Road Trip 2012, Day 19, part 1: Canyonlands National Park & Goblin Valley

First thing in the morning Grace and Brad went “ircin” hunting. This is really lizard hunting. When Grace was tiny she called all our anoles “ircin.” No idea why, but she was adamant and it stuck. I can’t see a lizard without thinking ircin.

We didn’t find any collared lizards, but these bellies were pretty cool anyway.

We packed up our little cabin pretty quickly (we had gotten very good at breaking camp by this time), hopped in the truck and headed off to Canyonlands National Park.

Canyonlands is where you can really start to see that the rivers were carving a gorge. There are three sections to the park; Islands in the Sky was the area where we went. The Green and the Colorado Rivers converge at the southern point of Islands, with the rivers on either side.

It was here that we happened upon the “crazy family” who was contributing, big time, to our population issue (let’s face it, overpopulation is the base cause of all our ills). The parents couldn’t have been over 30 and they had 7, yes SEVEN, children. Made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. Yes, they were cute but 2 kids still would have been cute – and more sensible.

Anyway, Canyonlands was pretty cool, but the best stuff was yet to come. A guy at Arch View RV Resort suggested we drive west by using routes 24 to 12 rather than going back to the Interstate. Victoria, our GPS, was pretty peeved that we weren’t following her directions and she continued to curse us out for some time. We stuck to our guns, though, and our next stop was Goblin Valley.

This was the beginning of the “scenic route.” Really, it did get much more exciting, but not before Goblin Valley.

So we got into Goblin Valley.

At first glance the basin just looked like it was filled with little mushroom people. After a moment we realized there were people down there amongst the brown, stone critters. The coolest thing about this park is that we could climb all over the hoodoos that were scattered around the area; there were no restrictions. They are doing environmental studies to check out the effect of feet and hands on the hoodoos but for now we could get up close and personal with all the little goblins.

Pictures don’t do this place justice. It was hotter than h.e. double hockey sticks (the girls’ term), but we could have spent a lot longer hiking around the hoodoo-clustered bowl. After we returned to the parking lot and looked across the land we realized that we really didn’t get that far in our wanderings.

But we had miles to go before we’d sleep, miles to go before we’d sleep so we were on our way…