Day 8: Bryce Canyon City to Moab

We had a relatively relaxed start to the morning today, eating breakfast in the hotel at 8am, then checking out and setting off to our next destination around 9. We had a drive of around two hours ahead of us from Bryce Canyon City until we reached our next national park: Capitol Reef.

As we began driving through Utah, the scenery was surprisingly green and pleasant.

I've always imagined Utah as being exclusively sandy and desert-like, but that's obviously not the case.

We passed various cattle ranches and at one point even had to slow down for some cows who were crossing the road.

We also drove past a large reservoir, which was part of Otter Creek State Park.

The entire area was really sparsely populated. We passed through a handful of villages – all of which had Mormon churches – but otherwise there were barely any signs of human habitation.

It was only when we got close to the entrance to Capitol Reef National Park that the landscape began to change.

This is quite an unusual national park, with an unusual name.

To me, a “reef” is something you get in the ocean, but in this part of the world the word is used to refer to a rocky barrier that is difficult to travel across.

This landscape definitely looks like it fits the definition of being difficult to travel across!

There's one paved road through the park and that is what we were following.

It was a really spectacular drive.

Every so often there were lay-bys where we could pull over and take photos.

It was so different to the views at Bryce Canyon yesterday!

Our plan was to do a hike to a large natural arch called Cassidy Arch. To reach the starting point for the hike, we had to drive a couple of kilometres down an unpaved road.

In my head, Capitol Reef was quite an obscure national park and I wasn't expecting it to be terribly busy.

That turned out to be a miscalculation – there were lots of people, including entire coach parties at the visitor centre – and when we got to the end of the unpaved road, we found the parking lot was completely full. We had to turn around and drive back to the main road again.

The main road itself was very beautiful, but we wanted to get out somewhere and have a walk.

We stopped briefly at a roadside viewpoint which advertised petroglyphs.

These are ancient pictures carved into the rock by native people. They were quite hard to make out, but in the photo below you should be able to see some people ...

... and in this one you should be able to see some sheep.

A bit further down the road we came to the starting point for our second-choice hike to a place called Hickman Bridge. The car park here was technically full too, but Tim managed to find a spot to park by the side of the road and we set off, initially walking alongside a river.

From here the path led between rocks ...

... up steps ...

... and over stretches of smooth rock.

Soon we had gained some height above the road.

The landscape we were walking through now had some black rocks which looked like they might be volcanic.

There was quite a lot of variety in what was a fairly short trail; we only had 0.7 of a mile to go before we got to Hickman Bridge.

I explained earlier where the “reef” part of the name “Capitol Reef” comes from. The “Capitol” part apparently comes from the white, rocky domes in the park like these.

Apparently their rounded tops are supposed to look like the dome of the US Capitol building in Washington DC.

Some of the domes we saw were definitely more pointed than rounded, though!

Our trail continued upwards.

It was quite hard work at times.

Eventually we made it to the end of the route, where the trail began to loop round to take us to the viewpoint we'd come to see.

We clambered over more rock ...

... and then got our first glimpse of Hickman Bridge.

You may struggle to make it out in the photo above. It's perhaps a bit clearer in the one below; a huge natural arch in the rock.

The closer we got, the easier it was to admire.

Though getting close to it was a bit challenging at times.

Once we'd climbed down to the optimal viewpoint, the arch was much clearer to see with the blue sky behind it.

We experimented with fitting both us and the arch into a selfie

The trail then took us right under the arch.

From there we made our way across more rock ...

... towards another viewpoint.

We passed a few little cactuses on the way

When we got to the viewpoint it was really stunning.

We realised there was a rock we could climb up onto for an even better view.

It's not as scary as it looks; there was only a very shallow drop on the other side!

We tried another selfie with the view.

And with this view too  

From that point it was a relatively short walk back downhill towards the car.

From Capitol Reef we had a drive of another two hours or so to get to Moab, which is where we are spending the next two nights.

The landscape continued to be fascinating as we drove out of the park, with lots of striped rocks.

You were never quite sure what kind of view you were going to get around the next corner!

I found all the rock formations really fascinating.

This one looked to us like it had a face in it  

As we left the national park, the countryside became a bit flatter for a while ...

... but soon there were huge rocks rising up out of it again.

We got glimpses of mountains in the distance ...

... and eventually saw the rocks change from a light sandy colour ...

... to a deeper red.

When we eventually got to Moab some time after 4pm, we were starving and found an Italian restaurant where we both had an absolutely enormous serving of spaghetti with meatballs.

Then we checked into our hotel, where the room is surprisingly big and spacious

It wasn't an extreme day of driving today, but you'll see from the map below that we still covered a fair bit of ground!