Bailey and I squeezed in our annual spring break girl's trip just before Idaho announced the 'stay home' order, due to COVID-19. This year we went to Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah. It was amazing! We covered almost 40 miles of hiking, and we never got bored with the scenery! Such a beautiful place!
We had all of our food with us, and we slept in the car, so social distancing was a piece of cake.
We left Friday at about noon, and got there with enough time to squeeze in one hike before dark. Our first hike of the trip was Chimney Rock, and it was a perfect way to get introduced to the park.
We slept in the car that night, and woke up to snow the next morning! Nothing that stuck, just a few flurries in the morning.
Gooseneck Overlook/Sunset Point:
1.1 miles
Our first stop of the day was Gooseneck Point. It's a beautiful viewpoint that overlooks the Fremont River. We also did a short walk out to Sunset Point. It was cloudy so we planned to actually come back one of the nights to watch the sunset. More about that to come later...
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| Gooseneck Overlook |
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| Gooseneck Overlook |
After that we stopped at all the cool pullouts along the road. The Castle was Bailey's favorite!
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| Bailey loved the castle (we saw it several more times from different places in the park), and she loved this picture. |
Fruita School House/Petroglyph Panel:
Next we saw the Fruita School House. It's the cutest little one room school that the early pioneer settlers used. Bailey loved it! There was even an old flag pole out front. There was a big rock behind the school where the school's name was carved, and the students carved their names and the year around it. Super cool!
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| Fruita School House |
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| The carved rock |
Next we walked along a boardwalk and looked at petroglyphs. Super cool!
Hickman Bridge/Navajo Knobs:
11 miles
This was our longest hike of the trip. It was quite eventful too! First we set out toward the Hickman Bridge. Super cool trail, and super cool destination.
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| We loved all the trails with carved stairs. |
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| Most of the trails are so subtle that from down below you would have no idea they were even there. |
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| This was a smaller bridge along the way. |
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| And here's the Hickman Bridge. So cool! Look under it on the left hand side and you can see Bailey. That gives a good idea of how huge it is. |
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| The trail goes under the bridge, so this picture was taken from the back side. |
After the Hickman Bridge, we kept going on the Navajo Knobs Trail. It had great views, but not anything we couldn't see from other areas of the park. This one was our least favorite, and we liked it even less when Bailey fell. Ahhh, it was terrible! We had gone the whole 11 miles, and with a quarter mile left to the car she fell so hard. We were already worried about her shoulder, so we were taking everything super slow and easy. We were going down some stone steps, and her feet slid out from under her. She instinctively grabbed her arm to keep it in place, but landed with her back on the edge of the stone step. It knocked the wind right out of her! She hit her elbow on the stone step too, and she felt the pain clear up her hurt arm. I could sense her starting to panic, so I had her stay still and concentrate on getting her breath back. Then we focused on her shoulder. We decided there was not much we could do about that, so she tried to stand up and couldn't. That's when we realized she had messed up her back. After a few tries we got her to her feet, but she could hardly walk. We went a little ways, and when I turned around to look at her, she was white as a ghost. I was really worried, but we had to make it back to the car, so I had her keep shuffling slowly on. It took her forever to get in the car, and once she was in, she realized she could not lean forward to close the door. That's when her tears finally started. It was so sad!
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| We saw the castle again, and Bailey said, "I need a crown!" I found her a crown and we got this lovely picture of the princess with her castle. :) |
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| Cool stone arch along the trail. |
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| Bailey thought it was so cool how the whole earth seemed to slant. |
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| This is where she fell. If you look at the step up from where she is standing, that's the one she landed on. |
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| She ended up with a nice raspberry and some good bruising on her back. |
Fremont River Trail:
3 miles
We drove to a nice picnic spot to have lunch. I unloaded the big ice chest, and the big box of food out of the car and unto a picnic table. Right when I was finished, Bailey realized that she couldn't get out of the car. Plus, it was cold, and that kept making her back muscles spasm really bad. I made her food, and she had to eat it in the car. I was out there alone at the table with enough food to feed an army. Bailey was cracking up, and said that the couple of people that went by on bikes looked at me like I was a crazy lady.
Our next hike was the Fremont River Trail. It was short and I thought it was just a flat trail that followed along the river, so we decided to try it. Bailey's back was really bad, but it was actually worse for her to be sitting in the car. Driving home with her in that condition was out of the question, so we decided to see if she could still hike. It was very slow going, but she seemed to do better on her feet. We got a mile in, and then realized there was a big climb. I ran ahead and finished the hike (it ended up being one of my favorites), and Bailey was gonna head slowly back to the car. We figured I'd catch her before she made it back. She ended up just walking back and forth on the trail until she saw me coming back down the hill. It made her nervous to have me out on the trail all by myself, so she waited for me. She was super slow, but could still walk, so we were hoping it would start to feel better by the next day.
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| Walking along the river. |
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| Lots of cute little friends hang out in the orchards. |
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| This is where the trail started going up, so she decided not to risk it. This is also when the trail got really cool, so I was bummed she couldn't keep going. |
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| I took pictures of all the views from every direction so I could show her. |
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| Very pretty! |
Grand Wash Trail:
3 miles
We knew we were running out of daylight and wouldn't have time for a long hike. We decided to drive to the trailhead that we were going to sleep at. It had the Grand Wash Trail so we decided to do half of it that evening, and drive around to the other side of it and do the other half the next day. It worked out perfectly. This was one of our favorite hikes! The wash was super cool, with big rock walls on both sides of us. We thought we heard other people on the trail, but it was just our echoes.
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| Really fun rock formations leading to the narrows. It would be a young kids dream hike. |
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| Entering the narrow part. |
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| We got back to the car in time to get everything situated right as it got dark. We enjoyed our key lime pies by the light of our headlamps. So fun! |
Cassidy Arch:
4 miles
We woke up with the sun the next morning. We were already at the trailhead for our first hike, so we got an early start. This was probably my favorite hike of the weekend. The trail was awesome, the destination was awesome, the weather was awesome, and we had the whole place to ourselves. Cassidy Arch was amazing!
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| The trail was so cool and had awesome views the whole way. |
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| fun! |
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| Theres' our car down below! It was a great place to sleep. |
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| This was our first glimpse of the arch. |
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| We made it! We had so much fun taking pictures at the arch. |
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| There's me standing on the arch! |
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| I was jumping in this one! :) I kept making Bailey nervous because from where she was, it looked like a tiny little spot I was on, but it was actually quite big. |
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| This one made us laugh. We wanted a picture with both of us in it, so she did a selfie. I'm a little dot on the arch! |
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| This is one of my favorite pictures from the trip. |
Capitol Gorge Trail:
2.7 miles
The drive into this trailhead was awesome! Big rock walls on both sides of us the whole way in. There were two hikes from this trailhead. The first one was the Capitol Gorge Trail. It had petroglyphs along the way, and a big rock that the pioneers used as a registry when they came through.
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| The drive in. Pictures don't do it justice. It was so cool, and we felt so small! |
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| There's a petroglyph above my head. |
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| We made it to the tanks. They are deep holes in the rocks that fill with water. They are important to the animals because they drink from them. |
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| We had lunch when we got back, and this time she felt good enough to eat with me. |
The Golden Throne Trail:
4.25 miles
We almost skipped this hike, because we couldn't find the start of it. I'm glad we kept looking, because it was one of our favorites. It was finally warm enough to wear short sleeves! I ordered us 'Sloth Hiking Team' shirts because we knew it would be slow going with Bailey's arm. Little did we know that she would take a bad fall, and they would become so much more relevant. We were definitely slow, but just like our shirts said, "we'll get there when we get there."
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| We had great views and great conversations on this hike! |
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| There's the Golden Throne behind us. Take a look at our cute shirts! |
Cohab Canyon:
6 miles
This was the last hike of the day, and little did we know, the last hike of our trip. We timed it out perfectly. We would do this hike pretty quick, and we'd have just enough daylight left to do the other half of the Grand Wash Trail that we loved the day before, and possible make it back to Sunset Point to watch the sunset. It started out great. We loved this canyon! This one would also be a kids exploring dream hike. On the way back, somehow both of us missed the signs, and we got on a different trail. We both kept making comments about how we didn't remember seeing certain things. Then we both started feeling like we were on the wrong trail. We had to backtrack quite a ways and that added a couple unexpected miles to our hike. Now we knew that we wouldn't have time to do the rest of the Grand Wash Trail that day, but we figured we'd just get up in the morning and do the two hikes we had left and then head home. Bailey's back did great on this hike, so we thought all was well. Now we were just focused on making it out of this canyon before dark. We didn't have our headlamps with us, so we walked pretty fast. We made it!
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| This is Cohab canyon, and it was really cool! |
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| So many fun off shoots to explore. |
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We made it to where we were sleeping just in time to get situated before dark. We didn't bother with the sunset, because the clouds rolled in. The plan was to get up in the morning and finish our last two hikes, and then drive home. Well, when we woke up, Bailey couldn't move. Like literally, she couldn't get up. She was stuck in the back of the car. I'm not sure if her back injury just took awhile to kick in, or if we really overdid it the day before. It took a long time for her to get up, and when she finally got out of the car, she could hardly walk. We decided to skip one of the hikes, but she still really wanted to do the rest of the Grand Wash Trail. We drove to it, thinking that she would loosen up once we got walking. It was short and flat, so we thought it would be fine. We started, and she literally couldn't do it. It was so sad! We got her back in the car, drugged her up, and headed home. When I say drugged her up, I mean two ibuprofen. Ha, that's all I can get her to take. We made it home without any incidents, but it was down hill from there. Her back got so bad! She started physical therapy for her shoulder a few days after we got back, and they worked on her back a lot too. She's gone three times now, and it has helped her a ton! We're pretty sure she strained or tore a back muscle, and possibly a hip. Her back and shoulder are doing much better. She's finally on the mend. She hardly has to wear her sling anymore, and she is back to walking somewhat normally now. We hope she can start running soon, because she has a really hard 55K in June. At the rate the virus is going, that one might end up canceled too.
Despite Bailey's fall, we still had a really awesome spring break trip. It wasn't under the best of circumstances, but she's a trooper and we still saw and did amazing things. We can't wait till next year. I wonder where we'll go?
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