The lighter side of life – staying in touch with friends and family by celebrating the ordinary.
It always comes back to Utah
Next stop, Utah! Because we were coming down from Twin Falls, and now live in Tucson rather than Albuquerque, some of our usual Utah destinations were fairly far out of our way. We decided to look for a new spot where we’ve never stayed before.
John suggested a region, the Red Canyon area off Highway 12, south of Panguitch. I opened the maps app, toggled to satellite view, and started looking for a promising spot. I could see trailheads along a clear north-south demarkation line where the red rock formations started.
I zoomed in and started panning around, looking for somewhere we could potentially camp. How about that “Camp Lp” just north of the Arches and Losee Canyon trailheads?
It’s always a real bonus to have trailheads within walking distance of our site, because then we can hike whenever we want without breaking camp, packing up the van, and potentially losing our camping spot. I prefer real trails to just scrambling around, because when John and I start rock scrambling, it always gets steeper than I like. I prefer to mindlessly follow a trail, it’s very meditative. Scrambling can be interesting, but sometimes bordering on terrifying – definitely not meditative.
Wow, that little spur road called Camp Loop was better than I had even imagined.
Here’s John bringing rocks to drive up on to level the van. I’m always telling him, “Don’t hurt your back!” Use smaller rocks for pete’s sake! He’s strong but I’m afraid he’s going to compress his spine or something. We aren’t young anymore!
Ok that’s more reasonable.
Ta-da! The perfect camping spot.
Over the course of a couple of days we took several hikes. John found a cave (he loves caves).
Guess what was in the cave? A geocatch!
He didn’t write in the logbook – I guess because he wasn’t looking for it. I figured it still counted!
We took a ton of photos, so I’m just going to post a bunch more without any commentary. They pretty much speak for themselves!
Yeah, that was a ridiculous number of pictures, I know! We just couldn’t stop taking them, it was all so very beautiful.
If you’re one of my readers who signed up to get this blog by email, it’s likely your email provider did not include all the pictures. You can see them all here.
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