The Devil's garden boasts a notably high concentration of arches, spires, and fins (narrow rock walls) in Arches National Park. Between the main loop and its many offshoots to iconic spots such as the landscape arch and the Double O Arch, hiking the Devil's Garden Trail can take anywhere from 1.9 to 7.9 miles with easy and difficult routes. If you are only going to make one spot in the Devil's Garden, it should be the Landscape Arch.
Bryce Canyon National Park has a campground, but for boondockers like us, we were delighted to find campsites off a forest road in Dixie National Forest.
It's 5am and I lie in bed contemplating sleep. It would be so nice, but it seems to be avoiding me. To my right, Chris stirs. "Can't sleep?" Part of it is the sleeping. Part of it is the opportunity. We are parked right outside of Bryce National Park. The sun will be coming up in an hour or so. We have time to get there to see the sunrise. But it means facing the below freezing temperatures outside of our cozy bed. Even so, this very well may be a once in a lifetime opportunity. We are both tired, but even Chris doesn't grumble as we layer on ski pants, heavy coats, and dash for the truck cab.
Hit all the major vista points in Bryce Canyon National Park with Highway 63, skirting the rim of the hoodoo filled ampitheater.
Lone rock campground on Lake Powell is listed as a primitive campground. But primitive campgrounds don’t have running water in my book. Lone Rock does. Granted, even primitive campgrounds tend to have fire rings and solid, if unpaved, roads. Lone Rock does not. That is because Lone Rock is a beach campground and anyone that wants a scenic, lakeside site has to contend with loose sand.
Monument Valley is an incredibly popular film location but few vistas are more iconic than the Forrest Gump Point along Scenic U.S. Highway 163.
Muley Point is a mecca for boondockers, overlanders, and outdoor adventurers, hovering over the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Southern Utah.
Driving the Shafer Trail between Canyonlands National Park and Moab is absolutely hair raising. The descent from the park's visitors center to the canyon floor is a heart stopping collection of narrow switchbacks. Better yet, the narrow trail is flanked by a sheer, 1,000-foot cliff on one side and a rock wall on the other. And if that is not enough disincentive, there is little between you and a precipitous drop other than a few tenacious sage brush.
The Rimrocker Trail is an off-road and OHV route from Montrose, Colorado to Moab, Utah. The trail traverses terrain from pine and aspen forests to rolling hills of sage and cactus. The road condition varies from regularly graded gravel to rutted dirt roads and one high water crossing. The trail winds through federal and private land so be conscious of signs along the road when selecting a campsite or taking side adventures on other trails.
We wing things. That's what we do. I've made a map of places we would like to go to and then base our routes on our final destination and what mapped points fall between our current location and destination. Exactly how our trip plays out each time is something we play by ear. In this case, we had ten days to travel to Oregon. Half way in, we discovered that we would be swinging by Arches National Park. Arches ranks as one of the most exciting National Parks that neither of us has ever visited. So, of course, we went.