We woke up later, in the comfort of the cheapest motel in town. We fully blasted the AC and appreciated going to the bathroom in the middle of the night without worrying about scorpions and spiders. That day, we were heading towards Canyonlands National Park.
Before you continue, make sure you’ve read the last post (read it here).
We said goodbye to Mexican Hat Rock! We were actually supposed to stay at Goosenecks State Park that night. It looks pretty incredible – we would love to go back sometime and stay there.
On our way to the southern part of Canyonlands, we passed by Twin Rocks and the town of Blanding.
Then we turned into the park. First we visited the Needles District. The main thing we wanted to see was Newspaper Rock.
Not far into this part of the park is Newspaper Rock. These are the best petroglyphs we saw on this trip. They’re really interesting.
Then we headed further into this part of the park.
We ran into some friends on the road.
Then we got our first view of the Needles. I think we could have gotten a better view of this part of the park by hiking through it, but we saw this first sign inside the visitors center and then we saw the second sign further below in a different part of the park. It was SO HOT. The heat was radiating off the rocks and the ground.
We didn’t stay too long before heading further north to the main part of the park.
It was a pretty long drive. From one visitors center to the other is over a 2 hours’ drive. We stopped at Dead Horse Point State Park, which is nearby the main part of Canyonlands, which is where we were camping that night. We set up our tent and killed a bit of time, waiting for the golden hour light and for it to cool down a little.
Then we headed into the main part of the park. Immediately, this became of the most impressive parks we had been to.
We did a short little walk over to Mesa Arch.
This was definitely my favorite thing we saw. The views over the mountain range over to the east were stunning.
Then we went down to Grand View Point. We were originally going to watch the sunset from this point, but we were hungry and wanted to get back to the campsite. This part of the park really felt like a smaller-scale and less crowded Grand Canyon. It was equally as stunning, but way less crowded. There was barely anyone there.
We actually got some of the best sunset views on our way back to the campsite.
We got back just before dark. We started to get out all the food and get ready to make dinner, when we saw the biggest spider I have ever seen in my entire life hanging out on the inside of the roof of our shelter. Looking at pictures online, it was probably a Hobo spider or a Wolf spider. Google images at your own risk. We named him Bobby, but that didn’t make us less scared of him.
I couldn’t get a picture, because one person was cooking as quickly as possible while the other person had to shine the flashlight at it to make sure we knew where it was at all times. As soon as we were done cooking, we ate while standing outside of the shelter. I have never eaten so fast in my life. We cleaned up our dishes quickly, and ran into the tent. It was super hot that night, so between being overheated and being terrified of Bobby, we had a hard time sleeping. On top of that, we were excited that we were going to Arches National Park the next morning!
