Four Incredible National Parks in Three Days: A Mad Dash Through Southern Utah

It was an ambitious plan. And probably a stupid one.

My wife and I had an invitation to take the Rocky Mountaineer train from Denver to Moab, Utah from April 22-24. We also had a visit lined up for Las Vegas from April 28-30.

Flying home from Utah to Toronto on April 24 and then flying back out west to Las Vegas on the 28^th seemed silly.  I started to think, which is often a dangerous occurrence in my household.

“I’ve always wanted to see the great national parks of Utah,” I told my wife. “What do you think?”

She obviously believed her husband, the travel writer and once proud owner of at least 643 fold-out paper maps in his crowded basement, had some idea what he was doing. She nodded her head.

I began to plan it out in my off hours, poring over Utah websites at night. I knew I wanted to see Arches National Park, and also Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. It looked like I could slide into Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on our way south, and probably Capitol Reef. But which one was best?

Somewhere in my early planning stages my wife mentioned that she’d love to see the Grand Canyon. I was there once for a brief visit 10 years ago, and it was a little far from the other parks we planned to visit, but I couldn’t say no to another stop.

That’s where it got ridiculously complicated. I kinda sorta maybe figured we could handle Arches, Capitol Reef and perhaps a bit of Bryce on our way south to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. But it was going to be a LOT of driving, and I wasn’t quite sure how to tell my wife we’d be getting up before the sunrise every day and driving every night until 9 p.m., forcing us into an endless series of Chicken McNugget and Subway sandwich dinners.

My brain was beginning to swim a little as I tried to contemplate my options. But I caught a break in mid-April when I attended a Utah tourism event in Toronto. It was there that a woman from the tourism department in Southern Utah, Janette Peatross, informed a naïve Canadian that the north rim of the Grand Canyon had received enough snow to make a Buffalo resident scream in agony, and that I’d have to make another plan.

I could’ve said “Okay, great, let’s add some relaxing time in Bryce Canyon and admire those beautiful orange spires.” I could’ve said, “Wonderful, now we have more time to soak in the hot tub at the hotel in Moab.”

Did I say either of those things? I did not. Instead, my first thought was, “We now have a half-day free.”

I asked Peatross for a recommendation in Kanab. She smiled and turned her laptop in my direction.

“What in the world is that,” I asked in wonder.

“That’s Peek-a-Boo Canyon,” Peatross said. “There’s another one in Utah, but this is the one near Kanab.”’

The photo that flickered in front of me showed a deep, slithery, orange-red, wavy canyon. I’d been to a slot canyon in New Mexico, and I’d read about places like Antelope Canyon in Arizona. But that was out of our way. Jeanette was right there in front of me, and Kanab would be easy to get to. Peatross kindly offered my wife and I a chance to tour the canyon.

I finally had an itinerary in mind for our Utah trip. I figured we would take a tour of Arches National Park on the morning of the 25^th, then drive a couple hours to Capitol Reef National Park and spend the night. The next day we’d head south to Bryce Canyon and stay the night there, then drive early the next day to Kanab for the Peek-A-Boo Canyon trip. If thought that if we left Kanab in time we could see a reasonable amount of Zion National Park (ho, ho) before driving to St. George, Utah for the night of the 28th, and then making it Las Vegas for an 11 a.m. appointment on the 29^th.

I thought we might just make it with a little bit of luck, a steady supply of strong coffee and a good, solid rental car.

ARCHES NATIONAL PARK

We got up early on the 25^th for a guided tour of Arches National Park with Chris Tull, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable biologist who works with Moab Adventure Center. It was glorious, a land filled with brilliant, rust-coloured arches soaring into a bright blue western sky.

Tull told us stories about the forces of water and chemical erosion that formed these graceful masses of stone and stopped to admire tiny, brilliant yellow and white wildflowers. We also stopped to admire the grandeur of towering walls of rock at an ampitheatre-like area called Park Avenue, where I admired a narrow stone column that resembles the head of Queen Nefertiti of Egypt.

At Sand Dune Arch we clambered through a narrow canyon for a short bit before emerging into a bowl of brilliant orange light, with a solid arch over a slope of smooth rock that formed a perfect natural stage.

CAPITOL REEF NATIONAL PARK

After our Arches tour we grabbed a quick lunch (yes, Subway) and drove a couple hours to Capitol Reef National Park, passing rugged cliff walls and a strange, roadside collection of metal dinosaurs, old cars and other kitsch at a place called Carl’s Critter Garden.

We managed to pull into the visitors center around 4 p.m. A parks worker who’s probably used to panicked people pulling up just before dusk kindly outlined a trip that would take us along the park’s scenic road to the Capitol Reef gorge.

We pulled onto the main road south and were gobsmacked by an overpowering range of orange-red rock hills. The rocks here appear to have been supercharged; thrusting skyward with immense force, and with shapes all raggedy-jaggedy.

I’ve spent 42 years of married life making my wife wait for me to compose the right photo on trips around the world. She would stand quietly, fidgeting while I worried about capturing an image.

This time was different. As we rolled down the road at 20 mph, soaking it all in, she turned to me and said the words I’d never thought would escape her lips: “Jim, TAKE MORE PICTURES!”

We sauntered southward in our silver Toyota Corolla rental and turned down a dirt road into the Capitol Reef Gorge. The rocky landscape we had previously traversed was fantastic. But this was almost primeval. The towering stone walls closed in around us as we zig-zagged slowly down a dirt road. The walls were so high that the wide-open skies of Utah were a mere rumour.

We were only in the canyon for 20-30 minutes, but it was one of the most inspiring drives of my life.

BRYCE CANYON NATIONAL PARK

The next morning it was up early again so we could make it to Bryce Canyon National Park. It was a pretty drive through tranquil farming country and then down a quiet, two-lane road, where we saw maybe eight cars in an hour.

 

The food options in Bryce Canyon City looked limited, so we steered the car a few miles west towards the town of Tropic. As we slid down a modest incline on Highway 12, the placid, flat landscape suddenly gave way to a small canyon filled with psychedelic orange rock, topped with broad streaks of white. They looked a bit like the creamsicles I used to eat as a kid.

We managed to wolf down most of a pizza in Tropic, and then headed back to the park, where we took the canyon-side walk from Sunrise Point to Sunset Point. Our brains were once again smacked, not to mention battered and bruised. The spires here rise from the canyon floor like thousands of silent sentinels; a vast spread of pale orange stone sculpted by millions of years of wind,, rain, snow and ice. A dusting of snow on the rocks only added to the intrigue.

Where a lot of Capitol Reef featured giant slabs of rock, Bryce offered up tall, chimney-like spires that to me resembled the Gaudi spires you see on some of his famous buildings in Barcelona.

I went back around sunset and it was even more beautiful, the shadows deepening the colors in the rock and small sparrow-like birds darting among the spires.

“Totally awesome,” I heard a visitor from Ontario, Canada say as we gazed down from Sunset Point.

The previous day at lunch, my wife read a story on the back of the pizza place menu about a local rancher named Ebenezer Bryce, for whom the canyon was named. Bryce was apparently not much of a romantic. When asked what he thought of the wonder-world of soaring spires outside his ranch, Bryce replied, “Helluva place to lose a cow.”

PEEK-A-BOO CANYON, KANAB

The next morning we were up even earlier than usual (my wife, not one to miss a trick, had begun to notice this pattern) so we could drive a few MORE hours south to Kanab. Someone we had met along the way suggested I take the highway through past Grand Staircase Escalante, but it looked Like I’d be going over a narrow mountain road at 9,000 feet. With snow on the ground at 8,000 feet in Bryce I wanted no part of it. Instead, we took the longer, flatter but still pretty way south to Kanab, where we met up with folks from Kanab Tour Company. 

I thought we were getting an ATV ride to Peek-A-Boo canyon. Instead, I found out it was me who would be driving. That would make it hard to shoot a video, but what the hell.

We donned our helmets and goggles and, after a short safety talk, headed out into the rugged sand dunes and chaparral of southern Utah. My wife held onto a metal bar for dear life as I eased our ATV up and down the shifting dunes, occasionally letting out a loud “woo-hoo!”

After careering around tight corners and zipping up and down the dunes for about 15 minutes, we eased our way into a canyon area and climbed out of our vehicles. We soon entered a deep orange-red slot canyon with waves and curls and smooth, rippled rock. It’s not a long trip, but the canyon hike might have been the highlight of our trip.

Our guide, Kirk Allred, took photos along the way and pointed out the best vantage points.

“Who needs skyscrapers,” he said with a smile.

ZION NATIONAL PARK

Maybe it was because it was the last park of our trip, but I didn’t do a lot of research on Zion National Park before we headed there from Kanab. We came in from the east, a road very much less travelled, and were immediately confronted by towering, chalky white/crème-coloured cliffs with vertical and horizontal lines that looked like some kind of natural graph paper. The road began to dip between the rock walls as descended into a deep valley, and then a long, long tunnel.

When we emerged we were on a stretch of pavement that was dwarfed by tall, gnarly peaks streaked with brown, rust and white rock, with patterns and lines and hidden figures that would no doubt delight a Rorschach test lover. When I pulled over, I noticed a young woman in a native-looking buckskin skirt standing near the side of a cliff, her arms extended in wonder.

Someone had suggested we try to park at an area of the park called Canyon Junction, but the lot was full. There’s very limited parking at Zion, and most of the main canyon is accessible only via electric shuttle. I pulled into the main parking lot and pounced on an open spot like a mountain lion on a wounded rabbit. A few minutes later we were riding up the valley in an electric shuttle bus.

With limited time on our hands (there’s DEFINITELY a theme at work here), we wanted to see something different from the other parks. The only water we’d seen in Bryce, Capitol Reef or Arches were as dry as a James Bond martini, so we opted to check out Weeping Rock, site of a razor-thin, wispy, beautiful waterfall.

The water at Weeping Rock tumbles perhaps 200 feet over a sheer wall of tan and dark-brown Navajo sandstone, and the moisture provides life to ferns and mosses that cling to the rock face for dear life. We sat on a stone ledge under an overhang behind the fall, watching the mist rise swoop and soar in the dry, desert air.

On the way back to our car I craned my neck to see massive rock formations such as the Court of the Patriarchs. It might have been the most enjoyable bus ride of my life.

Alas, we pulled out of the park around 4 p.m. and headed to St. George, Utah, which would be our stopping point on the way to Vegas.

Looking back, we managed four iconic national parks and a truly remarkable slot canyon in just 56 hours.  I’m living proof that you can do it, but I’d recommend at least 58.