5 Countries, 32 Days, 1 Four Year Old...

We loved the second part of Canyonlands, called the Needles district. We did some fun hikes, including a long, slick rock hike where Jen and I put on an impromptu Easter egg hunt by hiding jelly beans along the trail. The kids loved it! 

Canyonlands is a gigantic park that encompasses all of the canyons created as the Green River joins with the Colorado River. It’s about half the size of the Grand Canyon, which is still pretty big! The north half is called the Sky Island because you overlook the canyon from an island carved out over millions of years by the rivers. The bottom half, a 60 mile drive away, is deep within the canyon. We had one fun hike in the northern part, up some slickrock that looked like a big whale. But otherwise, we had a lot more fun within the canyon on day 2.

Believe it or not, Arches was not our favorite park. There were a few amazing sites, but they were few and far between. No great hikes here… just a bunch of short hikes to the sites which probably dampened it the most for us.

Goblin Valley State Park was by far the kids’ favorite. This valley of tiny hoodoos was a total playground, perfect for hide and seek. The kids could have spent all day here if it weren’t for the fact we arrived an hour before dark (did we mention things are *far* from each other around here???

We loved  the place we stayed outside of Capital Reef. It was this beautiful ranch complete with a dozen bison!  

One last quick hike at Capital Reef… lunch beneath some “windows” and a hike up to a frozen (it’s almost April!) spring. Off to see some goblins!

Our second hike at Capital Reef was just breathtaking. We got incredible views of just the most amazing, colorful, massive structures. This was definitely our favorite park of the trip.

The center of Capital Reef is the waterpocket fold, a huge, hundred mile long fold in the earth that if full of these natural cisterns (or waterpockets). Day one  at this incredible park was a mad dash down a long dirt road to do this hike before nightfall.

Snow! And lots of it! Bryce is the highest point we’ll be hiking - around 9,000 feet. So there’s still a lot of snow up here, which made for a good impromptu snowball fight on our hike! We also came upon what looked like a vortex - just like in Sedona there are all these little rock stacks signifying where the energy vortex is heading to the sky… or something like that. Whatever it is, the kids love making them!

Off to Bryce. This place is amazing. For people used to hiking in Arizona, it’s hard to impress us! But the hoodoos here are just spectacular. Sophie was especially excited about seeing Thor’s Hammer - a tall hoodoo topped with a rectangular boulder. The hiking here was freakier - lots of thousand foot dropoffs with not a single fence or barrier in site. Yikes!