Hiking Down South

We had the best time on the 19th and 20th of April in the South Central part of Utah!
We've grown to really enjoy hiking since we retired. Using our bodies this way has had it's pluses and minuses. It makes us feel alive, and it's wonderful to be out in the fresh air. But some of the time, our joints and muscles remind us that we're not in our twenties or even thirties any more. We're convinced though, that we want to stay with it, and make up for a lot of lost time on beautiful mountain trails.
We planned on spending the whole week -- first in the Escalante, Utah area, and then over near Moab, Ut. But the weather didn't totally cooperate with us. Rain and cold temperatures encroached into our adventure. We'll have to do Moab another time. We were hoping to get over to Arches National Park -- and hopefully we'll be able to fit it in before it gets too hot this summer. Here are some pictures we took to document our wonderful time in the Capitol Reef National Park, the Calf Creek area near Escalante, Utah and the Khodachrome Basin State Park.




We put "Escalante, Utah" into the navigation system of our car, and we followed "Lexie's" instructions in full faith. She took us a less direct route than we might have gone, had we used a map. We ended up on State Road 24, which took us to the Capitol Reef National Park, a place we'd never seen before. We felt really fortunate to see this fabulous park. Our first hike on the trip was to the Chimney Rock formation.
It was about 3 1/2 miles, and with all the stops we took to take pictures, it took us a couple of hours. There were some pretty good inclines, and we got a work-out!
This is the actual "Chimney Rock" formation. We saw it early on as we hiked, but we weren't sure that it was what we were looking for. So we kept on going, and ended up doing the whole loop.

Here's one of the goofing off pictures we took, as we hiked. : )
The next three pictures are to show you some of the wild life that we enjoyed seeing. I know that you can't see all the German Brown trout in Calf Creek, they are there. Dave found a worm in a muddy area, and threw it into the creek, and there was a great trembling of waters as the fish fought each other to get to the worm.
This isn't a great picture of the deer we saw. . . . there were lots of them tough.
No snakes thank goodness, but we saw lots of these little three to four inch long lizards.

We saw a variety of really interesting plants and flowers.


This little holy shaped leaf was pretty cool. They were little tiny leaves. Kind of a dusty green, with pink stems. It was kind of prickley.
We didn't see much of this "Indian Paintbrush". I think that I know the name of only one wild flower, and this is it.
This cactus was kind of a cool color.

We did the "Calf Creek Trail" to the lower falls back in the 70's and then again in the early 90's. It was fun to hike it again, and see the changes that had taken place. In the 90's, the beavers had cut down a lot of trees, making it more of a marsh, and less of a stream or creek. But the beaver's mess is mostly gone now, and it's back to a lovely, meandering stream.

If you look hard, you can see a German Brown trout.

This was one of the first photo-ops on the Calf Creek Trail.


The water was really cold!
The foliage was so new on the trees, having just come out for the Spring. I love the bright green.

Khodachrome Basin, just south of Cannonville, Utah was the last place we hiked on this adventure.




This small arch was called "Shakespear's Arch". I think we got a good picture of it!
These sandstone pipes were really amazing!


As you can see, we had a really fun time on this adventure! We're so grateful that we have each other at this fun time of our lives!