Utah National Parks - Bryce, Escalante, Arches, Canyonlands

After our extreme hiking days in Zion we continued on to the rest of Utah's National Parks a little exhausted and beat up.

Bryce was next on the list. We partook is an awesome dispersed site right outside the front gates and did a few of the hikes around the park including the Queens Garden and Navajo Loop Trail and the Rim Trail to finish it off, all in all around 8 miles. The landscape was pretty spectacular:

Bryce Canyon is Utah's smallest National Park and we had a pretty easy time exploring it in one day. I was anxious to get on the road towards Grand Staircase Escalanate NP where we were planning on doing the Coyote Gulch Trail. 

I obviously did not research this trail enough and luckily we stopped by the visitor center early in the morning to ask about it. The trail is around 11 miles round-trip, which we thought we had no problem doing in a day, but because of how strenuous it is most people backpack it. The ranger also started talking about class 4 climbing involved which went over my head and mentioned that you'll need to fit through a small crack and lower your pack down thirty feet by a rope and scramble down after it. That was not the day hike we were envisioning, and we'll need more prep to do that. Next time, next time. 

Instead we pushed on for a very long day of driving to Capital Reef Park, where we got a taste for the Arches to come on the Cassidy Arch Trail:

We ran into some other hikers that had just come from Arches that insisted the coolest thing to do was to get a permit to hike the Fiery Furnace area in the park. Later that day we drove straight to Arches and asked about getting the permit and luckily you can usually get them a day or two in advance. 

The next day after setting up at a pretty abysmal dispersed site outside of Arches, we went to the visitor center to get our permit for Fiery Furnace. The rangers we're pretty skeptical about our ability to handle the hike which requires a lot of scrambling over boulders and small spaces and a poorly marked trail, but considering how many people they have to rescue out of there almost every day their concern was justified. The trail itself is pretty great, and you're able to explore any of the area as long as you stay on rock and don't disturbed any of the precious "desert crust". 

The hike was a blast but was no joke. With temps in the upper 90's and the difficulty of finding the way out we were struggling towards the end. The trail is marked by small brown arrows showing the  loop out of the valley and are almost impossible to spot. Some of the climbs out seemed so dangerous that we we're sure that that couldn't be the way, given the range of hikers we saw on the trail, and then we'd find one of those stupid brown arrows hovering 30 feet above us and would need to figure out how to get up there. It's a must see for the park but don't expect a walk in the...well, park.

I was too exhausted to do more than stare at Delicate Arch from a distance, but on a separate day we did the Primitive Trail at Devil's Garden that included some of the parks top arches, Landscape, Double O and a few more along the way:

The park was again exceedingly hot and our campground was full of bugs that were doing their best to eat us alive. We spent both afternoons sitting in restaurants or cafes in Moab waiting for it to be cool enough and less buggy to enjoy our evenings in the campsite. We pushed on a day early to Canyonlands 

...and decided we had enough and would leave to Denver a day early.