Megan’s Take
We said goodbye to Capitol Reef National Park this morning and headed to Moab UT. En route, we stopped at Goblin Valley State Park. The valley is covered in sandstone goblins and formations (or “castles” according to Emilia and Emmett) which the kids had an absolute blast exploring.
It was as fun for them as the best playground you can imagine. Emilia is getting very confident with her body climbing and was going full steam ahead, and Emmett followed her up, down, and all around the different paths. There is no set trail, so the kids were free to explore all over.
After that adventure, we traveled onwards to Spanish Trail RV Park in Moab. It was close to 100 degrees here this afternoon – not my favorite. Our challenge will be to shift to an earlier schedule to get out in the morning since afternoon outdoor activities are not so enjoyable. Tonight, however, Emilia is driving us crazy with not staying in her bunk. She continually climbs into Emmett’s bunk to visit with him which is partly sweet but also crazy-making. Early bedtimes are really hard together in the camper, especially when the sun is still shining outside.
Phil’s Take
The trip out of Capitol Reef National Park was beautiful, but it quickly turned into a barren wasteland (still beautiful).
The landscape toward Goblin Valley State Park turned much flatter, except for right where the park was. There were still some features in the land, but it was pretty flat. Here’s a nice rock formation along the road.
Here’s a panorama looking out the other side of the road.
You can barely make out some cliffs in the distance. Goblin Valley State Park lies at the edge of those cliffs several miles down the road. When we got closer, it started looking a lot like the back side of Capitol Reef’s Waterpocket Fold.
Once we reached the parking area which overlooked the valley, you could immediately see why this place was special.
While the kids were discovering the castles, I climbed a hill in the middle and got an awesome 360 view of most of the valley.
I was drawn to that dome in the middle of the adjacent valley between two cliffs that looked completely out of place. It was a totally different kind of rock than everything else, even down to the color.
From that spot, I could get a very nice view of the more enclosed valley between those two ridges.
The formations in this park are awesome. It did remind me a lot of the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon National Park. It’s almost as if it was the same kind of erosion, but much shallower so that you could get closer. The features were also much more rounded, like the rock was a bit softer.
I really love that the kids are learning to use their imaginations and turn a place like this into a giant playground.
One other thing that struck me about this place is how incredibly barren it is. You could easily make the argument for the rock formations, because it’s bare rock and hard for anything to grow, but this panorama from an open area shows that there is very, very little vegitation anywhere here.
It turns out that this is a theme in this area. The further east we headed, the more barren everything looked, at least until we got close to Moab.
What vegitation there is looked brown and dead. There’s no wonder why they call the main river in the area the Green River. It’s the only place you see green. Just up the rock faces and it turns lifeless.
As we got within 10 miles of Moab, the landscape started to look a bit more familiar. These cliffs looked similar to Capitol Reef National Park, though not as tall.
I’m looking forward to seeing Arches National Park in the morning.
Here’s the gallery of all of the pictures from today.
