Browsed by
Category: Camping & Hiking

A Story of Sand and Snow – Great Sand Dunes and Rocky Mountains

A Story of Sand and Snow – Great Sand Dunes and Rocky Mountains

Sand and snow are the themes of our next two National Parks. No, I’m not talking about children born out-of-wedlock in Westeros. After spending a warm long weekend in Cortez, CO and Mesa Verde, the next stop on our eastern journey was Great Sand Dunes National Park. Wolf Creek Pass The Great Sand Dunes are located in southern Colorado about smack-dab in the middle of the state. To reach them, we must cross the Great Divide. We get a tad…

Read More Read More

Cities of the Ancients – Hovenweep and Mesa Verde

Cities of the Ancients – Hovenweep and Mesa Verde

The main attraction in Utah’s Mighty 5 national parks are natural rock formations. After visiting Canyonlands and Natural Bridges it was time to start exploring some human created formations. We headed to Hovenweep National Monument and Mesa Verde National Park. These sites (along with many others in the four corners region) contain the ruins of ancient civilizations. Specifically, Ancestral Puebloan communities that built large elaborate villages near canyons and cliffs. Hovenweep National Monument Hovenweep includes six different villages spanning the…

Read More Read More

Canyonlands and Natural Bridges – Exploring the Land of Rock

Canyonlands and Natural Bridges – Exploring the Land of Rock

Canyonlands is the last Utah National Park that we visited. It’s Utah’s largest park and has some of the most challenging and remote terrain in the nation. Canyonlands is part of the Colorado Plateau—a large region known for canyons, buttes, mesas, and other dramatic rock formations that have been carved by water and erosion over millions of years. It wins the award for best named park. There’s even a formation called Paul Bunyan’s Potty. How’s that for descriptive? Pin this…

Read More Read More

What Not to do in Arches National Park

What Not to do in Arches National Park

Our last few posts have been informational about Utah’s national parks so we thought it was time for a travel story. This is a tale of a series of bad decisions and what not to do if you find yourself stuck in a thunderstorm. Learn from our mistakes friends. We hope you enjoy this story about our unexpectedly eventful hike to Delicate Arch in Arches National Park. The Iconic Arches Arches NP is one of the most iconic places in Utah….

Read More Read More

7 Reasons Not to Miss Capitol Reef National Park

7 Reasons Not to Miss Capitol Reef National Park

We weren’t sure what to expect at Capitol Reef National Park. It’s quite literally Utah’s middle child of National Parks. Zion and Bryce are found in the west, while Arches and Canyonlands lie to the east. Many people pass over this park in favor of the more visited ones but we think they’re missing out. And that’s not just middle child syndrome talking. Pin this post for later > While some of Utah’s parks have an abundance of a specific formation…

Read More Read More

Best of Bryce Canyon National Park

Best of Bryce Canyon National Park

If Salvador Dali and Dr. Seuss created a place together, it would look like Bryce Canyon National Park. We think that everyone should experience it at least once in their life. Bryce is part whimsy, part eerie, and part stop-you-in-your-tracks stunning. Plus you get to say hoodoos a lot, which is just fun. What the Heck are Hoodoos? The native inhabitants of the area thought that hoodoos were people who had been turned to stone by the trickster coyote. It’s…

Read More Read More

5 Awesome Things to Do in Zion National Park

5 Awesome Things to Do in Zion National Park

Compared to Nevada’s muted color palette, Utah is shockingly bright. Zion National Park is the most vibrant park we’ve visited yet! It’s like a kaleidoscope of color. The rocky peaks and cliffs are bright red and orange with bands of black and white stripes. The sky is pretty much the exact color of the sky blue crayon. And lush green vegetation grows near the water sources. Even the sand at Zion is brilliant. Pin this post for later > There are myriads…

Read More Read More

Vulcans and Volcanoes

Vulcans and Volcanoes

Admittedly we had some post eclipse blues after watching the sun become blotted out by the moon. I mean how do you follow-up day becoming night at 10:30 am? It turns out that hiking up volcanoes is a good next move. After watching the eclipse from the path of totality in Central OR we headed down to Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern CA. This is another park that we’ve never really heard anyone talk about. Honestly, our knowledge of…

Read More Read More

Smoke on the Mountain – Mount Rainier National Park

Smoke on the Mountain – Mount Rainier National Park

We had one main goal for our visit to Mount Rainier National Park: See Mount Rainier. We lived 3 hours away from the mountain for over a decade and the most we’d seen was a glimpse of Rainier’s snow covered top from a distance. We’d never been up close and personal with the behemoth. Seeing Mount Rainier sounds pretty easy right? It’s a giant mountain after all—just look up! Well it didn’t turn out to be quite that simple. Wildfires…

Read More Read More

All Around the Olympic Peninsula

All Around the Olympic Peninsula

The Olympic Peninsula. Home to Olympic National Park, Olympic National Forest, 24 State Parks, 73 miles of protected primitive Pacific Coastline, amazing beaches, and the most northwestern point in the lower 48. That’s over a million square miles of mountains, coast, and rain forests! Yeah, I sound like an infomercial, but it’s really that awesome. It seems like you could never stop exploring the Olympic Peninsula. We only scratched the surface in the 8 days we were there. Our most…

Read More Read More