Great Basin, the Forgotten National Park

Yet again, this park intrigued us because none of our guide books covered it in much detail, and we ended up loving it. (In fact, in our reading, we glossed over the park without even realizing its existence till we passed a sign near Valley of Fire.) Great Basin is in Nevada, just across the…

Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Snake count 🐍, a perfectly harmless but four-foot long squiggle called a striped whipsnake (I had to ask Dan to look it up, aren’t phobias fun). I thought I remembered my parents taking our family to the Black Canyon when I was young; the park stuck in my head for some reason. When I asked…

Rocky Mountain National Park

On the heels of my crotchety Arches post, here comes my cranky RMNP suggestion: quiet campgrounds, free of screaming children, free of bros tripping on mushrooms, free of a capella groups practicing with acoustic guitar accompaniment, free of neighboring tents a-rockin’ in the early evening… Due to close quarters in the campground, we sought out,…

Weirdness Out the Window

Del Taco and Starbucks, Jack in the Box and Popeyes, Sonic, Sonic, Sonic. America is weird. Not the judgy, “that ain’t right” weird. The weirdness comes from the vastness, the difference that we all share. It’s a slideshow of fenced acreage and animals, stripped land and drive-thrus. Sitting in the passenger seat (Becka drives, which…

Telluride

We found Telluride in a box canyon at the end of a long, winding drive through the Colorado mountains and forest, with snowmelt-swollen streams running parallel to much of the drive. One of our old New York friends, and Dan’s former roommate, moved there several years ago and offered to host us in her funky…

Arches, While Reading Edward Abbey

I picked up a copy of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire at a bookstore in Santa Fe, having heard of Abbey before but never having read any of his work. Abbey spent several seasons as a park ranger at Arches in the late 1950s or early 60s, when it was still a National Monument rather than…

Capitol Reef, the Other Utah Park

We didn’t know what to expect from Capitol Reef – our guidebooks barely devoted two pages apiece to the park and, being internet-less at Hamburger Rock, we couldn’t find a good overview – and didn’t quite know what to make of it once we got there. It’s counted as one of Utah’s Big Five, but…

Canyonlands, Land of Rock Cairns

We took a slight detour in our route from the Grand Canyon in order to pass through Monument Valley, since I grew up on old-school Westerns and couldn’t pass up the chance to see the land made famous by John Ford. Canyonlands was the brainchild of former Arches superintendent and all-around western wilderness adventurer Bates…

Grand Canyon, North Rim: Who Comes Down, Must Go Up

The first ranger we talked to told us an old Grand Canyon adage: down is optional, but up is mandatory. We chose the north rim for a few reasons. First, it attracts far fewer visitors (everything I read said the north rim gets around 10% of annual Grand Canyon park-goers) so we hoped to avoid…

Further Criss-crossing of the Southwest

From Bryce we headed down to see a college friend of mine in the Phoenix area. She knew we wanted to focus on staying outdoors as much as possible, so she alerted us that Phoenix was about to have a cold snap, with temperatures twenty degrees below average. We adjusted our plans – if you…