It’s the first week of November, and I have no idea why there’s a fireworks display down the hill from us, but there is.
North Rim Grand Canyon to Capitol Reef – Day 2
Up and out early for a visit to Capitol Reef National Park.
I wish I could tell you what’s on this Mule Deer’s right eye; maybe it’s a mini-satellite tracking device.
We are seduced by the golden colors of fall glowing in the sunrise. Our positive first impressions of Capitol Reef are already hinting at the need for a follow-up visit.
Being suckers for petroglyphs, we add these to the list of stuff we must return for in order to have a fuller picture of the park than our quick tour is going to allow us to have.
Dirt roads are the paths to quiet riches because where the pavement ends, the crowds remain at bay, not that this place is swarming with visitors today.
A bit of Chaco cultural influence is at work on this relic of a “modern” building.
My best guess for what created these multi-colored layers is that this was a floodplain at one time. I think it wasn’t a lake as there are no black layers that would imply plant and fish life that was settling at the bottom, and the layers are seriously almost uniformly thin, so maybe it was quickly disappearing floodwaters that came and went?
If we are in Hanksville, Utah, this must be the famous Hollow Mountain gas station. We are about to turn off Route 24 for the 95 before taking the 276 to Bullfrog. Where…
…we were hoping to catch this ferry across Lake Powell. We just missed it by minutes and with almost two hours before the next ferry going in our direction, we opted to drive back towards Hite and take the bridge over the Colorado.
While we will always enjoy a good ferry trip over the water we don’t much mind a stunning drive over the desert either.
Can you guess just where the Colorado meets the lake?
Wow, this is one spectacular approach to a bridge.
Back in 1983, Lake Powell was in danger of spilling over the top of the Glen Canyon dam; under the bridge, you can see the bathtub ring the full lake left behind. Matter of fact, besides the ugly tragedy of destroying Glen Canyon by backing up the Colorado River, the water bleaches the sandstone and deposits tons of sediment in the lake, depriving the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon of the kind of river dynamics that made rafting a huge variable. Taming the beast to remove the risk of encountering the wild has been one of humanity’s greatest faults.
Why go straight home when you can detour and take in four states in one day? And I don’t mean some short little detour either; we go large and head through Blanding up to Monticello, where we catch Highway 666 so we can drop into Colorado going to Dove Creek. South through Cortez, we continue on the Devil’s Highway, where we can have a meaningful and potentially evil encounter with the Colorful State. Sadly, I have to report that neither Satan nor his minions were found on this day.
Snow-capped mountains and bald eagles, that’s America.
Into New Mexico, we are still on Hell’s Highway as we cruise past Shiprock and south to Gallup before turning west for the final drive home on this blistering fast loop out around the Four Corners of the American Southwest.
North Rim Grand Canyon to Capitol Reef – Day 1
Hmmm, balloons are floating overhead; that must be a signal to get in the car and race to the Grand Canyon. Sounds good to me, and so better late than never we spontaneously pack a bag and start the drive the north.
These are the Navajo Bridges in northern Arizona. The bridge on the right was opened for traffic in 1929, and for many years, it was adequate to serve the purpose of crossing the Colorado River. As time went by, vehicles became wider, and although pedestrian traffic was forbidden on the original bridge, the temptation to stand over the middle of the Colorado and look into the canyon was too appealing. So in 1995, a second, almost identical-looking wider bridge was opened (on the left), and the old one was relegated to being a purely pedestrian bridge.
This is Balanced Rock on the way to Lees Ferry at the northeastern corner of the Grand Canyon National Park.
Lees Ferry is Mile Marker 0 in the Grand Canyon. It is here that white water rafting trips get underway. Caroline is standing in the confluence of the muddy Paria River where it’s entering the cold green waters of the Colorado right behind her. This is also the first rapid boaters encounter on their journey into the extraordinary world of the Grand Canyon.
The view from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is roughly 1,500 feet above the other side. Funny how it’s “just” 23.9 miles to hike across the canyon and over 200 miles to drive from side to side.
It’s nearly impossible to see her in the pic but Caroline with her hands in the air standing over the hole in the rock. We were both out there a few earlier trying to grab a selfie from over our heads so I could show you how narrow the rock is that she’s standing on, but that didn’t work out.
Had to stop and teach Caroline about Fredonia, not this one in Arizona, as much as the fictional Freedonia referred to by the Marx Brothers in their 1933 movie titled Duck Soup. My introduction begins with the song “Hail Hail Freedonia,” followed by a bunch of mumbling to the tune that rings in my head nearly 30 years after I first saw this movie.
Well, this was unexpected to find in the state of Utah and begs the question, “Just who are the hos that make these pies, and are they Mormon?” Should you think you, too, would like to try some Ho-Made Pies, you’ll find them in Mount Carmel Junction, where the road turns off to Zion National Park.
We made it another 160 miles past this to Torrey, Utah, to spend the night at Austin’s Chuckwagon Motel.