Ok, so Green Mountain in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park may not be the most spectacular trail in the state – or even in the park – but it does have some good points. First, it’s one of…
10 Best (and worst) Day Hikes in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument
I think I can safely say that Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is one of my favorite parks ever. There’s such a diversity of scenery (i.e., of different kinds of rock formations, badlands, etc.) and most parts aren’t extremely well-visited, so…
Looking Back at Family Hike Reviewing History
This week, I was going through some old files on my computer and ran across a document with some of my siblings’ compositions we’d written for school in the early 2000s. This document contained several reviews of parks we’d recently…
Chasm View Trail – Short Trail, Wonderful Views!
Sometimes you go to a place because you really want to go there. And sometimes you go because there are circumstances beyond your control that cause you make choices you wouldn’t have made otherwise. That happened with us the last…
Flat Tops Hiking Around the Causeway: So Lovely!
Ah, the Flat Tops Wilderness Area! Where else in the US can you hike for miles across unspoiled, grassy flatlands, see pristine mountain lakes, look over cliffs that make your stomach flip, see Basque shepherds and their sheep, and have…
Camp Cannonville: A Free Campsite with a View
What’s better: A free campsite, or a paid campsite with a view? Or, are you like me, and would say, “Why not both?” However, free campsites with views are difficult to find, so when you find a good one, you…
The Day I-80 Closed – And We Were On It
This is a story of sunsets, traffic jams, map programs, wild fires, and adventurism. Don’t worry; everyone’s fine in the end 🙂 The day began pretty normally. We woke up in a Walmart parking lot somewhere
Pretty Little Lakes in the Flat Tops on the Sand Creek Trail
Although I like long hikes, sometimes we just need a shorter walk. My group does get tired (or just isn’t in the mood for yet another 12 mile (20 km) trek), or we want to do one short thing before…
Off-Trail Hiking to a Flat Tops Mountain: Pyramid Peak
We like to have a destination in mind when we’re hiking. It’s for sanity, mostly. We all know that if we can just “walk until we decide to turn around” we’ll never turn around until we’re way further from the…
A New Grand Canyon View: Grandview Lookout Tower
Last spring, I was preparing to hike the Grandview Trail in Grand Canyon. During my internet searching, I ran across a Grand Canyon sight I’d never known about before: the Grandview Lookout Tower. Could possibly be, I wondered, a real,…