Utah - Road trip

April 18th - 24th 2011

A last minute change of plans.  I found myself flying into Salt Lake city, Utah at midnight and being collected by Greg to stay at a couch surfers for the night.  Greg and Rose are currently on an 8 month road trip across America and then North to Alaska and I've been lucky enough to join them for a couple of weeks of it.

First stop was Arches National Park. Mum had emailed to say her, Dad and Andrew had visited here many years ago and she had loved it. She wasn't wrong, it was truly spectacular.  As the name suggests formed of many natural arches and beautiful big red turrets of rock. Utah understandably is famous for climbers as there is just a never ending abundance of choices of big sandstone spires.  Not only for climbers we had a great time camping by the river and making day trip hikes through the area.  A first for me to see such beautiful red rock spires, arches, red dirt and lots and lots of rock.  Unable to climb my imagination was running wild of possible routes, though I did bring my climbing harness I did have a quick conversation with a couple who had climbed the highest point in arches and it sounded amazing including a 30 foot free rappel down to finish (perhaps one for the future if I can meet some climbing partners and make another trip out here).  There were Jeeps everywhere and we found out it was the yearly week long jeep festival in Moab so hence the reason everything was so busy and there were Jeeps absolutely everywhere.

The night of camping was made extra interesting because of the massive storm that brought huge winds and rain in the middle of the night, blowing dust everywhere and threatening to blow Gregs tent away, so it was decided he and Rose would pack up their tent and we would all make ourselves extra cosy in his 3 person mountaineering tent for the rest of the night, completely covered in dust and wet not much sleepw as had

The next day we headed off to Dead horse state park for a hike around the top of steep canyons and cliffs.  http://www.utah.com/stateparks/dead_horse.htm

Driving onto Canyon lands we were finding it difficult to find places to camp due to Easter weekend. We stopped at Needles Outpost a private campground still close to the park opening where we meet a rather unusual character Tracey who ran the campground, its was almost like she had had too much sun and out there who can blame her, still we found a space and got our shower coupons so we were happy.  We did a quick drive to the info centre and got the last good campsite inside the needles part of the park allowing us to do a 2 day backcountry hiking and camping.

The following morning we drove a 4wd track as far as the fully laden jeep would take us then walked a bit further for a great view point.

Then it was off to the start of our backcountry adventure.  With a pack weight of 21kg (mostly due to lack of water in the park we had to take most in) the sun was hot and I got burnt in Arches NP so I was keeping covered up which made it hot but bearable.  We managed to take a small detour when we missed our turnoff to our camp area so added an extra few miles to the day but in the afternoon we were set up inside such a beautiful place. Feeling like we had the place to ourselves (each campsite only accommodates one lot of campers)

The following day we did about a 10mile (17km) loop out to druid arch then included Chesler park loop which was lots of fun.  A little bit of rock scrambling, jumping, squeezing through small tunnels and thin cracks it was an early start but worth it giving us the late afternoon off to read and relax surrounded by such beautiful sandstone spires.  Water in this area is very limited and we had one place to pump water for the whole day and night.  When Gregs pump failed an hour of trying then it was back to the old way of water filtration tablets and waiting 4 hours so it was water conservation for most of the days hike, less then ideal but with clouds around we all got through fine.

The rain returned that night and continued on and off making it a wet start to the day including packing up a wet tent and hiking the last 3 miles back to the carpark in non stop rain.  All part of the fun, remembering all my hikes back in Tassie in the rain, I'm pretty used to being wet so wasn't that fased.  What was fun and a bit problematic was the rain turned the path into a river and waterfalls of water fell all around us as the water slid easily off the rocks and the dry dirt wasn't able to soak up the constant water falling.  Some inventive jumps and side steps and eventually walking through the path/river made us wet by the time we reached the car.  Now sitting in a cafe in Monticello found out our WOOFing hosts mixed up dates and thought we weren't arriving until Tuesday so they don't want us to come until 6pm, 6hours to kill and its still raining!!!!