You can’t see it all in one day
Follow up to my last blog & taken from a Pecha Kucha Presentation I gave a few years ago…
“You can’t see it all in one day” they said. “There’s just too many amazing things to experience. You need to be a lot less ambitious Derek, and just take your time”, they said. Well we did it all in a day and we feel pretty damn good about it.
October of 2017 I had my first visit to some of the best parks the U-S-of-A has to offer. Flying to Phoenix and driving toward Denver then flying home all in 8 days.
This was a challenge in itself, but small in comparison when you are spending someone else’s money to do it, even smaller and more risky when you’re traveling with and spending your in-laws money. Even smaller yet when you don’t know your in laws very well, their culture is drastically different, and hell, you don’t even speak the same language. We did have a translator along on the trip, but with my Ohmonee’s wealth of health and finance knowledge that she wants to keep us apprised of and my tendency to spew a steady stream of bullshit, my wife gets burned out on translating real quick.
We picked up a Dodge Journey in PHX and drove to Sedona once we landed. I had always heard that Sedona was as magical a place as you can find in the country. Unfortunately my exposure was very limited since we got in late and left early the next morning. We stayed at the Sugar Loaf Inn where we were reminded by a man named Thor that we were being too ambitious, but he offered a suggestion of a nice Sedona viewpoint for our way out of town and wished us all the luck regardless of his scepticism.
The template for the trip was to wake up every morning, drive one hour to a park, visit the park all day, then drive one hour to a hotel, rinse and repeat. It actually worked out pretty well. There are some huge expanses of land where an iphone GPS is as useful as a small fanny pack with a large hole in it. Luckily I had done some previous research and knew of this issue this ahead of time, and brought my 8 year old garmin. Oh, also, some Native American tribes don’t recognize our time zones so that messed with plans from time to time.
After Sedona we went to the Grand Canyon, I had visited with my wife a few years previous when we took an Amtrak train from Chicago to Los Angeles, so I had some knowledge of the park and knew what was cool from the previous trip and what I would liked to have done. We walked along the Southern Rim and down pretty far on Bright Angel trail. It was a rough walk back up to the top. My general rule for the whole trip became Visit the Rim, Walk to the Bottom, then see what else we can see with the daylight remaining.
I quickly found that my In Laws were very similar to me in that, sure they wanted to see some amazing sights, but equally important to them and myself, was getting awesome instagram photos to show off to friends back home sitting in their fluorescent lit cubicles typing up PTS reports. I, personally have very little interest in a long hike in one location over several days.
That night we stayed at Lee’s Ferry Lodge, it looked great in photos but was one of the more nasty places I’ve stayed. No plugs in the walls for our phones, no wifi, no cell service, and an ample supply of wood paneling. Luckily on this one we got in really late then left at 5am to take a side trip to Horse Shoe Bend, another place I’ve always wanted to visit but knew almost nothing about. We arrived at 4am because of an unaccounted for time zone change or not change?? Anywho, I wanted to do some star photography but when I got there there were no lights anywhere and an extremely vague path. Luckily as I was scratching my head another photographer came so I walked very awkwardly about 5 feet behind him, saying nothing because it was 4am and I hadnt had coffee so I wasn’t quite able to form words yet. I’m glad I followed him too, because there would have been a large likelihood I would have walked right over the edge while stumbling around in the dark.
I got some cool star photos and some nice sunrise photos as the 500 other hipster photographers poured in. When the manbun count exceeded 50 we headed out and drove up the Zion National Park tYohave our minds absolutely blown. It was one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been. The entrance was nice, but we ended up driving through a tunnel and emerging into a canyon valley of such splendor I can’t describe with words or slightly above average photography.
I think basically every park we visited had some kind of shuttle system. That made it really convenient for the park grazing we were interested in. They would usually come every 15-20 minutes so sometimes we would just hop on and get off at a place that had an interesting name. We started each park exploration at the visitor center to get some basic guidance from a park ranger, then finished each day with a gift shop purchase. I was a sticker guy, Ohmonee was a hat lady, Ahbogee was collecting pins and Youngeun.. wasn’t buying much that I can remember.
We left Zion pretty late in the day and on the way to Bryce Canyon disaster struck! We had got about a mile out of the park, going 65 down the highway when we were suddenly surrounded by a murder of deer. I’m a little unsure how we didn’t hit a single one, unless the on-coming car cleared a path for us. With adrenaline pumping I hopped out of the car to see if the other driver was okay. I jogged about 2 blocks and found I was unable to communicate with the driver. For some reason I was unable to detect the language, but luckily my Ahbogee did. The contents of the oncoming car was 2 parents and 2 young boys who were also visiting from South Korea. They were even more clueless as you or I would have been as to what to do, as strangers in a strange land. In the dark, zero cell reception, and total inability to speak any English. Our family was able to team up and get them straightened out. An off duty police officer was just down the road dealing with another deer hit. They had one working headlight so they followed us to a hotel with plans of replacing the car in the morning and continuing on to LA. If things had gone any differently, even by just a couple of seconds it would have been us that hit the deer or their vacation turning out much worse.
The next day Bryce Canyon was pretty amazing. I remember it most for the amazing textures and coloring patterns of the HooDoos. We again walked the rim, then down into the canyon, where we saw Thors hammer and a bunch of ground squirrels that Youngeun definitely did not feed several times, because the signs said not too.
Next day skipped Escalante and the Petrofied forest, It was either closed or we ran out of time so we continued on to Capitol Reef. The one place I wish we had skipped and went to Antelope Canyon instead. Some guy named it Capitol Reef because it reminded him of the ocean. I stretched my imagination pretty far and came up with a photo of some rock with the blue sky reflecting that maybe looks like an ocean? Capitol reef was our first exposure to an arch and a real life pokemon.
We walked a long way to see “The narrows” they never came so we turned around and left.
We left a Moab hotel early again and found ourselves in the Canyonlands. The one place where I would have to admit you can’t see it all in one day. There were three districts: The Needles, The Maze, and the Island in the Sky. We spent the day in the latter. It was pretty neat. It felt kind of post apocalyptic to me. This place as a whole was so big that it sounded like you would need a camper and a couple of four wheelers to experience it all.
We stayed in Moab again that night and visited Moab Arches, probably my second favorite of the trip. There were so many arches that we didn’t get to see them all and we were pretty tired by this point so hiking was much slower than usual. Also there were tons more people at this park than the others. I think we made a mistake in viewing Dark Angel over another arch. I didn’t see an angel in the rock, but possibly a certain dark angel’s piece of anatomy, but not sure angels are equipped… anyway..
We headed out late in the day and planned to drive 4-5 hours to get a head start on our longest leg of the journey: driving to Rocky Mountain National park which would be a very different experience from the parks we had seen to that point. We made it to Rifle Colorado when it started to Snow. Youngeun checked the website and found that RMNP was warning of a possible closing due to the impending storm. It was the last stop on a long journey so we voted to not chance it and head straight to Denver where I was very much looking forward to CASA BONITA. If you don’t know what it is, watch early episodes of South Park. On the drive to Denver we did hit a blizzard.
Every leg of this drive was as incredible as the parks we were visiting. I’ve never been so happy to drive long distances. When I wasn’t focusing on hitting unfenced cows and the incredible amount of wildlife, I was soaking in the landscapes. The west has a huge lack of Korean people though. While I am used to skipping breakfast and living largely off of sandwiches, my In-Laws were used to 3 meals a day which always consist of Rice Kimchi, and a wide spread of side dish options. I could tell they quickly got burned out of America’s finest roadside greasy spoons.
We made it to Denver without any more trouble and got to take advantage of their free bus system while doing some basic sight seeing and souvineer shopping, then finished the day and trip off at the aforementioned Casa Bonita, which in all honesty was was cooler back in the late 90s the only difference is, I was able to see the cliff divers and spend a lot less time in the arcade.
The next morning we awoke, returned out Dodge Journey and flew back to the Nooga. Feeling satisfied that we did it all in a day, one park at a time.
www.followustodenver.tumblr.com
