Hoodoos, Kivas, and Canyons
Nearly 10 million people visit Zion National Park and Moab, Utah each year. What they may not realize is that the 310 miles between these two iconic locations are just as thrilling and a lot less crowded. Here are ten brief stories describing the delights my husband and I (age 81 and 72, respectively) encountered during a campervan trip to southwest Utah in May, 2021.
Part 1: An Island in the Sky & Needles
Canyonlands National Park is a park in four, large, disconnected sections. All of the sections are remote and wild, offering both day hikes and trails for backcountry hiking and four-wheel drive (4WD) vehicles. We visited the two least remote sections: Island in the Sky and Needles.
The Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands is just 40-minutes from Moab, Utah and Arches National Park. Canyonlands’ “Island” is a 6,000-foot high, quarter million-acre, sheer-walled mesa that sits in between the Colorado and Green Rivers. It’s most spectacular trail, the Grand View trail, twists along the mesa rim, across slickrock, through stunted pinyon trees, and ends with a view of Junction Butte, another red, 6,000-foot sandstone mesa about a mile off the island’s southern tip.
In one direction we see the snow-covered La Sal Mountains; in another the red rock desert of Monument Valley. A thousand feet down, high-clearance, 4WD vehicles navigating narrow turns on the White Rim Road look like tiny toy trucks. This 100-mile trail follows a meandering line of canyons along the Green and Colorado Rivers, themselves another thousand feet down. (Note to beginners — expect to pay at least a $1,000 if your vehicle breaks down and you have to be towed out.)
There are numerous other trails of varying difficulty, but we take the relatively short hike to Mesa Arch. Photographers often arrive to shoot the sun rising through this arch. We visited midday, and it was still grand.
The Needles section of Canyonlands National Park is 75 miles south and a bit west from Moab. It is a remote and rugged area where off-road vehicle trails greatly outnumber paved roads.
The best place (maybe only place) to see the rock formations the park is named for is Needles Overlook. That location requires a 40-mile round trip detour before you get to the road that takes you into the park.
The road into the park is called the Indian Creek Corridor Scenic Byway (Utah State Route 211). Our first stop is Newspaper Rock State Historic Monument. This 200 square foot rock is easily accessible and contains one of the largest collections of petroglyphs in the country. Hundreds of engravings are carved into the rock representing people, animals, crops, and mythical or mystical beings. Some are 2000 years old; others were carved by early American pioneers.
The Scenic Byway also takes us through a portion of Bears Ears National Monument. In this section, immense red cliffs reach up into the bright blue sky. Their crumbling and eroded peaks look like fortresses in a mystical kingdom. We imagine gods roaming the corridors above us, unconcerned with our fate or that of any other mortal.
In the National Park proper, we hike the popular Slickrock Trail, a 2.5-mile loop that winds its way around the top of a barren sandstone plateau.
Short spurs off the trail lead to views of snow-capped mountains, red and white cliffs, canyons, and weird rock formations that look like giant piles of bracket fungi. Small depressions in the stone, known as potholes. team with life when it rains, according to the park literature. But when we are there, they are bone dry.
Part 2: Fast Draw in the Old West & Devil’s Canyon
Fast Draw in the Old West. Monticello, a small town south of Moab, Utah, is well outside the hustle and bustle generated by the three million backpackers, rock climbers, 4WH drivers, mountain bikers, etc. who visit Moab (population 5,000) each year.
The Abajo Mountains, known locally as the “Blue” mountains, loom over the town. At 7,000 feet, it’s pleasantly cool and a relief from the heat of Moab.
At the Old West RV Park the clientele is mainly seniors who appear to spend most of the day sitting in the shade of their rigs.
The RV park owner, a grizzled 60-something, gives us, and every guest, a DVD with 30 or so YouTube videos of him demonstrating his fast draw skills with a classic Remington six-shooter. It doesn’t take much to persuade him to give an in-person demonstration. He places a Styrofoam coffee cup upside down on the back of his hand, flips it into the air, draws his holstered pistol with the same hand and then shoots the cup out of the air.
Devil’s Canyon. We prefer camping in nature to in-town RV parks. So we spend only one night at the Old West before relocating just nine miles south to Devils Canyon Campground in the Manti-La Sal National Forest. Only a handful of other campers come and go in the four days we spend on a high ridge surrounded by Ponderosa Pines.
Devil’s Canyon sits in between Monticello and nearby Blanding, Utah, and all three locations are good jumping off points for exploring the Four Corners region generally.
While we are camped at Devil’s Canyon, we visit Hovenweep National Monument (see Part 3 in this series), dip down into Monument Valley as far as Mexican Hat, and drop in on a recreated historic Mormon Settlement in Bluff.
By the mid-1800s, Mormons, already well established in northern Utah, launched an expansion plan, founding nearly 500 settlements in Utah and neighboring states by 1900. Bluff is famous in Mormon history as the end point of the Hole in the Rock Expedition, a 200-mile trek from Escalante, Utah to the San Juan River across some of the most rugged terrain in the United States.
Part 3: Ancestral Puebloan Civilization
The Ancestral Puebloans were a southwest Native American civilization that populated the area known as the Four Corners (SE Utah, NE Arizona, NW New Mexico, SW Colorado) between 900 and 2500 years ago.
There are literally hundreds of archeologically significant sites in this region where visitors can see cliff dwellings, rock drawings, and artifacts from this culture.
We visit the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum, located in Blanding, Utah. This museum hosts one of the largest collections of Ancestral Puebloan pottery in the southwest. Outside we climb a wooden ladder down into a partially restored Kiva, a below ground-level building used for rituals.
Ancestral Puebloans are known, among other things for their excellent brickwork, and we see that at Hoovenweep National Monument, about 45 miles south and east of Blanding. There, in a remote high desert, several nearly intact buildings perch along a small canyon that provided food, water, and shelter for a village where nearly 2,500 people lived nearly one thousand years ago.
Ancestral Puebloans abandoned the Four Corners region sometime after 1200 BC. The reasons they left are not known but theorized to be some combination of climate change, environmental degradation and/or drought. Many remnants of this fascinating culture remain and can be easily seen throughout the region. Descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans include the Hopi, Zumi, and Puebloan peoples.
Part 4: Through the San Juan Mountains to the North End of Lake Powell
We hardly see another car as we travel west and then north from Blanding. Utah on the Bicentennial Highway Scenic Byway (Route 95).
The road passes through the San Juan Mountains via the White Canyon. This area used to be part of the Bears Ears National Monument. President Trump reduced the area of land covered by the Monument designation by 85 percent in 2017, only one year after it had been established by President Obama, but President Biden has since restored it.
We pull off the road for lunch in a virtually empty landscape except for a couple of other RVs camped on a ledge over a gorge. Opportunities to boondock — self-contained RV camping — abound in this state where 60 percent of the land is owned by the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service or other federal government entities.
A little further up the road is the Hite Ranger station, a lonely outpost surrounded by the red walls of Glen Canyon at the northernmost tip of Lake Powell. Lake Powell was created when the Colorado River was dammed, and it is popular with boaters.
We walk down a long boat ramp, but we never reach the Lake, water levels are now so low. In the campground, one lone tent flaps in the breeze. There’s no one else around.
We get a small inkling of what this vast landscape might have been like before the river was dammed.
Part 5: Capitol Reef National Park
Capital Reef National Park is a skinny, 100-mile long, up-thrust technically known as the Waterfold Pocket. Much of the park is accessible only to backpackers, long hikers, and high clearance vehicles, but the park also has attractions that are accessible to nearly everyone: petroglyphs, a 130-year-old-orchard, and a wide variety of good day hikes. There’s even homemade pie and ice cream at the general store.
Capitol Reef is Utah’s least visited national park and is located in one of the West’s most isolated regions. Still, this Park, like most national parks this year, is busy when we are there. Our van is just one in a line of vehicles bumping down the narrow, deeply rutted, but still spectacular Capitol Gorge Road. And our aggressive, city skills definitely help us nab a parking spot at the bottom.
But then we start our hike, and before we know it, we are winding our way through the curvy, sandy, cool Gorge itself. Against the clear blue sky, the smooth, white Navajo sandstone peaks look like soft serve ice cream cones on the verge of melting.
We climb a hundred feet and rest in the shade at the “tanks” — large, bathtub-sized depressions in the stone that are normally filled with water, but, like so many other places on this trip, are unnaturally dry.
In the late afternoon we drive south along the rarely travelled Notom-Bullfrog Road (Bullfrog is a tiny town on Lake Powell, 68 miles away). We haven’t reserved a campsite, and we are looking for somewhere to spend the night. Around 5 pm, we pull into a small pull-off. really just a wide spot in the road. Not another car goes by all night.
The next morning we hike the popular Great Wash Trail, an easy four and a half mile round trip through a wide canyon that narrows down to just 15 feet across in some places.
Part 6: Over Boulder Mountain and into The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
Utah’s Scenic Byway 12 has been called the most scenic drive in America. It definitely ranks among our top five. It is literally a thrill a minute.
There’s the “Hogback” section, a skinny ridge where the road drops off sharply on both sides. Colorful canyons stretch out for miles in all directions. The small towns of Boulder and Escalante offer food and lodging and are good jumping off points for backcountry adventures into the wilderness.
Stopping at overlooks every chance we get, we take most of the day to travel only 45 miles.
From Torrey, Utah, just west of Capitol Reef National Park, we begin by climbing nearly 9,000 feet to cross Boulder Mountain — the highest forested mesa in America.
After that the road travels along the western edge of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The Escalante is immense — one million acres of some of the most remote and inaccessible land in the United States. Virtually no paved roads run through it.
Late in the day we drive down a steep road into a small, narrow canyon, but find, to our dismay that the cool and welcoming Calf Creek Falls campground is full. The host tells us we can stay overnight in the parking lot. Or we can go up the main road a short way, and, at mile marker 70, immediately after the cattle guard, turn left onto a dirt road. It’s not marked, but we can camp anywhere off that road for free. So this is what we do.
We spend a silent night parked on slickrock next to a twisted pinyon tree with a view of the pink cliffs of the Escalante in one direction and Navajo sandstone canyons in the other.
Part 7: Kodachrome Basin State Park
The 20-mile drive from Tropic into Kodachrome Basin State Park is all sagebrush, dust and red buttes in the distance. If the town of Tropic, with its few trees, is an oasis, this landscape is a cowboy movie from the fifties.
Kodachrome sits at the edge of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It gets its name from National Geographic explorers who, in 1948, were so impressed the area’s vibrant colors, they called it Kodachrome Flats, after a popular color film made by Kodak. Alternating white, grey and pink bands on the sheer mountain walls surround our campsite on three sides shimmer in the sunlight.
The Park itself is notable for the more than 60 red sandstone columns that stand like solitary sentinels throughout the park. They range in height from six to 170 feet tall and most can be easily seen from hiking trails. Though the origin of these sandstone pipes is debated, it is believed that they are the only formation of their type in the world.
Part 8: Bryce Canyon National Park & Red Canyon
You probably have seen photos of the hoodoos at Bryce Canyon National Par. These red, white, and pink rock spindles spiral up and spill out across the Bryce Amphitheater like a psychedelic fairyland.
Hoodoos are only found in a few places on earth, and the highest concentration of them anywhere in the world is in Bryce. Located at an elevation of 8–10,000 feet, Bryce experiences both above and below freezing temperatures more than 200 days each year. The hoodoo’s unusual shapes are formed when rain and melted snow, trapped in rock, freeze and expand.
The easy, 2-mile Rim Trail, with its jaw-dropping views of the main amphitheater, is a good introduction to the park. Our second hike is more rigorous, descending (and then climbing back) 800 feet, but it allows us walk among the hoodoos and gawk up at them from the amphitheater floor.
Finally, we drive along an 18-mile plateau edge where the park’s entire string of hoodoo-filled amphitheaters and bowls is on display.
The bright red, ridged, sandstone cliffs of Red Canyon are just a few miles west of Bryce. The first thing we see are a couple of red, sandstone arches curving charmingly right over the road. And then suddenly the canyon’s ridged and crumbling red wall is right at the road’s edge. The canyon is not large, but it is one of the most photographed sights in Utah.
We camp across the road at a Forest Service campground, mainly using the location as a jumping off point for visiting Bryce. But we also hike up one wall of the canyon — a surprisingly steep and treacherous trail that made us glad we had brought our hiking sticks along. And there are plenty of other things to do for those who have the time, including a 24-mile paved bike trail and numerous trails through the vast Dixie National Forest, with separate trails for hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding and off-road vehicles.
Part 9: 7,000 Feet and Above: Cedar Breaks National Monument & Kolab Terrace Road
Cedar Breaks National Monument is a few miles west of Panguitch, a town where virtually every building on its main street is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
With an elevation above 10,000 feet, Cedar Breaks National Monument is cold even in late May. On the day we are there all the trails are still snow-covered and closed. The wind is so intense we have to literally push ourselves out onto the viewing platforms, which are perched over a 2,000-foot-deep amphitheater.
Even from a few feet back, the views are magnificent. The three-mile-long amphitheater contains every kind of rock formation — arches, columns, spires, hoodoos — in every hue: the usual reds and oranges, of course, but also purple, pink, grey and white. Some compare it to Bryce Canyon, but we found it more remote, more rugged, and certainly less visited.
Kolab Terrace Road winds up along the west side of Zion National Park. The paved portion ends after 40 miles, at Lava Point, a 7,000-foot elevation with panoramic views of Horse Pasture Plateau, Wildcat Canyon, and the distant Markagunt Plateau. The road is a scenic drive, an access point for trails into some of the park’s most remote and least visited areas, and a great escape from the crowds and heat — already intense in May — in Zion proper.
As we drive up, we can see a storm gathering in the distance. By the time we reach the Lava Point overlook, the sky has turned bruised shades of grey and purple and is beautifully foreboding.
Undaunted, we return down the road a few miles and set out on a hike. After only a quarter mile, little white flowers start sprouting up in the meadow on either side of the path. Except they’re not flowers; it’s snow.
By the time we get back to the campervan, the sky is pelting ice shards that sting our faces. We wait a bit to see if the snow will pass, but when temperatures start dropping into the low thirties and the snow on our windshield is too heavy for the wipers to remove it, we decide it is time to go. We clean the windshield by hand and gingerly inch our way back down the mountain to Springdale where the temperature is nearly 100 degrees.
Part 10: Our Rig; The Route We Took; What We Didn’t Do
The Rig: We drive a 2017, 21-foot Dodge Promaster van that was converted into an RV by Pleasureway. Our campervan is equipped with a bathroom, refrigerator, and two-burner stove. Our living area converts into a bed each night. We camp in public and private campgrounds with and without hookups, or in parking lots, driveways, or any other flat surface where we are welcomed.
A 20-gallon water tank, a 5-gallon propane tank, solar panel, and two lithium batteries make us self-sufficient for 3 to 5 days without external power. The campervan also has a generator and an air conditioner, but we rarely use these. Because our vehicle is relatively small, it is easy for us to maneuver and park in towns and cities, camp in small spaces, and travel the switchbacks and tight turns of mountain roads.
The Route:
I-70 to Moab: South from I-70 via Route U-128 (Upper Colorado River Scenic Byway). Approximately 60 miles
Moab to Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands: North from Moab on U-191; west and south on 313; 32.5 miles
Moab to Needles section of Canyonlands: South from Moab on U-191; East on U-211; 74 miles
Moab to Monticello: South from Moab on U-191; 55 miles.
Monticello to Blanding: South from Monticello on U-191; 21 miles
Blanding to Hovenweep National Monument: South on U-191 to Reservation Road (follow signs). 45.6 miles
Blanding to Hite and the Northern end of Lake Powell. North on U-95; 57 miles
Hite to Capitol Reef National Park: North on U-95; West on U-24; 80 miles
Capitol Reef National Park and Along the western border of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to Kodachrome State Park: West on U-24 to Torrey, South on U-12 to Cannonville. South on Kodachrome Road (follow signs); 110 miles
Kodachrome State Park to Bryce National Park. Return to U-12. Continue west on U-12; 23 miles
Bryce National Park to Red Canyon. West on U-12; 14 miles
Red Canyon to Cedar Breaks National Monument. West on U-12 to U-89. North on U-89 to Panguitch; West on U-143.
Red Canyon to Zion National Park and Kolab Terrace Road. West on U-12 to U-89. South on U-89 to U-9. West on U-9 into and through Zion National Park. Stay on U-19 to Kolab Terrace Road in the town of Virgin (just west of Springdale). 97 miles.
What We Didn’t Do: There so many other places we could have gone and things we could have done. A month in Southern Utah is not enough time to do everything, and that is not even counting all the great areas located in neighboring portions of the Colorado Plateau in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. What did we leave for the next time (or two)? Escalante Petrified Forest, Anasazi State Park Museum. a 4-Wheel drive to the Hole-in-the-Rock, Goblin State Park, Dead Horse Point State Park, Monument Valley, Cedar Mesa State Park, Mesa Verde National Park, the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad Train, Canyon Des Chelles National Monument, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
