Today’s post was supposed to be about Yellowstone, but all I can think of as I look at the pictures is what a pain the National Parks are to deal with. You can pretty much count on NOT camping within the park, which means you go in and check and then back-track out of the park to bounce up a Forest Service road looking for a flat spot with some shelter and preferably some water. We were ready for anything, of course. You all know how competent Troy is.
So here is a typical day. After a morning of packing and schoolwork, we arrived at Capitol Reef.
Our trusty guide book said that the valley here was established as an orchard and you could still pick your own fruit. Pick-your-own-fruit is probably my kids’ next favorite pass-time after chase-each-other-with-sticks.
We stopped at the ranger station. Now they call it a visitor center. I guess I won’t talk about that either. All I want to do is complain. All the rangers and volunteers that we talked to were delightful, as you can imagine. Many were part time and/or retired or volunteers. This young lady from Garland, Texas is an astronomer and gave a short talk to get us all excited about the star party later that night. She succeeded in getting us excited, but we didn’t get to go. We did pull out the star chart through the rest of the trip. As you can imagine, the stars were magnificent everywhere we went.
A hand-written sign pointed the way to Pick-your-own. Then you weigh what you pick and pay by honor system.
You only have to pay if you want to take fruit away. What you eat while enjoying the cool shade and burbling brook and spectacular surroundings is free for the picking. The boys got a little carried away and we still had apple caramel chewy bread in the dutch oven three weeks later.
I tried to have lunch ready on our travel days, because handling the cooler was a major ordeal. The walls were three inches thick and it was certified to be bear resistant. All the parks require bear canisters now to keep bears out of people’s food and hopefully out of the campgrounds. It must be working because we saw no signs of bears anywhere. The monster cooler weighed 30 pounds empty. Getting ready for this trip had its ups and downs and I cried one day about eating Lipton soup for six weeks straight and crouching over a burner the size of a cupcake to prepare meals for five. Troy did all the research for the cooler and camp stove and bought them, no expense spared. This was such a peaceful spot that we pulled it all out and cooked anyway.
The downside was that we were racing daylight to leave the park and find a campsite. Our book had some maps and Troy downloaded maps from the Forest Service that show some roads. To me, the National Forest areas (not all contain trees) seem vast and monotonous. How do you find one tiny spot to camp? Troy looked for places where a road met a creek. That narrows it down to just a few spots.
This was a dead-end valley of multi-colored dirt. It was so soft that I doubted it could hold me up. How has it lasted so long? How does it hold itself up? The black dots above are the boys, sinking knee-deep into the hillside. There were four-wheeler tracks all over, so my guess is that the local kids come here to “go mudding,” or do donuts and slide around ‘til their trucks are caked an inch deep with mud. I am sure Utah kids do that just like Texas kids do.
We had it to ourselves for the night, with nothing to hear but the river. The place was interesting, but I can’t say we wanted to dally the next day, so we did some writing homework and headed on to the next coffee shop.
No comments:
Post a Comment