The weekend of 2 Nov 07, Tracy and I spent our time down in Capitol Reef National Park in south-central Utah. That park is actually pretty nice. There aren’t many people and it’s got several different types of nice canyon hikes. On Saturday we hiked the Burro Wash Trail. This hike went through the desert wash for a couple of miles, then the canyon narrowed, and got to be a lot of fun. There were some really tight spots as well as some very mild climbing. We only saw one other group that was coming in as we were leaving, so that was nice. The canyon was really pretty, and just enough of a challenge to be fun. We ended up turning around about half a mile from the end because the canyon was flooded with about a foot of water; it was too cold to want to get wet, and we didn’t have any waterproof shoes with us. In the future, we plan to bring our kayak shoes with us for little canyons like this. I tried to shimmy over the water, but the walls were just too vertical and the stretch was too long. But it was a really good hike. We also hiked quite a bit of the Grand Wash Trail, which was some really nice, big walls. This was a nice, relaxing hike that was really easy to get to on the main road. The next day we hiked up the Rim Overlook Trail. This was a really nice trail over a bunch of slickrock up to an overlook from the canyon rim. The trail was pretty steep, but it wasn’t too long. We only saw one other person as we were coming out, and this trail was also really easy to get to. There was also a lot of volcanic rock along this trail that looked like it came from nowhere. We read back at the trailhead that this area used to be mostly flat with volcanoes around it. Then glaciers moved in and cut all the canyons and spread the volcanic rock all over the place…geology is cool. Anyway, Capitol Reef is also cool, and a great place to go when there’s too much snow up north.
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