Utah: Ultimate National Parkness
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
The Utah National Parks have been on our list for this road tripping lifestyle almost from the beginning. Craig had never visited the parks, and I have not been to any since I went to Bryce/Arches on a family road trip when I was a young teenager. This spring seemed like the perfect time - we were already on the West Coast and starting the Utah road trip in early May meant we were able to see half the parks before their high season. Yup - we managed to fit all of the Big Five into about a month. It was glorious. And tiring. And totally worth it.
Before I go any further, a long overdue apology to Mom - snarky teenage me was wrong, the rocks don’t all look the same. In fact, 90% of Southern Utah was gorgeous, but even better, all the areas looked very different from each other, were formed from different types of rocks/minerals and were formed by different geological processes. Craig had to read every single informative sign along the way 🙄.
I have no idea how many photos we took, it was ridiculous. And, since it was too difficult for me to weed them down to a manageable post, I decided to organize my Utah posts by first giving you this “summary” about all of the parks and associated towns, and then a photo post for each one with more details. Follow the links!
Note: I highly recommend all the parks if you enjoy funky rock formations, geology and/or hiking. One cautionary note - if you plan to visit, pay attention to the elevation at each park, particularly if you live near sea level. It’s no joke and may affect your fun - give yourself time to acclimate.
Links:
Zion National Park: Summary below and Photo Post
Bryce Canyon National Park: Summary below and Photo Post
Capitol Reef National Park: Summary below and Photo Post
Arches National Park: Summary below and Photo Post
Canyonlands National Park: Summary below and Photo Post
Zion National Park
Zion National Park was our favorite and it was also the first park we visited, simply because it is the furthest south and we were driving north from LA. Zion is the most visited national park in Utah, with about 5 million people visiting each year. The season was just getting started when we arrived in early May. We purposefully went mid-week, but there were still a LOT of people there. One of my favorite things about the area - you arrive in the town of Springdale (which is the closest town to the main park entrance) and you can already see the amazing rock formations/mountains from everywhere in town.
We stayed at the Cable Mountain Lodge, which had canyon views everywhere you looked and you can walk right into the park from your hotel room. I highly recommend this hotel - it was nice, convenient and comfortable. Starting in May, you can’t drive into the main part of the park and must take the shuttle buses. Their system worked really well - I’m not sure how it would be if there were 10X people, but it worked well for us. Being able to walk from our room to the shuttle line saved us a lot of time waiting in line to drive in/find a parking spot in the lot and THEN have to wait for the shuttle.
The base elevation at Zion is 3,900 ft at the visitor’s center, with the main hikes we did adding 500 to 1000 feet from there. I think that makes Zion the lowest elevation of the Big Five and in some ways the most approachable from a travel perspective. See the Zion post for info on our hikes and lots of photos of this amazing canyon.
One of the ways Zion is different from the other Utah parks is that it has the highest concentration of slot canyons. A slot canyon is a narrow passageway between towering rock walls. Slots are formed by water cutting through sedimentary rock, such as sandstone, and often still have a river running through the base of them.
I have to say again, Zion was by far our favorite of the 5 parks. It was beautiful, had a great variety of hikes and activities for all experience levels, including a couple of hikes you’d have to be crazy to attempt (in my opinion 😳). We also really liked the town of Springdale and enjoyed some good meals there.
See the photo post.
Bryce Canyon National Park
Bryce Canyon National Park is only about 90 miles/2 hours from Zion and the best way to get there is via the very scenic Mt Carmel Highway/Highway 12. When you drive that way, you get to climb up through and out of the park on a path that is drivable all year, and you go through an epic historic mountain tunnel (see this video I found on Instagram - I was too busy enjoying the tunnel to shoot my own).
Bryce is the highest elevation and the smallest of the parks. It has one main 18 mile road and only one entrance/exit. As you drive through the park, all viewpoints and hikes are on the left. Interestingly, it’s not really a canyon - the park is actually the eastern edge of a really high, enormous plateau (the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau). Therefore, when you hike in the park, you are always hiking DOWN the side of the plateau (and then of course you have to go back up - ugh. As they said there, “Going down is optional, but coming back up is mandatory” - too true). The visitor center elevation is 7900ft, and the highest point is at the end of the scenic drive at more than 9100 ft.
The Hoodoos are the most interesting geological feature of this park, and it has the largest concentration of these formations in the world. A hoodoo is a tall thin column of rock sculpted by erosion, usually with relatively soft rock topped by harder, less easily eroded stone that protects the column from the elements. They are often seen near each other, so you get these weird fields of the formations. We loved the way they looked. We also learned that the formation of the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon happened faster than normal since the area has 170 days annually of freeze-thaw cycles as a result of the high elevation - while we were there, it was in the 80s during the day, but 40s at night.
There was a shuttle system here too, but it wasn’t mandatory and we didn’t find it quite as useful as the Zion park one. Instead, we came in early enough each day (before 9am) to park in one of the lots on the rim and then walk around to most of the areas we wanted to see/hike. We visited over a long weekend, so it was busy, but not so much that we couldn’t see and do what we wanted.
The nearby town of Bryce Canyon City is very small and very touristy. It might be more convenient to the park, but we decided to stay down the road instead in Tropic, which was also small but a little better with respect to amenities (at least a couple restaurants worth visiting and totally acceptable coffee). Staying there worked for this short a visit, but I would not go there for longer or for anything other than visiting the park.
See the photo post for more details!
Capitol Reef National Park
After staying briefly in the Zion/Bryce area, we decided we would spend more time in the Arches/Canyonlands area (Moab, Utah). We took the longer, scenic route on highways 12/24 between the two national park regions of Southern Utah, which serendipitously took us right through the newest Utah national park, Capitol Reef, established in 1971. It’s a weird name for a land locked park, right? Well, the high ridges of the main feature of the park, the Waterpocket Fold, looked like an impassible reef to early expolrers/prospectors in the area.
The Waterpocket Fold is a wrinkle in the earth’s crust, called a monocline, because it’s a one-sided fold within otherwise horizontal rock layers (see image from space! Yeah, I was excited to find it). The “wrinkle” extends about 100 miles, mostly north/south, creating a long, narrow national park that is only a few miles wide. When you visit, the best/only paved road crosses the northern part of the park via highway 24. Unfortunately, we did not have time to do any of the hikes, which all looked very interesting (we will be back!). But we did have time to take the 10 mile scenic drive south from the visitors center to Capitol Gorge. The last 2 miles are narrow and unpaved - it was an adventure! See the photo post.
While the drive to Capitol Reef was gorgeous, soon after you leave Capitol Reef National Park, the rest of the drive to Moab gets less exciting, more flat and very dry.
In case you are thinking - what the heck, I’ve never heard of Capitol Reef. Well, join the club! I didn’t know anything about this park or Canyonlands. And they both start with a “C,” so I kept getting them mixed up! Once you visit either or both, though, you’ll never forget or wonder why they are also national parks.
For completeness - the elevation at the visitor’s center is 5500 feet.
Arches National Park
What’s different about this park is….. all the arches! There are over 2000 of them in the park! We did have somewhat poor timing at Arches, compared to the other parks. We arrived there a week before their busiest time, Memorial Day Weekend. Interestingly, Arches is the second busiest of the Big Five and can have wait times of 1 hour at the entrance gate (yikes!). Timing is everything - we went there before 9am when we went and completely avoided the Friday/Saturday/Sunday of the holiday weekend. Also, since Canyonlands is only about 30-40 minutes away and much less frequented, it was the perfect opportunity to check out that park!
You enter Arches at about 4,000 ft elevation, then you drive past the visitors center and start driving up and up this dramatic road that serpentines to the main part of the park. The entrance road winds through the park past impressive mountains, rock formations, and (of course) arches. The trailhead at the furthest end of the road, the Devil’s Garden trail, is at 5,200 feet, just to give you an idea. My two favorite formations were the ones in the Park Avenue Trail (see photo above) and the views all around the Balanced Rock. That rock is 3600 tons (the size of a destroyer) and is shaped such that, as you walk around it, it looks completely different from different angles.
The arches and other interesting rock formations in this case are formed primarily because the park sits on top of a salt bed. Over millions of years, deposition of other minerals/debris layered on top of the salt, which became unstable. Long story short, lots of geological movement, vertical cracks, lots of erosion, weird shapes, different hardnesses, yada yada….arches! And fins! And balanced rocks! Oh my!
The town of Moab is very cute and has a lot of food/shopping options. Also, lots and lots of ATVs. We did not avail ourselves of those, but it was fun watching them all over the place. Of all the towns near the Utah national parks, Moab was the best suited to a longer stay. And the views from everywhere (again) were gorgeous. Even just walking around our Airbnb’s neighborhood.
Check out many more photos here.
Canyonlands National Park
Canyonlands is weird, and it’s the largest of all the Utah parks. It also sounds to me like it was named by the 10 year old child of one of the National Park Service managers. It’s physically split into 3 “districts” by the Colorado and Green Rivers. The river gorges are very deep and there are few paved (or unpaved) roads - you can’t even drive directly from one of the “districts” to the other, you have to drive all the way out and then around to go from one to the other, which at best takes 2 hours. Luckily, the best and most easily accessible district, Island in the Sky, is only 32 miles from Moab.
The views are truly breathtaking and the hikes are a lot of fun, because you are walking among very weird rock formations with interesting strata and lots of colors. You add in the hints of the rivers far, far below and the hints of greenery that can only live right near the water and these vistas are totally unique. I also really enjoyed the trail markers, which were piles of rocks called cairns.
Island in the Sky (visitor center 5900 ft) is the most built up of the districts and has paved roads to most of the major areas/hikes. We also made it to The Needles (visitor center 4900 ft), 74 miles and an hour and half from Moab, which only has a minimum of paved roads, but super interesting formations as well. I also really liked the closer view of the Colorado River from some of the overlooks in this district. We did take one of the unpaved roads as far as we could (after a certain point you need a “back country” permit, even for day use). It was a lot of fun and definitely gave The Beast a good workout.
The third district, The Maze, has no paved roads and is a lot harder to access - it is considered one of the most dangerous and isolated hiking areas in the lower 48 states. As the national park website says, it requires “extreme self-sufficiency, high-clearance 4WD, and advanced navigation skills” to visit - needless to say, we were satisfied with visiting the other two districts. We could see some of the formations of the Maze from the Green River Overlook in Island in the Sky.
Formation of this national park is obviously dominated by the erosion from the rivers that run through it. In fact, they consider the two rivers the fourth “district” in the park and apparently, there are very exciting river rafting opportunities. Check out many more photos here.
Ranking the Big Five:
We have a (bad?) habit of wanting to rank/compare/contrast all the things we are seeing and doing on our travels, making for some interesting conversations. For example, we LOVED Bryce Canyon, it had really interesting formations that felt like they were out of this world. But, in contrast to Zion, Bryce came nowhere close and in our rankings of the 5 parks, Bryce was probably our least favorite. But really, that just tells you how AMAZING the other 4 were because Bryce is still in the top 10 of all the National Parks we’ve been to so far.
Here are the detailed rankings (while they ended up similar, there was LOTS of discussion):
Dina: | Craig: |
|
|
|
|
| (Craig refused to make a decision between these two) |
|
|
|
|
Comments