We were spending a few days in Moab, Utah, mostly to visit Arches National Park, and we didn’t plan to go to Canyonlands National Park because we thought it was too far out of our way. There are four unconnected districts of Canyonlands and as we drove to Arches early the first morning we saw a sign that said Canyonlands: 30 miles. So we thought, ‘let’s go!’ and we drove the forty minutes to the Islands in the Sky section of Canyonlands.
La Sal Mountains at sunrise
Arches National Park is home to the greatest concentration of natural stone arches in the world, more than 2000. It is unique and I was totally blow away by the backdrop of the La Sal Mountains in the east. Continue reading
We didn’t have much time in Zion–we only allowed ourselves a day there on our way to The Wave. So we drove through Zion, taking in the towering peaks.
Court of the Patriarchs
Death Valley is the land of extremes, it has the record for the hottest temperature in the world: 134˚F in 1913, and it’s the driest climate and the lowest elevation in North America. The National Park has a page with some interesting facts about why it is so hot and dry.
In my last post I mentioned that Joshua Tree National Park has nine campgrounds, which are all available on a first-come, first-served basis, and when we visited the park on Friday and Saturday all nine were full. We arrived again on Tuesday and a couple of the campgrounds were crowded but we had a few options in the Jumbo Rocks campground. Many of the spots are close together, so we chose one that had a bit of separation from the neighbors, put our “reserved” sign up, and went out hiking to watch the sunset. 
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Though the Wonder Valley turned out to have an appeal all it’s own, the reason we rented a house in Twentynine Palms, California was its proximity to Joshua Tree National Park.
We got to White Sands National Monument just after it reopened and drove through the park (parts of it were, and still are, closed from the drone crash).
One of Pearson’s first memories is watching, live on TV, the Space Shuttle Columbia land at the White Sands Test Facility and he’s been enamored with White Sands, New Mexico ever since. So on our way out to California, we made a plan to stop and explore White Sands National Monument for a few days.
Adjacent to the National Monument is the NASA Test Facility, an Army Missile Range, and Holloman Air Force Base, so the National Monument and Route 70, the road from Alamogordo to Las Cruces, is closed quite often. Unfortunately, a week before we arrived in White Sands an unmanned drone on some sort of training mission crashed in the National Monument and they closed the entire park until further notice. Continue reading
In the late afternoon, after most of the other 18 hikers had cleared out of the area, we knew we had to start the 3.2 mile hike back to the car. Continue reading
In my limited research before our trek out to The Wave, I found out that there was a second small wave and a bunch of neat things to see if you hike up above The Wave. Some people even hike to the top of the ridge, but we did not have optimal footwear to be hiking on sandstone. Continue reading
