Flutterby™! : Eric & Asha's Road Trip 2004-10-15 18:22:12.096044+00

Eric & Asha's Road Trip

2004-10-15 18:22:12.096044+00 by ebradway 2 comments

Asha and I took our honeymoon this Summer. We left on June 21st and came back on September 18th. I'd like to oblige Dan with some pics from our hike on the Colorado Trail, but we didn't carry the digital camera and I haven't scanned the prints yet.

After the first 270 miles of our hike, we zig-zagged across Utah to see Canyonlands NP, Arches NP, Newspaper Rock, Capitol Reef NP, Grand Escalante, Bryce NP, and Zion NP before getting to her parents' place in St. George, UT. Later, we visted and hit the geographic highpoints in New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Mississippi(during Hurricane Ivan).

Yeah, we gotta get back out there and go alittle further east, that Canyonlands shot is incredible.

In Canyonlands alone you can see hoodoos (like Bryce), windows (like Arches), a canyon cut by the Colorado River (like Grand Canyon), slot canyons (like Zion), petroglyphs (like Mesa Verde) and on and on. There's a four-wheel drive trek on old mining roads that takes three days. There are four separate areas of the park: Islands in the Sky, Needles, The Maze, and Horseshoe Canyon. You can't get to the Maze without driving a day in 4x4 through Glen Canyon State Park. It's by far my favorite park. While Arches, Bryce and Zion are absolutely mobbed, Canyonlands is empty. And even if it's crowded, there are parts that never will be, like the Maze, which is considered one of the most inaccessible places on the planet.

We didn't get to do any hiking in any of the parks except Arches. We got up with the sun and managed to get a 12 mile hike in to Dark Angel at Arches before the crowd hit. There were three cars in the parking lot at the trailhead - us and two photographers - waiting for the sun to come up. When we got back to the car by 9am there weren't any parking spaces open and we passed a couple hundred people hiking out. We're hoping to snowshoe Bryce this winter. Asha's parents moved to St. George which means we get to visit and hit Bryce and Zion with snow on the ground!

I know that you commented on Joshua Tree before. We were both blown away. In some respects, it is a barren wasteland, but in others its amazing. There is more than ample camping around big rocks. The campsites are situated so you can't see the other campsites but you can see the light from their fires on the rocks at night. The night sky is astoundingly clear. I've never seen so many falling stars even during meteor showers. Of course, we were booking it out of there by 9am as the oven started heating up!