Capitol Reef National Park

Wednesday, June 2 for Tuesday, May 18, 2021

We  are home in North Carolina as I write this. I did start the entry while still "on the road," but ran into too many difficulties with transferring photos and Internet connections that I gave up until we returned to good connections and I could add a screen to view photos.

Although we were not limiting ourselves to the five major National Parks in Utah, we were interested in The Mighty Five, as they are called. (They are Arches, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Zion.) We started out this Tuesday by heading to Capitol Reefs. As with most Parks, there was a considerable drive to get to the entrance, and that way in was also scenic.

If you are able to expand out this picture of an information board, you will see how the Park got its name.

Lots of driving ... many different formations, colors and textures to see.

Effective or not, this picture was to show some perspective, with the road included.

The picture at the top of this entry leads to a high point (no pun intended!) and a low point of this day. From the look of it, this should not have been too tough, because it was only 1.5 miles, and the elevation was pretty steep, but on a normal trail, it wouldn't have been so bad. I told Randy it would be an hour to hour and a half, I expected to be back. She passed.

I did make it to the top, shown here. The Cassidy Arch is named after ... Butch Cassidy, but I could find no evidence that he had actually been to this part of the canyon. (The Hole in the Wall hideout that gave Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid their gang name is in Wyoming.)

It took me an hour and half to get up there. The climb was tough, one fellow traveler describe one part as the "Stairmaster Section." Some steps, lots of rocks and sand. It then took me an hour to get back down, because footing wasn't too secure for an old guy. There were people climbing in all manner of dress and style. Even a few in flip flops! One guy was jogging it! Not me.

Those hiking boots are supposed to be blue! You can see the dust collected much higher than my ankles.

Randy was frantic when I got down, she was thinking something must have happened to me. There were so many people on the trail, if anything had happened to me, she would have known about it, because they were coming and going like Grand Central Station, as the old saying goes.

I was pretty proud that I made it. There were other "gray heads" on the trail, but I was most likely the eldest on this particular day.

Randy took a few pictures of the surrounding area while I was on the trail.

After I got rehydrated and we moved on, we continued driving through the Park. The picture immediately below is one of those that have the appearance of a Capitol Dome, which was one reason for the name of this Park. 

We got to another area of petroglyphs -- these were larger and much easier to see than the previous ones we encountered.

By this time, we were moving on -- our next stop was a hotel in Moab, Utah. We stumbled on a great steak and BBQ place in Hanksville, Utah. It was called Duke's.

After leaving the restaurant, we went through an area called Teasdale, then called it a day.

There were more good pictures, but around this time two weeks ago, I began having trouble transferring pictures from two different iPhones to my old MacBook, and then moving them into Google Pictures, which I need to do, so the pictures can be imported into Google Blogger. There will be at least two more entries, and them this trip will truly be history!