After last nights flat tire we were left behind schedule in Escalante instead of Moab for the night. As a result we had a lot of ground to make up tonight and did three national parks in one day. The first was Capitol Reef, a national park full of brightly colored cliffs, beautiful aspens, and petroglyphs.

We saw many cool things in this park. The first was a little hidden cliff dwelling. I am not sure whether this is ancient (I doubt it) or something someone just decided would be cool to make but either way it was really interesting and cool.

Also there was Chimney Rock and an old cabin out in the middle of the park.

The petroglyphs around the park were probably my favorite part in this park. You could totally walk by and not notice this beautiful remnant of the past. They have an eerie beauty about them and are so intriguing.

It was a beautiful park but I wish we had more time to explore this amazing park. The geological wonders around this park are astounding.

Next was Canyonlands National Park.

Reminiscent of the Grand Canyon, this park has an overlook over vast canyons and deep crevaces in the earth. It is amazing to see the land strecthing for miles with jutting cliffs and sheer canyon walls.

We visited the Mesa Arch which had an amazing view of the canyons through the archway.

We were chased out of the park by a lightning storm. It was pretty epic, the skys had quickly clouded over with dark angry clouds which did not hesitate in releasing bouts of rain and lightning followed by the deep boom of thunder. We headed over to Arches after that hoping to get some exploration in before the storm really hit.

It was extremely overcast and threatening so we made our trip very brief. We drove in to try and do a hike at the Windows collection of arches.

We got to see Balanced Rock and the Garden of Eden.

However we did not hike due to fear of the lightning and massive amounts of tourists. There were so many people around the arches that it just wasn’t worth it so we left. They were like ants and good photos were not even possible because the monuments were covered in people.

So instead we are going to return to Arches really early in the morning before all the other people arrive. So stay tuned for better pictures of Arches tomorrow.

Tags: arches, canyonlands, capitol reef, cliffs, hike, red

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Photos, Travel Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.