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?




Continue reading about our trip as we dayhike in Colorado's Lizard Head Wilderness near Telluride.

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