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…

Road Trip 2012, Day 18: Salt Lake City to Arches National Park

Saturday morning, after a nice night’s sleep at a hotel in Salt Lake City, the fam visited the Family History Library (genealogy library) in Temple Square. I had kind of planned this on a whim when I realized we’d have a few hours before picking up my mother at the airport at noon. The library opens at 8am on Saturdays and we got there just after opening. The on-street parking is free and at that time on a Saturday morning, available. Yay!

The place was unbelievable. As we walked in we were greeted by a gentleman at a HUGE desk. He gave us “First Timer” name tags and transferred us to another person who hand guided us to using everything – after we watched a short movie detailing the facility in all its awesomeness. There are 7 times the volumes of the Library of Congress and they have vaults built 600 feet under a huge mountain. Every day their workers add data that is gathered from all over the world.

The girls were set up with their own computers and games to keep them busy and Brad and I sat down to start digging. Brad was super lucky – someone else had already done most of his Rush lineage and he was able to track back to – I kid you not – Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, first Surgeon General, Father of Psychology, first president of the University of Pennsylvania hospital.

My mother’s side of the family is mostly from North Carolina, which is one of the least complete databases they have. I made it to my great grandparents but lost the trail there. On my father’s side I think I found information about my grandmother, but I didn’t have her or her parents’ full names correct and I got stuck there, too. Rats. I just sat beside Brad’s coolness and ogled each new member he came across, all the way back to the 1400’s in England.

The genealogy library is one of the coolest things I’ve seen. It doesn’t matter who you are, this is one fabulous, well-run place. I would love to spend a few days there in the future, especially after they get some more data from the North Carolina folks. Salt Lake City was a really nice place, the people were super friendly, it was inexpensive and it was organized. Here are some pictures of what we found:

We got my mom at the airport (a mere 4 miles from the library). Even the airport was awesome. They had a huge waiting lot outside the main airport drag. It had ginormous signs that would tell the incoming flight times and whether the people were ready to be picked up yet or not. Way cool. THEN, once you start to the baggage/pick up area there’s a center island with numbered sections so those people flying in can just go to a section, call their ride and tell them at which number to find them.

The truck appropriately rearranged to permit the extra body, we got rolling right along and headed to Arches National Park.

Arches has over 2000 arches within the park. I think we saw maybe 10, but of course we were on the drive-through-see-what-we-can mode of travel. We’re not going to be hiking with my 67 year old mother and 9 & 11 year old girls, so driving is the most effective way to see all this stuff.

 

We did have to get out and walk up to this arch. It was absolutely huge and took some time to climb up to it. From the other side of the ledge it was a straight drop down, down, down. Creepy!

Can you see the tiny people on there?

We drove some more, saw some more and were pretty impressed when we drove to our little cabin at the Arches Viewpoint Camping & RV.

Road Trip 2012, Day 17: From Bruneau Sand Dunes to Salt Lake City

Bruneau Sand Dunes is also known for its, get this, sand dunes.

We decided we weren’t in a big time squunch this morning so we got the girls up and moving around then, eying those awesome dunes in the background, decided to climb those suckers.

Of course, Grace caught a really cool dragonfly. She just has lightning fast hands!

Caroline and Grace were both doing great climbing the dune until Grace started freaking out that the wind was blowing the sand like needles into her legs. And the wind was totally cranking. I wish I had had an anemometer, but the wind was certainly enough to knock over our tent and bend 3 of our poles. Seriously. It had been hard to sleep with it ripping at the tent, too.

Caroline, wearing pants, stuck it out and ran all the way to the end and back. She really had a blast.

Brad, wearing fur, also had no problem with the wind. Of course, I was wearing pants since it was below 80 degrees, so I was fine.

After packing up our bent tent and listening to Brad curse up a storm because of course the wind was all our fault somehow (he got over it pretty quickly) the open road beckoned and Salt Lake City was our goal.

Of course, being us, it’s totally about the journey and not only the destinations; we pulled off in Utah to check out the Golden Spike.

 

The Golden Spike was the ceremonial railroad spike driven when the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific train tracks met.The Union Pacific had started from the west coast, the Central started from Independence, Missouri. With the help of the Chinese laborers, the Union Pacific rail was about two years ahead of schedule by the time they reached the Sierra Nevadas.

The Central Pacific train, above, burned coal (although it could burn wood, too). The Union Pacific burned wood since it was more readily available than coal.

The blue was the Union Pacific train, the brown was Central Pacific. They put on a neat show at the center and even had the trains running and whistling. I believe the road signs before Golden Spike seemed to indicate that there weren’t any facilities, but that was a lie. The visitor center was great and had nice bathrooms, displays and even a couple movies.

We saw these beautiful birds on the way back to the main highway to Salt Lake City.