In this post, I’m going to talk about our day at Capitol Reef and our stay at Goblin Valley. If you haven’t read the last post, it’s about Grand Staircase-Escalante and Petrified Forest State Park. We left Petrified Forest State Park after our sunrise hike and headed towards Capitol Reef, which was just under a 2-hour drive. The views were incredible all the way.
Below is a picture of one of the scariest parts of the drive. It’s hard to see in the picture, but the ground drops off on either side of the road!
This was one of the best stops – I think it’s called Larb Hollow Overlook. It was just on the side of the highway.
And then we arrived! Immediately there were some pretty cool rock formations!
And the sun came out, which made everything look even more incredible!
We then drove to the Goosenecks Overlook, where you can see down into the canyon.
Then we headed to the visitor’s center. From there, we took the scenic drive down to Capitol Gorge. This is where we started to realize this park is completely underrated.
Scenic drive indeed! All of those pictures were taken just from the road.
The we arrived at a parking lot, where the trail goes into the gorge. We didn’t plan to hike into the gorge, but apparently not far down the trail are some petroglyphs, which we wanted to check out.
We also saw some names carved into the rock. They’re from the some pioneers/settlers from the 1870s. One of the mysteries of these names is: did they climb up there or did the earth erode down to the current level? I’m very curious.
Then we got back in the car and headed to the main Petroglyph site.
At first, it was hard to see, but the Park website has a much better picture.
There were some that were closer to the trail.
And then we left the park and headed to our campsite for the evening. We were going to be camping about an hour and a half away at Goblin Valley State Park.
Like every drive on this trip, the landscape changed drastically every 20 minutes or so and I saw rock formations and landscapes that I had never seen before.
Eventually, we ended up on a long, straight road, which eventually led us to our home for the evening.
This was our most secluded and dramatic campsite on the trip, I think. We had our own little canyon to ourselves.
It was still too hot to put up the tent, so we decided to check out Goblin Valley.
It was not far from our campsite and was a lot cooler than we thought it would be. Goblins are the official name for those mushroom-looking rock formations, which I think is just hilarious.
Then we walked down into the valley and climbed around the rocks. There are some paths through the rocks. You could definitely get lost in the valley and wander around for hours. This time, we didn’t. We headed back to the campsite to make dinner.
Now that the sun was behind the rocks, it wasn’t too hot to set up camp. This is definitely one of the best places I’ve ever set up the tent. I cooked dinner in the little shelter. It was so windy, I was worried that the gas stove was going to be blown out.
Then, after dinner, the sky was beautiful! With the clouds, we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to see the stars.
But sure enough, as soon as the sun set and the stars came out, the clouds cleared. Right over our tent you could see one of the dippers (I definitely can’t tell the difference between the little and the big ones).
As we read on one of the signs in the park, Goblin Valley is one of the darkest places on earth and because it’s dry in the desert, the visibility is good almost every night.
We even got a glimpse of the Milky Way.
The wind died down and we were able to seem. Make sure to check out the next post about our journey down to Monument Valley.
