Utah Adventure Travel - Rambling in Utah’s Red Rocks

Many an adventure amidst towering red rock spires and dark canyons

Had J.R.R.Tolkien needed further inspiration for a landscape to send his hero hobbit through, he could have looked to the red rocks of Utah. In the midst of towering red rock spires or down darkening canyons, Frodo and his band could have had many an adventure.

Strung like a necklace across the throat of Utah, five National Parks offer hauntingly eerie landscapes with captivating red rock scenery. They are Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Arches, and Canyonlands. Each has its distinctive monoliths, spires, canyons, caverns and spans -- geologic souvenirs of wind and water erosion. Just a three hour drive from Las Vegas, the antithesis to the Parks’ natural splendors, is Zion, the most westerly of the five.

You tour Zion along the valley floor, its powerful rock walls towering overhead, dwarfing you. Most are rusty red Navajo sandstone but next to Angel’s Landing, one of the highest points in the Park, is the dramatic snowy white Great White Throne.

High on massive bluffs, rock climbers are tiny specks creeping tentatively upward while far below flows the Virgin River, lined with cottonwoods whose airy greenery contrasts with the stark rocks. The Riverside Walk takes you past spring and summer wildflowers clinging to the cliff sides and leads to the start of the Zion Canyon Narrows.

Hiking in the riverbed, sometimes in up to 4 feet of water, brings you to the canyon’s narrowest part where the rock walls almost touch overhead. Zion’s eastern side has a different look with orange and white slick rock etched by patterns of cracks and grooves. Perhaps there’ll be mountain sheep clattering across an open expanse when you drive by on your way to Bryce Canyon National Park.

In contrast to imposing Zion, Bryce Canyon is a fairytale land of fanciful spires. Here, you wend along the canyon’s curving edges looking down on thousands of hoodoos, which are rock pillars with fantastic shapes and colors.

They jumble together confusingly maze-like in amphitheatres that span the horizon. Mormon settler Ebenezer Bryce took one look into the mass of hoodoos and declared it “a hell of a place to lose a cow.” Fortunately there are paths to keep people from going astray amongst the rock towers and a favorite is the Queen’s Garden/Navajo combination.

The trail zigzags along the hoodoos’ rough surfaces, intriguing shapes, and brilliant red colors. The steep return winds through a narrow slot canyon called “Wall Street” where you can stretch out your arms and almost touch its sides. East of the tightly packed spires of Bryce is yet another contrasting landscape at Capitol Reef

Perhaps the least visited park in Utah’s necklace is Capitol Reef. It encompasses a 160-kilometer giant wrinkle in the earth’s crust called the Waterpocket Fold, a massive jumble of eroded cliffs, domes, and canyons. It has completely desolate areas of rock reflecting the intense heat of a desert mid-day and areas bearing marks of civilization.

Indians hunted and farmed here for more than 1000 years. Mormon settlers established the town of Fruita, complete with a one-room school, and planted orchards that the Park Service still maintains.

Early pioneers motored through rugged Capitol Gorge canyon and recorded their names on the walls to mark their passage. These carvings give a human connection in this barren wilderness and it’s amazing people homesteaded here. The emptiness and drama of Capitol Reef is rivaled by that of Canyonlands National Park, further to the east.

Canyonlands is the largest of the five Parks and two great canyons carved by the Colorado and Green rivers are at its centre. It’s a haven for four-wheeling, with roads running the gamut from comfortably paved to tortuous, bone-jarring rock.

The sparsely vegetated Islands in the Sky plateau has sheer drop-offs of about 600 meters to the plateau below and the rivers, which wind sinuously along the paths they’ve carved, are another 600 or so meters below that. It’s vast. Empty. Mesmerizing. Just don’t go too close to the edge.

Not far from Canyonlands’ precipitous drops is Arches National Park with the greatest density of natural arches in the world. Arches are formed by a combination of erosion effects - subsurface movement, water and ice, wind, and weather.

Delicate Arch looks like a standing horseshoe while Landscape Arch stretches over 300 feet and appears impossibly thin at its centre. The Windows look like a giant’s pair of spectacles and Double Arch seems centered in a herd of rock elephant heads. Surrounded by such dramatic geologic upheaval and erosion, you feel very small indeed, like a blip on the radar screen of time.

From the imposing masses of Zion’s rock faces to the vastness of Capitol Reef and Canyonlands to the delicateness of Bryce’s spires and Arches’ sculptures, there is unmatched scenic beauty in these five National Parks. The hobbits would have marveled at the red rock landscape of Utah, had Tolkien sent them there.

Recommended:

• Visit in the late spring or early fall. The summer’s heat is very intense. The historic Lodges at Zion and Bryce -- book one of the cabins if available (www.zionlodge.com and www.brycecanyonlodge.com)
• Skyridge B&B, Torrey - near Capitol Reef (www.bbiu.org)
• Try the rattlesnake cakes at Café Diablo in Torrey.
• Sunflower Hill B&B Inn, Moab - handy to both Arches and Canyonlands (www.sunflowerhill.com)

Author: Karoline Cullen