One of our goals was to explore the space between – between the National Parks. Toward that end, we stopped by a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office and made one ranger’s day. We asked about maps, roads and campsites in the area between the NPs, mostly managed by the BLM. She was beaming! She went on to tell us all of her favorite places, potential road closures, and where campsites are plentiful or scarce.
Capitol Reef National Park is the most remote of the Southern Utah parks. Unique geological movements created a 100-mile wrinkle in the earth’s surface the eventually eroded into an angled reef surrounded by various shapes, sizes and colors of crazy rock formations. The unique movements also enabled the Fremont River to run year-round, creating the basis for settlement. The soil, climate and isolation were perfect for fruit orchards. Fruita, the remains of the historical town within Capitol Reef, is literally and figuratively an oasis in the desert.
Canyonlands National Park is a vast and quiet place compared to Arches. It’s divided into 3 distinct districts: Island in the Sky, Needles, and the Maze. The latter can only be accessed by jeeps and off-road vehicles, so we won’t be visiting the Maze. We did visit Island in the Sky during our stay in Moab.
Continue reading “Canyonlands National Park, Part 1 – Island in the Sky”
Arches National Park is known for its arches – over 2,000 of them!
Last October in Memphis at the Blues Guitar Unleashed (BGU) Live gathering, several of us jammers stayed at the Tom Sawyer Mississippi River Campground in West Memphis, Arkansas. Among that crew were Michael (known as Stringbreaker on the BGU forum) and his wife, Kat. Michael and Kat live in Moab and they told us we should stop by if we were ever passing through there. Ding ding ding!
Continue reading “Jamming with Stringbreaker”
This is our first visit to Utah canyon country, and likely not our last. It’s magical! And we’ve only just begun…
Southern Utah is beautiful! However, cell coverage and wifi are nearly as sparse here as palm trees in the high desert. It looks like we’ll be updating blog posts in batches, and perhaps adding photos/albums as we find bandwidth!
We were approached by another hiker who asked if it was our first time in Utah. Yes, yet how did he know? First timers tend to take an extraordinary number of photos. He was right! So, please excuse our (temporary?) hyperphotophilia. Our oversized albums are a small fraction of that extraordinary number…
We have arrived in Utah where we plan to stay for a bit and explore. The re-positioning portion of our trip is complete. We’re about to slow way down.
Our foray into New Mexico was actually another blues guitar visit. We’ve met my friend Steve twice before in real life, and he and I have been friends online through the BGU forum for several years. Steve told me, in a reply to a forum post I made last year in which I detailed the states we planned to visit, that there was a mistake in my list – I’d left out New Mexico. Well, to me that sounded pretty close to an invitation to visit the legendary Compound within which Steve and his lovely wife Hyacinth reside, and I vowed not to make that mistake again this year.
…bring interesting storms into eastern Colorado and New Mexico in the spring. So what are the options for a couple of adventurers in a 6 ton RV with 6 all-season tires (2 of them brand new!) heading through Taos and Santa Fe to Albuquerque, with a forecast for 12+ inches of snow?