Press "Enter" to skip to content

Tag: historic inscriptions

A Pleasant Morning in Capitol Reef

Pleasant Creek | Southern Utah Wanderings in a Sandstone Wilderness
Friday & Saturday, October 4-5, 2019

After finishing up our hike through the Little Death Hollow Loop late in the morning we headed back to Boulder for lunch so we could figure out what we were going to do for the rest of the day and on Saturday. Originally, I had planned for one more overnight backpacking trip off of the Wolverine Loop Road, but we both decided that we wanted to head back home on Saturday afternoon so we would have Sunday to relax before going back to work on Monday, so we needed to find a day hike for Saturday morning instead. After discussing our options we figured that something in Capitol Reef National Park would be good since it wasn’t too far away and was on our way home anyways, so we set our sights on Pleasant Creek. We have both hiked parts of Pleasant Creek in the past, but had missed some things that we wanted to check out this time. Since we still had the rest of the afternoon and evening free we headed up to Capitol Reef and visited a couple rock art sites before finding a campsite just outside of Torrey for the night.

1 Comment

Navajo National Monument: Keet Seel & Betatakin

Thursday – Sunday, May 30 – June 2, 2019

After a quick visit to Navajo National Monument back in 2011, which was when I was on my way to visit The Wave for the very first time, I knew that I needed to come back another time so I could actually hike to the Keet Seel and Betatakin ruins. Every year since then I have thought about going back but I never got around to making the advance reservations for the Keet Seel hike which typically fills up early in the year. When I made the decision that I was going to try to obtain some hard-to-get permits earlier this year (i.e. Havasupai), the hike to Keet Seel was up near the top of my list! On the first day that reservations were being taken for Keet Seel in February I called and reserved an overnight permit for Diane and myself for the first weekend in June because it was the first Saturday of the season that you could do an overnight hike this year. Since this particular hike is only available from Memorial Day to Labor Day, which is typically the hottest part of the year on the Colorado Plateau, I hoped that the weather would cooperate with us this year and not be too warm…

5 Comments

Big Dominguez Canyon: Cactus Park to Bridgeport

Saturday & Sunday, May 18-19, 2019

This weekend we had some stuff to get done around the house but we still wanted to try and squeeze in a backpacking trip this month, so we decided to head over to the Dominguez – Escalante National Conservation Area for a quick overnighter into Big Dominguez Canyon. While I have hiked into lower Big Dominguez Canyon many times over the years, Diane had never been in this canyon before and wanted to finally check it out. We planned to do a repeat of my very first backpacking trip by starting out in Cactus Park and hiking down the canyon to Bridgeport so it wouldn’t be just another out and back hiking trip, plus I’ve wanted to redo this trip again now that I am much more experienced. After we had returned home from this trip I learned that Saturday was Colorado Public Lands Day, which I had never heard of before, so I guess it was pretty fitting that we actually stayed on public lands in Colorado this weekend instead of heading over into Utah like we usually do at this time of the year!

2 Comments

Ancient Architects of Arizona

Wednesday – Saturday, April 24-27, 2019

Earlier this year two of my favorite bands, Architects and While She Sleeps, announced a tour that started in late April and went through May. These two bands don’t tour in the US very much so I knew that I really needed to go to this one! I’m just glad the tour dates closest to home didn’t coincide with a weekend that I had already made plans for! We were unable to go to the Denver date, which was the closest one to us, so we decided to go to the Phoenix date instead and would plan a short easy trip around it. I had never been anywhere between Flagstaff and Phoenix before, so I thought it would be a good idea to play tourist for a change and visit all of the popular National Monuments as an introduction to the area. I also figured that since we were going to be seeing the Architects in concert on Saturday night, that it would be nice to visit the ruins left behind by the ancient architects of Arizona on our way there!

1 Comment

Triangle Canyon: Cactus Park to the Gunnison River

Dominguez Canyon Wilderness | Ten Year Anniversary
Saturday, March 30, 2019

I spent the last two weekends hiking in the Needles District of Canyonlands and will be going back again in another week and a half, plus we had a concert to go to on Sunday evening, so this weekend we planned to stay close to home and take a little bit of a break from driving. Saturday was also the ten year anniversary of the designation of the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area through the passage of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, so we decided to celebrate the occasion by hiking down an unnamed canyon within the Dominguez Canyon Wilderness to a petroglyph panel that I first visited on a river trip back in 2012. This canyon, located just north of the more popular Dominguez Canyon, has no official name on any map that I’ve seen, so I’m simply going to refer to it as Triangle Canyon since it sits just below Triangle Mesa.

1 Comment