After visiting Horseshoe bend, we stopped at Page to get our essentials before heading to Utah. It includes, grocery shopping, finding the cheapest diesel to fill our both tanks and finding the portable water to fill the water tank. Normally it takes us at least half a day to have all these done.
After having ourselves sorted, we crossed the border to Utah! Our first stop was a small town called Kanab which is the southern gateway for visiting the famous Zion National Park.
It’s a heavily regulated national park due to the amount of visitors they receive every year. Most of their famous hikes like Angel’s landing require a permit and time reservation. Driving in certain parts of the park with your own car is also prohibited and it is only accessible using the national park bus services during the peak season. We didn’t want to do all of that, so we just drive through the area of the Zion NP that was accessible by car. We couldn’t even park to do short day hikes, since most of the carparks were full. The good news is, we knew about all these, so we didn’t have our expectations high for Zion national park. It was still a pleasant drive with stunning views.
The summer heat started to catch us as soon as we entered Utah and it didn’t leave us till we reached north. More on that later. We camped by a nice creek close to St George and cooled ourselves down in the fresh water and nice shade under the trees before heading to the next stop in Utah.
The next stop on the south western corner of Utah was Bryce Canyon National Park. It has been one of our favorite spots in Utah so far. Hoodoos (irregular columns of rock) exist on every continent, but here is the largest concentration found anywhere on Earth.
The pink and red hues of these Hoodoos and their contrast with massive deep green pine trees was out of this world. It’s really interesting that this national park is not as popular as Zion national park so you can just drive to the park, enter and enjoy all the wallks in the park. It’s also quite compact comparing to some of the bigger national parks so most of the walks are accessible form the same car park so finding the car park to access the points of interests is not a problem.
We camped right outside the national park, the night before and entered the park, early in the morning and managed to find a decent car park close to the main trailhead for the famous trails. since most of the trails are connected, it’s easy to cross between differnet trails and have a custom made trail. Having shades of the big trees and high rock formation, helps a lot with coping with the heat during the midday. We enjoyed every second of it.
As soon as we headed uphill toward the carpark and out of the Hoodoos, the afternoon heat was hitting us hard.
Chaapaar needed some maintenance and engine oil change. I also had to work on a last minute project, so we had a motel booked in a small town close by called Panguitch.
That was a great break from the heat of the Southern Utah and gave us opportunity to finish off some of the items on our to do list. The dinner in a local diner in the town just added a great ending to our great day at Bryce Canyon national park.
The next day was a different story! Normally I spent time every day to make sure that we have a plan for the day and a rough plan for the area we want to spend the night.
The night before, I was busy with work, laundry, eating out and haven’t spent enough time to finalize our route and we were heading to a big area called Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
It’s not a national park but a big area just accessible with dirt roads and a lot of great trails, rock formations and canyons to explore. I’ve marked few places to explore in the area before but I’ve missed few facts:
First of all the area was really massive, with only one main gravel road to access it all and this Gravel road didn’t have access to the main roads on its northern end which meant we had to drive it all back to where we started.
The gravel road was really wide but it was packed with washboards and made it really annoying to drive on it for hundreds of kilometers. And it added to the fact that all these nasty road that we drive on, we need to drive all the way back.
And to top it off, we left the motel late in the morning, so we got to our first point of interest in the area around lunch time, and the heat was almost killing us.
That’s how we exhausted ourselves to the level that we’ve never done before just because we haven’t planned properly. That was one of the biggest lessons we learned along the way in a very hard way.
The Grand Escalante area is beautiful, worth at least few days to stay in the area. We didn’t have much time because we knew it is going to be hotter every day and we still had so many spots to visit in Utah. We visited some of the spots including Spooky canyon and camped somewhere in the area for the night before driving back the next morning.
The next morning, we didn’t feel any better. We had so many mosquito bites over the night that made us feel sick. It topped up the heat and exhaustion from 4 hours of hike in the middle of the afternoon and long drives the day before. We knew that we needed a break from it all before we can continue and have real fun. We found a nice national forest called Fish Lake north of where we were and decided to get there to cool off and relax for few days before carry on to the 4 corners of Utah.
That was a great idea to stay still for few days. We are still learning to adjust our speed. how fast we need to move and how many days is enough for us to stay in one place. It’s really good to listen to other overlanders and get their idea on how fast they’ve done a stretch of a road but everyone is different and we just need to find our pace.
In the next post, we carry one to the central part of Utah before heading to the south eastern Utah and visit some more wonders of this fantastic place. Till then take care and enjoy your life.
