The third week of our Utah trip with the Herefords was focused on visiting Capital Reef National Park and the surrounding area.  Capital Reef is a large “tall and narrow” park almost entirely surrounded by federal lands including National Forests, National Monuments, and BLM lands. Consequently, if seems like the wilderness goes on forever.  The park is centered on a 90 mile long ridge in the earth’s crust known as…

At the end of March, we stayed in Bosque, New Mexico about 40 miles south of Albuquerque for a few days followed by Santa Fe for almost a week.  Our time was largely spent hiking in National Monuments and visiting American Indian ruins. Many of the ruins are at least 700 years old and are the last vestiges of native peoples who occupied the land for thousands of years.  In…

We have passed by Petrified Forest National Park several times while traveling through Arizona on I-40, but haven’t taken the time to see it.  When we cancelled our mid-March stop in Durango (due to weather), we decided to stop at “Petrified” instead.  This was a good move as the park is much more than some petrified wood chunks.  It is also  about the Painted Desert, extinct creature excavations, as well…

The Monument Valley Tribal Park a huge area that straddles Utah and Arizona that contains some of the most scenic rock formations in the world.  It is the product of 50 million years of erosion and lies entirely in the Navajo Nation Reservation territory.  Normally, you can take Navajo tours in and around the entire valley with a Navajo guide, however in mid-March the Park was still shut down by…

Lake Havasu is a reservoir created in 1930’s when the Parker Dam was built on the Colorado River. Lake Havasu City was essentially founded in the late 50’s by a real estate developer hoping to capitalize on the lake by building a recreation community.  Over the past 50 years, and despite being in the middle of nowhere, the town has become a water sports and retirement center.  It has a…

For the third consecutive year, we spent a month in Yuma starting in mid-January.  The weather was nearly perfect, especially considering what the majority of the country went through.  The campgrounds, stores, and hiking trails were not nearly as crowded as in years past.  People were generally good about masking and social distancing. However, it just wasn’t all that exciting and that was okay.  It was the best we could…

As part of our “Winter 2021 Isolation Tour” we decided to stop at several National Monuments (NMs) on our way to a month-long stay in Yuma, AZ.  There are 129 NMs in the US and they span a wide variety of venues ranging from mini-National Parks to historic buildings to ruins. We’ve previously been to a dozen or so and find them to be the “short stories” of the National…

Our fall travel schedule turned out a bit differently than we planned last winter.  However, although a bit low key compared to the Florida trip we planned, it was a lot fun and forced us to travel off the “beaten track” and explore some new places. The Chesapeake Bay and Outer Banks areas are just gorgeous and  great places to simply relax. There were a lot of walks and reading…

The Pisgah National Forest occupies a huge amount of mountainous land above and below Ashville, North Carolina.  We chose to go there without doing our normal due diligence due to quick pandemic-based schedule adjustments.  We knew there was decent hiking and that it was far enough south to be warm, but we had no idea just how great it is.  The area we stayed in is known as the Ranger…