CATHEDRAL
We
had reserved a campsite at Navajo Lake in the mountains north of Zion for
Sunday night. However, there was still a
huge wildfire burning near there. We had
driven by that area a week earlier, and the smoke had been terrible. We decided to change plans.
We
didn’t have specific plans for Monday, but we wanted to camp in southwestern
Colorado that night. That meant that we
would spend most of the day driving across Utah. We decided to get a head start Sunday
evening. We left Springdale and drove
back through Escalante. We continued to
Boulder and up over Boulder Mountain. On
the far side we found the Oak Creek Campground just off of highway 12. It was a nice spot in the evergreens, and it
was 54 degrees when we got out of the car.
Perfect!
The
next morning we had breakfast, broke camp, and drove
to Capitol Reef National Park. I’ve been
to the park before, but I’d never seen the Cathedral Valley area. A rough backcountry road makes a loop through
there, but I didn’t have an adequate vehicle on my prior visits. The Park Service recommends high clearance
4WD. We just happened to have a 4WD
SUV. The opportunity was too good to
pass up.
The
drive starts with an interesting ford of the Fremont River. The road doesn’t just cross the river, it
follows it downstream for a short distance.
I don’t mean you drive alongside the river, I mean you drive IN the
river. That was a little disturbing, but
the water was low. From there we climbed
up into the hills along the Waterpocket Fold. We stopped at all of the official overlooks
and did a few short walks to stretch our legs.
First up was the Lower South Desert View. It features long range views and some
impressive cliffs. We had lunch at the
Upper Cathedral Valley View, which provides a great vantage of the rock
formations in Cathedral Valley. Then we
stopped at the Gypsum Hole, which was interesting but hard to view. My favorite part though was the Temple of the
Sun, Temple of the Moon, and Glass Mountain.
The temples are giant rock formations.
Glass Mountain is a rock outcrop with exposed selenite crystals. The crystals look like glass, but the
mountain isn’t much of a mountain. You
can explore the whole thing in a couple of minutes of easy scrambling.
I
wish we had spent more time in Cathedral Valley. It looks like a great place for remote car
camping and cross country hiking.
From
there we drove back to Moab. We stopped at
the Moab Brewery for an early dinner.
The food and beer were decent, but nothing special. Then we took backroads through the mountains
of southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado.
We were bound for Telluride, Colorado, where we hopped to find a place
to camp on July 3rd. What
could go wrong?
Back to Utah
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Please remember to Leave No Trace!