Honeymoon Day 5: Capitol Reef National Park

We woke up pretty early, and packed up our car to start our drive to Capitol Reef National Park! It was about 3.5 hours from Arches, but we wanted to make sure we got there as early as possible because this was the campground that didn't allow reservations. So, we had Cheerios in our car again for breakfast (we did that a lot...). We were there by about 11:30am and we got a GREAT campsite with a cute little tree!  We set up our tent under the tree (to protect us from the rain, because yes, it was supposed to rain again... It rained every day of our honeymoon until Day 7!), and we set up our chairs and put a tarp on the table, because we wanted people to know that the campsite was super occupied!  

There's our little tent under the tree! 

As we were setting everything up, the campground host came over to chat, and he was not a fan that we were only staying one night (he thought Capitol Reef had way too much to see and we should stay many nights!), but he gave us great advice on some sights to see. First, we decided we really wanted to go see the petroglyphs!! They are attributed to the Fremont people, which lived in Utah from about 600 to 1300 AD. That was a short little drive, and it was SO cool!!!  

Can you see the petroglyphs? They're about halfway down, towards the middle of the picture. 

More petroglyphs! They're along the bottom of that ledge.

And more petroglyphs! They're right in the middle of the picture. 

And more! 

After that cool little stop, we drove over to the Hickman Bridge Trailhead, and hiked about 3 miles roundtrip (with about 400 feet of elevation gain). It was a really great hike (not too hard, not too easy), and the Hickman Bridge was SO cool. We also met a lot of great people on this hike! 

Hickman Bridge!

This is right after we walked through the arch, and we're standing right under it. 

I just thought this was a cool mountain. 

After we were done with the Hickman Bridge hike, we decided to head over to the Gifford House which is a cute little store which was near our campground! They're known for their pies, so we got the LAST apple pie along with some hot beverages (coffee for McGee, mint tea for me), and went outside to have our nice snack. We sat at a table underneath a nice overhang, because it was starting to rain a bit! Perfect pie and coffee/tea weather. 

Pie and sporks! We demolished this delicious pie so fast. But don't worry, it wasn't a full-sized pie, as you can see! 

After our snack, we went on a drive to try to find Cassidy Arch (shout-out to my amazing little niece Cassidy!!). We didn't want to do the hike (it's a really difficult full-day hike, but the arch is supposed to be super impressive when you see it up close), so we were looking for the viewpoint. We drove down a very scary unpaved road which had signs everywhere that it had a high flash-flood risk, so we both agreed that if there was even one raindrop while we were on the road that we would turn around and head back to a normal road as quickly as possible. We found the Cassidy Arch viewpoint, but we could not for the life of us find the arch!! We were wandering around and around, and then FINALLY we spotted it quite high up on a mountain. It was hard to see!! My pictures aren't great, but McGee got a good one that I can maybe post later.  

Here's the sign for the viewpoint! It literally just points in the direction of a bunch of mountains... 

The arch is in that darker brown portion at the top, just to the right of center in the picture. It's almost impossible to see...

Here's the arch at full distance (without zoom). It's still way at the top of that mountain... Can you see why we had a hard time spotting it? At first we were like "Maybe it collapsed...", or we thought we were taking crazy pills. We were relieved to find it! 

 Then we drove back down the super scary high flash-flood risk road, and went to a few really nice scenic view areas. After that, we headed back to the campsite, and on our way we saw a big ol' deer walking on the side of the road, and then he hopped a fence like it was nothing! There were also a ton of deer exploring our campground when we got back too. They were not afraid of people at all! Everyone just let them be and gave them space, so that was nice to see. That night we had a great dinner by the campfire (we made more burritos with our leftover cooked ground turkey), and had toasted marshmallows for dessert. We spent a ton of time hanging by the campfire that night!! Here are some pictures of the rest of our day:

Here's the deer trotting along! 

Then he just decided to jump the fence! 

And here he was safely on the other side. 

We loved Capitol Reef!!  It's definitely the least-known of the Mighty 5 National Parks in Utah, but it's a great one.

Honeymoon Day 4: Arches National Park

We woke up at our cute little B&B and ate the delicious breakfast that they provided for us! It was delicious yet very awkward, because they had us all sit family-style at a big table, and everyone else had been staying there many days already and knew each other, so they basically ignored me and Kevin... BUT, the important part is that it was super delicious, and it WASN'T Cheerios!! There was a delicious frittata (usually I'm not a fan, but this one was super good), homemade biscuits, fruit, and a weird cinnamon thing that neither of us liked.

Then we packed up our car and drove our short little drive to Arches National Park (about 10 minutes to the gate, but then about another 30 minutes to the Visitor Center). One of the things that we'd really wanted to see was Delicate Arch, but the rangers told us that it was actually closed (including the view point) because of flooding and some construction they were doing on the roads. So, we got some advice on other hikes. Our first stops were Sand Dune Arch and Broken Arch:

This was just a cool part of the trail you had to walk on... 

Here's McGee in front of Sand Dune Arch! 

And another cool part of the trail! 

This is Broken Arch... if you looks closely on the indented part at the top you can see a crack that goes all the way through the arch. So, like a smart person, I went and stood under the big crack to take a picture of it!!  

This is from directly under the arch, looking up. Can you see the crack going all the way through it? If you see the little notch on the left side, you can see a line that goes all the way through. It was kinda eery standing under it! 

Here's just some cool scenery after we finished the hike. 

Next, we went on a hike to see Landscape Arch, which is the longest natural arch in the world! It was massive. Chunks of the arch keep falling over the years, so the arch keeps getting thinner and thinner, and could fully break at any time!  

It's hard to get a good picture of Landscape Arch because they have fences up so you don't get too close (due to the chunks of rock that keep falling), but if you look closely you can see the very thin arch of rock and how crazy long it is.

From there we were going to do the Primitive Loop Hike (it has like 7 cool arches) even though the rangers had told us part of it was too flooded so we couldn't do the full loop. Buuuuut pretty early on in the hike I chickened out and decided it was NOT for me because I felt like I was going to die. Now, I do NOT have a fear of heights at all... but there was a very precarious and narrow uphill arch (with drop-offs on both sides... and if you fell off you would definitely die or at least break tons of bones), and I just honestly don't feel I have the balance to attempt something like that. If there had been something I could have held onto (like a cable or chain or something) I would've felt safe... but I just had this terrible feeling I was going to fall. So, I felt really bad because I just didn't feel up for it, so we turned around and found some other arches to go see. I found a picture of the part that scared me:

Yeah, it's that narrow pathway part up the middle... I just knew I would fall. 

So here's some other stuff we saw instead of doing the Primitive Loop Hike: 

McGee under Pine Tree Arch! 

Can you see how tiny the people look in this picture? So that tells you how big these arches are!! 

And here's the view from up in those massive arches... We climbed on up. 

McGee climbed up even further than I did! But then he had some trouble getting down due to a swarm of tourists... so I had to capture that on film too because it was hilarious to watch. 

What is happening is this picture?? It was two parents trying to help their uncoordinated daughter climb up where McGee was... It was not going well for them, and they were oblivious to the fact that McGee wanted down! 

It continues... 

You can barely even see McGee in this one... They were not making it easy for him to get down!

If you look closely you can see some beautiful snow-capped mountains in the background! 

Another crazy arch (Skyline Arch, if I remember right)! 

After all of that hiking, we headed back to our campground. But we found out there were some more cool hikes from within our campground!  So we set out to see all we could before the sun went down. 

This is the view from our campground!! You can see the snow-capped mountains on the right and a nice rainbow on the left. 

Snowy mountains in the background again! 

This was a cool arch we hiked to from our campground! This was called Tapestry Arch, and it was maybe our favorite because we only saw one person on our entire hike!!  It was so deserted and beautiful. We hiked right up to the arches and climbed up under them. 

Here's a closer look before we climbed up under the arch. Once we climbed up under it we were like, "Oh crap, the sun's going down!" so we had to race back to camp since we hadn't brought a flashlight with us. 

Here's our little campsite! We loved this one, and it was our first night of ACTUALLY being able to camp!!  We still needed the tarp over our tent because it did start raining pretty hard in the evening, but nothing like the Grand Canyon (there was no flooding). Oh and those are our cute $6 chairs from Walmart! 

Look at the cool rock on the side of our campsite! It provided great privacy from our neighbors.

We cooked up some ground turkey and made delicious burritos over our campfire, and toasted some marshmallows for dessert!!  It was awesome :)  The rain started at about 8pm, so we went to our tent about that time because it wasn't expected to stop until after midnight. The tarp held up really well though and we didn't get wet at all! 

Honeymoon Day 3: Canyonlands National Park

Well, we're getting windows installed on our house today, so MY GOODNESS it is noisy and chaotic!!  It's making it very hard to concentrate and get any work done, so I thought it might be good to do some Honeymoon posts since I can't really focus on work.

So, Day 3!!  On Day 3, we woke up quite early and hit the road to head to Canyonlands (and had Cheerios and coffee in the car again). We had a 6.5 hour drive ahead of us, so we wanted to get there as early as possible so we could get some good hikes in!  It was a pretty smooth drive with lots of gorgeous scenery.

When we got to Canyonlands we drove straight to the Grand View Point area and did some hiking around the rim of Canyonlands. There were some AMAZING views.

After hiking around the Grand View Point area, we drove over to the Mesa Arch and hiked to the big ol' arch. It was awesome, and was good preparation for Arches National Park which would be the next day!

Here's a view of the whole arch (almost)! It was so long that it was hard to back up enough to get the whole thing in a picture. 

After we were done at Mesa Arch, we left Canyonlands National Park and drove to our Bed and Breakfast to check-in! Our room was ADORABLE and felt like a little studio apartment! And the bed was sooo soft - it had one of those memory foam mattresses!

After we were all settled at the B&B, we decided to drive to Dead Horse State Park (right outside of Canyonlands), because we heard it was THE BEST place to see the sunset!!  The views were pretty spectacular, and the clouds made it kind of hard to see the full sunset but what we did see was pretty damn amazing. 

After that beautiful sunset, we drove to find some dinner. First we tried the Moab Brewery, but it was SO crowded and really felt like a TGI Fridays (not that there's anything wrong with TGI Fridays, but just not what we wanted that night), and we were told there was a 1 hour wait. So, nope. Then we looked on Yelp and saw that a Mexican Restaurant had AMAZING reviews, so we drove there and got some tacos to-go, and ate them in our room (they were DELICIOUS). We drank some beers in bed and watched Hocus Pocus... It was pretty much the perfect evening!!  Haha :)