Dunn / Averill Family Adventure 2013: ‘Merica

Rachel...We are really behind with blog posts as haven’t been in reliable email contact! So lots to catch up on. After Zion National Park, we visited several other places in southern Utah, which were all staggeringly beautiful – Bryce Canyon, Natural Bridges, and Capital Reef. These were all places with incredible canyons to explore. Unlike Zion, where we started out at the bottom of the canyon and climbed upwards, in the other places we started at the top and ventured deep down. Luckily living in hilly Wellington is good practice for all the canyon walking and rock scrambling that we did.

Bryce Canyon was an amphitheatre full of bizarre red rock formations called hoodoos, some named for their shapes – one looked exactly like Queen Victoria! The colours were amazing, especially in the late afternoon sun. We camped at the top of the canyon, which was very cold – we were 8000 feet high (around 2500m).

Capital Reef was very unusual in that the valley floor was full of fruit trees, planted by the first Mormon settlers to the area in the 1860s, which you can pick fruit from today. We picked some juicy sweet red apples in an orchard with deer wandering around, which was very surreal!

Natural Bridges was a canyon system with 3 rock arched bridges that had formed by erosion over time. You could walk down to all 3 of them, and we scrambled down to two. The first one was lots of fun – scrambling down rocks, ropes, wooden ladders and handles to the canyon floor. Not for people scared of heights or too worried about health and safety!

We were lucky enough to visit the Utah parks during the US Govt shutdown, as the Utah state government had done a deal with the Federal government to keep 8 national parks in the state open temporarily. No such luck in California, where Death Valley was shut, although we were able to drive through it.