Monument Valley

Although a travel day for us, we found a couple of unexpected gems as we headed northeast from the Grand Canyon back into Utah.  Near Page, Arizona, as we stopped to fill up and wash the truck, we noticed a sign for Horseshoe Bend on the Colorado River.  Could it be the same river bend we seem to have seen on every postcard?  Indeed it was.  After a mile hike or so through some deep, red sand, we snapped this shot:

Maybe not as good as a postcard, but it was a nice leg-stretcher.  We ventured on, and after couple more hours came across the turn-out for Monument Valley.  We decided to bite the bullet and pay the Navajo fee to enter the monument and get the best views of the sandstone formations.  Our national park pass doesn’t work on tribal lands, but the side trip was well worth the visit.  In addition to the views, we got to walk in John Wayne’s footsteps, and were pretty impressed at the Navajo Code Talker exhibit at the small museum.

After 7 nights of sleeping on the ground, it was time for a hotel and hot shower that didn’t require quarters, so we called it a night in Monticello, Utah.  The organic vegan restaurant across the street was closed (darn), but we found a little cowboy joint that served up some good home cooking.  We were mostly good and opted for veges and salad as 2 of our 3 sides (the third being hush puppies – yum!).  The piece de resistance, however, was the chocolate cake.  Three layers of fluffy goodness, spotted with chocolate chips, layered with cream cheese frosting and covered in chocolate ganache.  Hey, we had veges with dinner.

We’re hoping to get an early start on the day tomorrow as we head into Canyonlands and meet up with our friends, Greg and Michelle (of the infamous Bone Blog).  They are doing their own trip from Missouri through Colorado and Utah, so we’re looking forward to a friendly face and swapping stories of our mutual adventures.

North Rim of the Grand Canyon

The North rim of the Grand Canyon is nothing short of a sight to behold. One of the 7 Wonders of the World, the North rim hosts beautiful views of the Colorado River and its tributary canyons.  As an added bonus, the drive in to the park is a beauty all its own, with wide, open meadows surrounded by pine and aspen forests.  Although we’ve never been to the South rim, we chose to explore the North rim for its remoteness and beauty (i.e. – a fraction of the crowds, and way more to look at than sagebrush).

As mentioned in previous posts, Erin spent some time here in 2001, and even hiked into the canyon. With no geology to map, however, we decided to skip most of the strenuous hikes into the mile-deep canyon and instead view some of the lesser-explored areas of the park via vehicle.  This also saves us from being complete sweaty slobs for our dinner splurge at the Grand Canyon lodge this evening.

After dinner, we plan to take in an astronomy lecture at the lodge and do some star gazing. The dark sky should reveal some views that may even rival the beauty of the canyon.

Happy Father’s Day!

Off-Road Adventure

Saturday was a travel day for us. We needed to get from Bryce to our campground at Grand Canyon, which is a pretty indirect route… for most people. We, however, decided to take the scenic route. This involved nearly 100 miles of dirt roads, but paints pretty much a straight line between our start and end points for the day. For those of you who followed our previous adventure, you’ll know that we did that trip in a six year-old Hyundai Santa Fe with no air conditioning. That car, when loaded down with a full complement of camping gear, rode low on its suspension and handled miserably. For this trip, we’ve got a brand-spanking-new Toyota Tundra pickup. From the beginning, it was obvious that we’d have more room (plenty for all of our supplies and then some). Our off-road adventure, however, really highlighted how much easier the right vehicle can make a road trip. Instead of worrying about whether or not the car would have difficulty with the road, we just went, and the truck handled beautifully. Even with all of our gear, the Tundra plowed over washboard roads at 50mph. It was a blast.

Along the way, we saw several great geologic features which tourists generally never get to see. These included the Grosvenor Arch and the Cockscomb formation.

We also ventured into two slot canyons – Cottonwood Canyon and Wire Pass along the Paria River. The latter proved to be spectacular, with 50 foot high walls no more than three feet apart in places!  We felt we got some pretty good photos, too, even if one of them is in kind of in bad taste (our apologies, Aaron Ralston…).

The vistas along the way certainly made the drive worthwhile, although we found-out at the end of our journey that the tailgate of a pickup truck is by no means airtight. ALL of our gear is now covered in fine desert dust. Whatever, it’s not dirty, it’s just… weathered.

Bryce Canyon Voodoo. Hoodoo? You Do.

Like Labyrinth, Bryce Canyon is a maze all its own — made up of canyons and geologic formations called hoodoos*.  Although we we’re not trying outrun the wrath of David Bowie, we did have fun exploring in the badlands, hiking around such areas as “Wall Street” and “Thor’s Hammer”.

Bryce is a small park, so we saw most of it in a few hours, even with adding about 6 miles of hiking.  The weather, hovering around 70 degrees, has been a welcome relief from the 100 degree temps we experienced in Zion and Death Valley.  This afternoon, we may go explore some neighboring towns, and check out the visitor center for Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument.  If road conditions are favorable, our trip to the Grand Canyon tomorrow could prove to be quite adventurous!

*A quick geology lesson from Erin: hoodoos are formed when softer rock below a harder cap rock (dolomite, in this case), is eroded by wind and ice.

 

Zion

We’re to the part of our trip for the next ten days or so where Erin has been to most of the parks during a geology field camp in the summer of 2001.  Zion is no exception.  Nevertheless, having visited ten years ago, and without Brian, it is still very much a new experience.  Erin spent most of her five weeks in southern Utah mapping rock formations (a.k.a. “coloring”), and this time she actually gets to enjoy the scenery.

Zion has proved to be much like Yosemite, in that every direction you turn is another stunning view worthy of a photo.  We spent yesterday utilizing the great shuttle system in the park, which whizzed us around to all of the major sites.  We did a few hikes, including the Emerald Pools and part of the Virgin River walk.  Much to our disappointment, the Narrows hike was still closed, due to the Virgin River still running too high and swiftly (not to mention the water temp was only 42 degrees!).  This is the one hike Erin did in her previous visit to the park, and was looking forward to re-experiencing with Brian.

Today is quite a bit warmer than yesterday (97 degrees), so we hiked early, then settled into to a beachy spot along the Virgin River to sunbathe.  We’re now enjoying ice cream and blogging to you from the comfort of an air-conditioned building!  Wish you were here…

Tomorrow we’ll get to experience one last highlight of Zion – the 5,613-foot tunnel that will serve as our exit from the park and transition to Bryce.

Death Valley….it’s a dry heat.

Neither of us knew exactly what to expect of Death Valley National Park.  It is desolate, beautiful, full of life, and completely isolated all at the same time.  We made an early start with the day and headed into the park to experience the main attractions – we did a short hike through a slot canyon, followed by some exploring at Dante’s view, the highest overlook in the park (at over 5,000) feet, followed directly by a trek to Badwater salt flats, at -282 feet below sea level.

Sadly, we learned that the famous Racetrack, where the rocks appear to be pushed over the desert floor, require a healthy six-hour commitment on sketchy roads.  Apparently selfish tourists have also been stealing the rocks (we are not totally surprised, as we actually saw someone take a fallen branch from the General Sherman Tree back to his car while in Sequoia!),  so we decided it probably wasn’t worth the trip.  We ended the day with a scorching 102 degree hike through parts of Titus Canyon, which we later found you could drive through from the Nevada border with a 4WD high-clearance vehicle (darn!).  Or, if you’re an international tourist, apparently your rented Nissan Sentra will do just fine.

Speaking of tourists, we deduced that nearly every vehicle in the park with a California, Nevada or Arizona license plate that was not a 4WD vehicle, was in fact, French or German tourists.  I’m pretty sure we’re the only ones staying at our hotel that speak English as a first language.

Ah, our hotel.  We’re residing at the Panamint Springs Resort – and although it is somewhat lacking in polish (and sound insulation), it offers a shower, air conditioning, a decent night’s sleep, and a stellar restaurant – boasting OVER 100 BEERS! And we’re not talking about 100 varieties of Budweiser products here.  We tried five new beers, and re-sampled the elusive California Common from Sierra Nevada’s Beer Camp.

Tomorrow we are going to give our sunburns a chance to heal. We’ll make one quick stop at Rhyolite ghost town, then have lunch at the Pink Taco at the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas. After that, it’s back to nature as we spend a few days in Zion.

Sequoia & King’s Canyon

King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks were an unplanned stop along our route, as Tioga Pass over Yosemite was still closed due to heavy snow pack, and the detour to Death Valley would have made for a very long day of driving.  The parks were a nice  and uncrowded surprise, and although you can really only look at so many big trees, there are definitely parts of the park that beg for a longer visit than the few hours we had (but, they were generally in higher elevations, and again, still closed due to snow pack!).

We managed to see not only the largest known tree by volume, the General Sherman Tree, but also the nation’s official Christmas tree, the General Grant Tree.

Along the route, we also spotted a black bear grazing in a meadow!

We woke up this morning to a chilly 35 degrees and headed out of the park towards Death Valley, where the high temperature for tomorrow is forecasted at a mere 106 degrees.

Brewery Update

Since we’re not expecting to see much wildlife on this trip (despite bear warnings…), we thought we’d provide an update on the breweries visited along our route.  To date:

• Deschutes – Bend, Or
• Silver Moon  – Bend, Or (try the pilsner!)
• Bend Brewing – Bend, Or
• 10 Barrel – Bend, Or (awesome food, awesome beer!)
• McMenamin’s – Bend, Or
• Sierra Nevada – Chico, Ca

It’s going to be a toss-up to see if we’ll be visiting more breweries on this trip or National Parks!

Yosemite

Our two days in Yosemite have flown by. For those of you who are unfamiliar with national park camping, here’s a quick tip. BOOK EARLY! Yosemite National Park is only about 4 hours outside of San Francisco, which means that every day in the summer, it’s completely mobbed with people. When we were planning the trip several months ago, Erin looked into campsites in the national park and came up empty-handed. It turns out that if you don’t book a year in advance, you’re not getting a site. Don’t fear, however. It turns-out that you don’t really want to camp in the park anyway!

Erin scored us a killer campsite just outside of Yosemite that allowed us to skip the throngs of people inside the park, and was also quite a bit cheaper. When we arrived, we set up camp and went straight into the park for a few hours.

Yosemite is, for lack of better words, absolutely beautiful. We had seen so many photos, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling of being hemmed-in to this narrow valley with giant slabs of granite all around you. Since we visited in early summer, the waterfalls flowing over the walls of the canyon were all in full force (a dream come true for Erin, a complete waterfall junky!). It’s hard to describe a place in which every way you turn is a gorgeous view. If you haven’t been, you should come here. Brave the crowds and just come. It’s worth it. Here’s the proof:

Chico, CA and Oroville Lake

Our first stop in California was the Chico area, which is very near Oroville Lake. The plan was to camp at a park near the lake, using it as our base camp for a visit to the Sierra Nevada brewery, as well as a hike to Feather Falls. The first night went very well. We made it to the campsite (which was almost completely empty), set-up camp, then drove to Chico for dinner with some new friends, one of whom works at the Sierra Nevada Brewery. The beer was excellent, the food was great, and the company was fantastic. The first night of camping wasn’t even too bad, aside from some slightly loud neighbors.

We had a great 10 mile hike the next day. The waterfall, the 6th tallest in the U.S. was a great payoff (highly recommend).

That night, we had a bit of an incident with some noisy redneck camping neighbors arriving post-midnight, taking 2 hours to set-up their tent, yelling the whole time, and culminating with a visit by the police. Lovely time…we’ll provide more details upon request.

We left early the next morning for Yosemite, groggy from lack of sleep, but excited…