike we were overlooking a river as it meandered through the park cutting slowly away at the base of the cliffs. As we turned around to leave rain started to fall ever so lightly and the wind began to pick up. We ducked back into the canyon and made our way to the exit. When we reached the Jeep we drove a little further up the road to the old homestead barn and the one room schoolhouse and took lots of photos of it!

Then we began our drive to Moab where we would visit Arches and Canyonlands National Park. As the sun dropped below the horizon, the rain began to fall much harder making it difficult to see with one headlight and only the passenger side windshield wiper working! Fortunately the majority of the distance was traveled by way of a state highway with very little traffic on it. To our left the sinking sun briefly illuminated the far away hills of Goblin Valley with a blazing light as it dropped below the cloud level. It quickly vanished leaving the world in a grey haze that steadily turned blacker. Sometimes the most incredible things you encounter on a trip like this happen to be the simplest. In this case the profound emptiness and thickness of the night was amazing! No stars shone through the overcast sky but still it was incredibly peaceful and lonely! We drove like that for over an hour without a single car in sight and then we came up to I-70! It was so strange and so exciting to finally see a sign for Denver, 433 miles away, but it felt like an easy days drive after what we had done in the last few months. But our story didn’t end there! We exited the interstate and made our way south to Moab. When we reached Moab we discovered that it would be difficult to find a place to park the Jeep for the night. After a fruitless search around town we eventually just pulled off the side of the road in the middle of the Moab, made dinner, and hurriedly went to bed. In the morning we awoke to large puddles and lots of mud, not exactly the way we pictured Moab. The times that we have visited the biking, climbing, and four wheeling paradise known as Moab it has always been super hot and dry with a blazing sun overhead! Change is good though; we hoped the cooler weather would make hiking easier. It certainly did make aspects of hiking in Arches easier but as we soon discovered the fog could make sighting the Arches a real challenge! We stopped in the Visitor Center to talk with the Rangers about the best hike to do. After we knew where we were going we set out through the park. Arches National Park is an amazing place where over 2000 freestanding natural sandstone arches have formed, more than anywhere else on earth! We drove through petrified dunes; balancing rocks, needle like spires of red rock, mazes, and more arches than you could shake a stick at! We hiked to Landscape Arch, which is one of the most famous in the park. It is as long as a football field, but very narrow. They used to allow visitors to hike up underneath it but in the 90’s a large chunk of rock broke off while several tourists were resting below it and narrowly missed crushing them to death! We tried to hike to several other Arches farther down the trail but the rain made the rocks very slick and the footing treacherous so we turned back and saw several Arches closer to the car.

When we reached the car we drove to anther set of arches and took some pictures of them, we continued this process for most of the day. At one particular arch we encountered an older Japanese couple that were also taking pictures of the Arches. Chris climbed up on top of one of the Arches and in an effort to stay out of their photographs decided to continue climbing up the rock until he could go no further. Chris was out of sight for quite some time so Lauren became to yell his name to try and find him. The Japanese couple also became intrigued with Chris’s whereabouts. Soon all three where yelling, “Chris!” or “Where are you?”. They continued looking for him and calling his name, until they finally saw him! The woman yelled, “I found him” and her husband replied “wow, he a natural rock climber”! After that Chris climbed on top of the Arch and they thought it was funny so they took several pictures of him and then left. They were an extremely nice and fun couple! We continued to take some pictures of the Arch and then we also left.

The next arch we saw is the famous Delicate Arch, which is on the Utah license plate, and then Double Arch, and the Window Arches (North and South), and finally Keyhole Arch. The rain had been coming and going all day, sometimes hard, sometimes in a light mist, and once the sun poked out for an hour before disappearing for good. The last stop was Balancing Rock. The Balanced Rock is an enormous boulder perched extremely precariously on top of a thin spire of mudstone and cemented cobbles. It sits in an amazing defiance of physics…for now!

After we had taken our last pictures of the rock we began racing back to the car. When Chris reached the parking lot, he turned around to run back and tackle Lauren but slipped as he was making the change in direction. Luckily Lauren no longer bothers to try and avoid Chris (which is good because usually that ends in her tripping over her own feet) so she just plowed straight into him! It worked in both of our favors since the collision kept Chris from painfully face planting in a puddle and on his feet, and his tackle attempt wrapped her up and kept her from falling. So despite his attempt to tackle her, all that happened was we ended up hugging in the middle of the parking lot! Adorable! As the sun set we were driving out of Arches and back into Moab. We found a Laundromat so that we could use their Internet to post one of our blogs and then we splurged for the night and went to Zax Grill! We don’t know if its really a good place to eat since every time we’ve been there it has been at the end of an exhausting backpacking trek through Utah wilderness or in this case a cross country drive in which we lived by the phrase feast or famine, with most of the days ending in famine! Suffice it to say that it is a tradition for us, and every time we are in Moab we will go to Zax Grill! After dinner we began driving towards Canyonlands. It was a stressful drive because it was still raining and it was pitch black, and as we mentioned before the Jeep only has one headlight and one working windshield wiper on the passenger side! Every time a car passed us it blinded Chris and unfortunately there were cars at least every five minutes so by the time we saw the sign for Canyonlands Chris was not in the greatest of moods. Couple that with the fact that the road we had turned on crossed through open range and you have a fairytale plot! As we chugged along in the Jeep the massive head of a bull could suddenly be seen just off the road. It was quite a scare and was all the convincing we needed to pull off on the next pullout and go to sleep. We did just that. In the morning we awoke to about 2 inches of freshly fallen snow and cloudy skies! It was beautiful but also very cold!

 We will not be deterred, however, so we ate breakfast, packed up and drove the rest of the way into the park. By this time it is snowing again. We filled up our Nalgene’s at the Visitor Center and then began driving to the trailhead for the joint! We reached the trailhead and discovered the option to drive the four wheeling road back a little more to shorten our hike a little. Chris listened to the better judgment of his wife and decided not to attempt the road. We began the 11-mile loop to the joint in the snow with snow falling and a heavy fog all around. We had done this hike before on one of our spring break backpacking trips and it was one of our favorite hikes! We reached the Needles District of the trail and were greeted with towering monoliths of rock half hidden in the fog. It was nothing short of breath taking!

We continued through the Needles and made our way to the joint. The joint is a series of horizontal cracks that run through a portion of the sandstone. The cracks are so narrow that you have to turn sideways to fit through them while your back and chest are pressed against both walls! Its not a good place for claustrophobics! On top of that it is filled with deep puddles that you have to wriggle past, but it is truly great fun! At one point the walls were just far enough apart that Chris was able to climb to the top by wedging himself against the walls and inching his way up. He took some pictures from the top and then came back down and we continued through the joint. As the trail progressed the canyon walls got higher and higher until suddenly they ended and we came out on the other side. By the time we left the joint the snow was coming down HARD!

It was not a blizzard but visibility was poor and the snow was getting deep. It was no longer easy to find the trail. We easily became sidetracked and we had to be extremely diligent about looking for trail markers and Cairns in order to keep from becoming lost. By the time we reached the Jeep an additional 6 inches had fallen and everything around us was coated in a wintery blanket! It was beautiful but because the rock had become extremely slippery and icy, we were very thankful to be done with the hike! Lauren put some hot water on the stove and made hot chocolate as I shoveled off the accumulated snow from the hood and windshield of the Jeep.

The sun was about to set as we switched the Jeep into four-wheel drive and made our way out of the park. The roads were not plowed and icy so the going was slow. Remember how the road into the park crossed an open range? Well, as soon as it was dark we came suddenly upon two cows that had apparently fallen asleep while standing in the middle of the road! It was either that or the cold had numbed their brains into a comatose state! Chris slammed on the brakes and the Jeep began to slide towards the left shoulder. We missed the cows and the ditch by a miracle! Thank God because hitting a cow, even at 25 mph, would be devastating to any vehicle! We fish tailed briefly and then kept driving. The cows didn’t budge. They didn’t even seem to know we were there. Stupid animals! When we reached the main road, the plows had been at work and the open range ended…whew! We drove further until we found a suitable place to pull off the road and sleep. We awoke in the morning with another 3 inches. Lauren checked the status of the remaining parks we were planning to see, Mesa Verde National Park, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, and the Great Sand Dunes National Park. MVNP closed the village ruins for the winter, and BCGNP was inaccessible due to snow, as was the GSDNP. Well, at this point, we are cold, wet, hungry, and tired. The weather during November in the high alpine of the Colorado Rockies was not about to improve much until next May or June and we would be stranded for at least several days hoping for the parks to open. We opted to return home and save the Colorado national parks for another time. As we reached the border of Colorado we spotted the sign “Colorful Colorado”. It was the last sign we needed, but unfortunately it was in a muddy snow-filled ditch. At first we were not too keen on getting the last sign, but honestly we had come this far and braved so many elements, and endured so many ordeals, it would be stupid to not get this last sign! Besides, what is the worst that could happen, we could get wet feet or the Jeep might become stuck? Whatever, we drove down into the ditch, took the pictures, and escaped without a hassle. Success!

From there we had a 9-hour drive home. Piece of cake! Shortly after we crossed into Colorado the snow turned to rain. It continued to rain until we reached Pagosa Springs and then it turned back into snow. As we approached the Wolf Creek Pass it was evident that southern Colorado had received a lot of snow recently! It was painful to drive past the ski slopes and not be able to get out and ski! From there on we mostly just drove, and drove, and drove. We arrived at Lauren’s parents house around five. We took a picture of us with their house in the background and sent a picture to both parents and Lauren’s sister, Kaitlyn, and waited in the car to see if they would realize we were there.

We had told them we would not be arriving there until Tuesday the 26^th. Needless to say, when they received their pictures they were confused. My dad finally figured out that we were outside; Lauren’s mom, Elaine, did not believe him. She walked outside just to be sure and when she saw us she began running and exclaimed, “It really is you!” and embraced Lauren in a huge hug! Everyone hugged and laughed. On the day we left it rained in Colorado, because it was sad we were leaving. On the day we returned there were fireworks! Colorado was excited to have us back and we are certainly glad to be back in this beautiful state! It is undoubtedly good to be home!