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Category: Touring

Windy Weekend in The Swell

Saturday & Sunday, April 29-30, 2017

After staying up late the last four nights in a row to attend concerts and then getting up for work early the following mornings, it was finally time for me to sleep in on Saturday! I woke up around 9:00am (I really cannot recall the last time I slept in that late), packed my camping gear into the Jeep and started driving west to the San Rafael Swell where I would spend the rest of the day hiking in canyons and searching for rock art. It was very windy out all day, which is pretty typical of springtime weather on the Colorado Plateau, but a cold front had moved through the area and the temperature was pretty cool out, too. I could have done without the wind, but the temperature was perfect for hiking! Here are a few photos from the day…

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Little Grand Canyon

San Rafael River Gorge | Friday & Saturday, March 31 – April 1, 2017

Visiting the Little Grand Canyon in the heart of the northern San Rafael Swell has been something I have wanted to do for a long time. I’ve looked down into the gorge from the edge of The Wedge may times before and thought to myself that I needed to get down there. I had always dismissed going there on a day-hike because of it’s length and figured I would be able to catch the San Rafael River at the right time so I could take my inflatable kayak through the canyon. That has obviously never happened yet which is why I put this trip off for so long. Since there is a long local hike near my home that I’ve been thinking about doing this spring, I thought that hiking the Little Grand Canyon would be a good test to see if I was going to be up for it or not, so I finally went for it.

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Petroglyph National Monument

Tour of the Deserts | Honeymoon Adventure
Saturday, March 18, 2017

The last day of our Honeymoon Adventure was finally here. Thankfully, we weren’t out late on Friday night at the concert since we woke up early on Saturday morning so we could visit Petroglyph National Monument before starting our eight-hour drive back home. Even though we still had another day before we had to return to work, we wanted to spend Sunday at home resting and getting things back in order.

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White Sands National Monument

Tour of the Deserts | Honeymoon Adventure
Thursday & Friday, March 16-17, 2017

After spending the previous day driving from Tucson to Alamogordo and visiting the Three River Petroglyph Site, it was time to finally visit White Sands National Monument. I have long wanted to visit these white gypsum sand dunes located in the Tularosa Valley of southern New Mexico and made sure that this park would be a stop on our Honeymoon Adventure. We headed over to the Visitor Center early and arrived about 30 minutes before they opened at 9:00am so we could get one of the ten permits available for camping in the dunes that night. I’m glad we got there early, because when we arrived there were already four groups ahead of us waiting in line to get permits. One of the guys waiting in line told us that they had tried to get a permit the day before at noon and were told that the permits were all gone shortly after they opened because of Spring Break.

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Three Rivers Petroglyph Site

Tour of the Deserts | Honeymoon Adventure
Wednesday, March 15, 2017

After spending a nice evening at Saguaro National Park it was time for another day of driving. This time we would be heading further east into the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico. It was a pretty uneventful drive through a new area of the country for both of us. We arrived in Alamogordo just in time to check into our hotel and then we continued driving north through the Tularosa Valley so we could visit the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site.

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