On July 18th we went into Salt Lake City with Erica to do some sightseeing and catch the shuttle to Moab from the airport. Salt Lake City is quite... Mormon. Most people dress conservatively, many of the men wearing white dress shirts and dark pants, and it's very clean. Visiting the Mormon temples is a main attraction, as is the new shopping development built for the Olympics. Interesting to visit, but just another city. It would probably get really boring really quickly.
Moab, however, is AWESOME. It's a hippie-ish, artsy little town surrounded by red rock desert. We stayed with a really cool couchsurfer and through him got so meet some other cool people. His ex-roommate Sarah even let us borrow her car for three days! Us being us, we of course managed to get a flat tire within the first ten minutes... bringing out total to 26 bicycle tire flats and 1 car flat. Yay, us!
Having a car in Moab was a huge bonus, because the parks are pretty spread out and designed for drivers, not hikers. There would have been a lot of hot, dusty, frustrating hitchhiking going on if we hadn't had a car.
Now, how to describe the parks??? I think I'll just give a brief description and then post some pictures to do the rest of the talking.
Arches National Park, just 5 miles north of Moab, is known for it's... wait for it... arches.
Canyonlands National Park is split by the Colorado and Green River canyons so you can access it from three sides but can't cross through the middle of it. The "Island in the Sky" area is a small web-like maze of mesa standing up above all of the surrounding canyons.
The "Needles" park of Canyonlands is south of Island in the Sky and full of red hoodoos capped with white, mushroom-shaped sandstone.
Bryce Canyon is southwest of Moab and is not so much a "canyon" as it is a series of horseshoe-shaped bowls full of jagged hoodoos. The park sits up on an 8,000- to 9,000-foot mesa and you can hike from various points down through and among the hoodoos.
Zion National Park (even farther southwest) is a deep canyon carved out by the little Virgin River between incredibly high sheer cliffs of Navajo sandstone. Sorry, we don't have any pictures of Bryce or Zion uploaded yet, but when we do we'll post them here.
Ever since we left Moab we've been hitchhiking to get where to want to go. It's been working out quite well for us! It's usually pretty easy to get a ride, since there isn't any public transportation around here and quite a few people do it. Also, we've met a whole bunch of cool people along the way who've told us a lot of very interesting things about the area. One time, a nice guy named Eric actually drove 50 miles past his destination so that he could drop us off at Bryce Canyon. We managed to convince him to come into the park with us, and we had a great time hiking together and chatting. These are the kind of experiences that make hitchhiking so much more worthwhile and interesting than just taking a regular, boring old bus! =P
We've been in Zion for three nights already now, and will be heading out again tomorrow. Our plan is to hitchhike down to the Grand Canyon, then to Las Vegas where we have a place to stay right on the strip with another couchsurfer. Should be fun! We're going to take advantage of all the free/cheap stuff provided for the gamblers without gambling. Well, maybe a few nickel slots so that they'll bring us some of those Long Island iced teas =P
We're trying to figure out if we'll be able to hike down from the north rim of the Grand Canyon and then back up the south rim, rather than hitching all the way around the outside... hmm... need more info. That would be pretty cool, though.
That's it for now! Hope everybody's doing well!
2 comments:
hey! just glancing through your blog(s) from a library in Cedar City, Utah... hope the Grand Canyon hike went well! I didn't realize how many other places you've also been - pretty amazing. Good luck with the rest of your travels!
Sounds like you two are having a blast! Keep safe!
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