All right!
Here’s our Sunday:
Got out of the hotel by 8 am, headed east on U-24.
The landscape here is…CRAZY. I had no idea. I mean – I’ve been to Utah before. I’ve been to some parts of the Southwest. We’ve done Zion and Bryce. We’ve been to both rims of the Grand Canyon. Painted Desert, Petrified Forest. Various parts of New Mexico.
All amazing, but nothing like this. Massive land formations of incredible variation. Driving from Torrey, Utah to Hanksville, down to Leprechaun Canyon, up to Goblin Valley State Park, and then to Moab was like planet-jumping.
Which is why movies set in space are filmed here and why there’s a Mars Desert Research Station, funded in part by Elon Musk, here – it’s not open for public tours anymore, but I wanted to figure out where it was just to see – but I didn’t have cel service and maps didn’t tell me the road…..
Anyway.
I’m tired and we have a very early day tomorrow. So quickly:
Torrey-Hanksville (gas at a station built into a hill) – Leprechaun Canyon-Blarney Canyon-Tacqueria in Green River – Moab.
There were other possibilities on the docket. The Little Wild Horse Canyon/Bell Canyon. The Sego Canyon Rock Art. But we ended up spending a lot more time at Goblin Valley than I expected, so headed straight to the next destination and took a peak at the landscape for tomorrow – which is good, since I’ll be navigating it before dawn. I was not expecting what I saw today, so ..to repeat …it was good we skipped the other stuff and did a quick run-through here before it got dark.
Some pics. Just a few.
And yes, when I’m doing all this, I do think, regularly, sometimes with every other step – When my mother was sixty-one years old she was….
…and never is “squeezing through slot canyons and getting ready to hike ten miles tomorrow” what fills in the blank.
Just sayin’. We do what we can do when we can do it. Because we don’t want to regret what we didn’t do when we could do it.
Right?
Row above – Leprechaun and Blarney canyons. I do not know the history, cannot explain the Irish-y names.
Goblin Valley State Park & dinner in Green River, UT.
More photos and videos at Instagram, both in posts and in “highlights.”
Charlotte was Both 
I found that taking pictures was almost frustrating in such scenery, just doesn’t convey the uniqueness and the beauty of what I was hiking through. My problem is, always, to pare down my expectations of what I want to try to see so that I can take the time to see some one place more fully. It is a little strange to read the National Park brochures and see “if you only have two hours” for a place I could spend a week at.