Capital Reef, Petroglyphs, Hickman Bridge

Greetings. Here is my travel reportage from Friday, 10/22. It's only been a couple of days, but Jim and I are already forgetting where we've been. So sad, a brain is a terrible thing to lose.
There was a spectacular sunset on Thursday night. Kim and I stood outside and took many pictures. It was pretty dang impressive.

Friday we headed out to Capital Reef. It's another national park with stunning scenery. To get there, one drives east on Highway 12 from Escalante. We had given some thought to exiting the area via this route to avoid a 12% grade that lies in our path back to Tucson. After seeing this road, however, that notion was abandoned with vigor. It has a 14% grade and many more hills. I'll take the 12% thank you very much.
So, this is on the way to Capital Reef at about 9,800 feet. It was an atmospheric kind of day with clouds and mist contrasting with the brilliant color of the Aspens.


Look in the upper third of the photo, you can just make out the mountains in the distance.

Here we are at Capital Reef.




This is a hike through the Capital Gorge. Imagine you are a Mormon settler on your way west. This is part of the route you traveled. Those people were tough.


There is a flat section of a wall called the Pioneer Register, where pioneers would carve their names into the sandstone.


The weather here has been aggravating. Cold damp impulses come through, and one would swear the skies were going to open up and rain pigs and chickens; but then it only sprinkles. Fearing the pigs and chickens, we cut the Gorge hike short and headed out to see the petroglyphs. This is what we saw on the way to there.




Here we are at the petroglyphs. Fortunately these are inaccessible, and have not been defaced by the little taggers who feel they must write all over everything.

Then it was on to the walk to see the Hickman Bridge. Again we got psyched out by the weather, and decided to abandon before reaching the final destination. It was a pretty hike with massive scenery.

More scenery on the way out of the park.



So our key learnings from that day were as follows.
- Always take the hiking poles, no matter how benign the beginning of a trail looks, it can change
- Always wear the hiking boots, see above
- Always take the rain jackets, they prevent rain

I've also learned from Kim to take pictures of the park entrance signs, so that when one goes back to look at the pictures, one knows where they were taken.