Travel Blog

Before I get to our final Utah National Park, I just want to let everyone know we made it to the Grand Canyon, and are nestled, very snuggly, into our RV spot. I'll have more on that later, with pictures. Suffice to say, I think our spot was built with a smaller RV in mind, and it was quite the feat of maneuverability to get this rig in it. But we made it, met our new neighbor, Dave, and are ready to start work tomorrow.

But back to Park 5 - Canyonlands. We had been there before, but we only stopped very briefly, so Phil wanted to go back and spend some more time in a different section, which is called The Needles. The first thing we did was to go the extra 22 miles to the Canyonlands Overlook. We had the place to ourselves, and I think it's worth the extra gas to go check it out.

We overlooked for about a half hour and then decided it was time to get down there and walk around a little bit. But, on our way into the park proper, we got sidetracked by some more petroglyphs. They call this Newspaper Rock:

Our next stop was the Visitor's Center to get our sticker and magnet, and then we tried to find our first hiking trail. But all the signs were very confusing, and we couldn't find the trailhead we wanted to do. It got to be so frustrating that we just parked at the next parking lot and decided that we'd just start hiking from there. It worked out ok, though, and we had fun tromping all over the big bedrock boulders.

First we'd climb up:

And then we'd go down:

And all the while we were counting lizards.

Our final tally was 21 lizards. Not too shabby.

We got to see a lot of interesting rock formations:

And even more interesting ways that life works around its environment.

If you get the chance to visit, make sure to check out The Needles section of the park. The campgrounds looked really neat, too, and we'd recommend spending a night or two in one of them to really get the chance to explore.

I have one more park to write about, not including The Grand Canyon, and I'll get to that one tomorrow if I'm not to exhausted from my first day back to work after my nice vacation. And on that note, I will leave you with Phil's artsy pic of Canyonlands: