On Sunday we left Durango and headed back West to Glen Canyon, Arizona. We shared the driving as it was the longest drive between places we’d done thus far. The drive basically consisted of one long straight road after another, with very little traffic, so it is very easy. We did go through Monument Valley on our route which is full of towering rock formations. It is often used in Hollywood movies to depict the American West. In fact one…
This post comes soon after Lucy’s about Mesa Verde national park so don’t miss that one too! We are only staying in Durango, Colorado for one day and we had booked to go on a scenic train ride up in to the Rockies to a place called Cascade Canyon. This is an old narrow gauge steam train which has a variety of different carriages – we opted for the first class carriage (I think I can charge this to work…
We left Moab today to travel to Durango, Colorado. This will be the 4th state we have been since this part of our trip began – the previous ones being Nevada, Arizona and Utah. En route there was another National Park we wanted to visit – Mesa Verde, which is home to archaeological sites and mesa/cliff dwellings of the Puebloan people who lived in the area for over 700 years. As we only planned to stop for a few hours…
We’ve been staying in the town of Moab for a few days which is close by to two National Parks, Arches which we went to on our first day, and Canyon Lands which we went to yesterday. We’ve had a full day at each park, and then used our last day today to go back to Arches for a bit, but otherwise have a bit of a lazy day as we’ve been so busy so far and we’ve got tired…
Today we said goodbye to Capitol Reef and travelled to our next destination, which was Moab. Here we were hoping to crack two parks – Arches NP and Canyonlands NP. The journey to Moab As always we saw lots of stunning scenery on the drive, although the majority of the time we were seemingly driving on a straight (never-ending) road in through the desert, which at least made for an easy drive. En route we did go through a place…
This post is coming quite soon after Lucy’s one covering our trip to Capitol Reef and day 1 in the park, so don’t miss that one here. It’s definitely a lot colder here in Capitol Reef, and today was the first day of our whole trip I think where it wasn’t a clear blue sky and sun all day, so we felt the cold when we were out hiking. Cloudy and a bit windy still, but not too bad once…
Today (17th Jan) we moved onto our third National Park, as we headed to Capitol Reef Canyon. It was only a few hours drive, which we did at a leisurely pace with only an occasional stop on route to take photos. It felt like we were the only car on the road as we weaved our way through the canyon and past the ‘Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’ area. As we got higher we started to see lots of snow which…
We split our day into two parts today – a scenic drive to start with and then the Queens/Navajo Loop trail, in reverse this time. Southern Scenic Drive This is an 18 mile drive that starts at the Visitor Centre and takes you all the way to the park’s highest elevations at Rainbow and Yovimpa point. There are numerous stops along the way – some are merely viewing spots where you park up and take some photos, and others have…
Hi everyone, we moved on from Zion National Park on Tuesday to our next destination which is Bryce Canyon. We took the scenic drive route through Mount Carmel which had some great views, and a long 1 mile tunnel dug through the cliff. Stopped for a brief walk at the ‘Canyon Overlook Trail’ as we were leaving the NP and then drove on to Bryce Canyon from there. The scenic drive on the way to Bryce: Bryce Canyon Day 1…
Today was our last day in Zion so we decided to tick off a few more of the suggested hikes. We had a leisurely morning at the hotel (to give our legs a rest after our uphill trek yesterday) and then did two more walks in the afternoon. Sand Bench Trail The first was Sand Bench Trail, and it had quite a different feel about it compared to the others we’d done. For one thing the majority of the route…