Utah’s ‘Mighty 5’

Hello there friends. Let me tell you about our week and a half in Utah:

• Southern Utah boasts some of America’s best and most unique scenery, with 5 cracking National Parks and a bunch more National Monuments and state parks all within a few hundred miles drive of each other. The Parks are branded as ‘Utah’s Mighty 5’: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches, and Canyonlands. All feature the state’s distinctive red rocks, but they each offer a quite different experience.

Very civilised apres-hike beers and snacks

• Zion is one of the best known and most popular parks in the States, and feels slightly Disney-fied, in a nice way. It’s served by the lovely little town of Springdale, with lots of great accommodation and food, and there’s a decent coffee shop and brewpub right by the park entrance. There’s only one main road through the valley, and driving is mostly prohibited, with a very efficient shuttle service taking you up and down. It’s so civilised you can buy a draught beer at the end of your hike from the kiosk at the park lodge.

• That said, Zion’s two most famous attractions are anything but tame: the Narrows is a full day or longer hiking down the Virgin River between towering canyon walls (and was off limits when we were there due to the river being too high and rough); and Angel’s Landing is 4-hour slog up a vertiginous peak. Neither are remotely suitable for kids, which saved us the need to figure out if we were brave enough.

• The scenery in Zion is stunning, with the grand red walls of the canyon looming above you on either side throughout the park. There are some great family-friendly hikes along the river and to waterfalls. We heard a couple of massive thunderclaps on one walk, but there was no storm in sight: “oh, it’s just another rockfall”, said a fellow hiker.

• Zion is about 3500 feet above sea level, and as you drive a couple of hours northeast to Bryce Canyon you reach 8000 feet, with an accompanying big drop in temperature. After really nice early 20s weather in Zion (and only a few days after 37 in Death Valley), it dropped to 1 degree C in mid-afternoon at Bryce, and we got snowed on.

Hoodoo? We do!

• Bryce is the opposite of Zion orientation-wise: in Zion you’re in the valley floor looking up; in Bryce you’re along the top of the cliff looking down into the ampitheatre. The main attraction is the amazing collection of ‘hoodoos’: oddly shaped columns of orangey-red rock, which are apparently sometimes called ‘fairy chimneys’ or ‘earth pyramids’, the latter presumably by people unfamiliar with the basic shape of a pyramid. There are some great hikes down into the ampitheatre, but none that seemed like a good idea with kids and in the snow.

Take a hike

• Capitol Reef is the least famous of the ‘Mighty 5’, but it's an underrated gem. It’s a fascinating mix of craggy cliffs and gorgeous gorges, tan sandstone domes and vermillion dirt. We only had an afternoon in the park, but squeezed in a great hike through Capitol Gorge down a long-dry riverbed.

• Arches and Canyonlands are towards the eastern border of the state, and both are served by the town of Moab, a fun little burg that’s one-third hippy, two-thirds outdoor-adventure-bro, and framed by the towering red cliffs of Arches, and the distant and snowy La Sal mountain range. The area has countless off-road tracks, and is very popular with ATV junkies, a good number of whom seem to like to fly large MAGA flags from their vehicles.

As seen by our washing machine

• Arches does what it says on the tin, with over 2,000 rock arches amongst a load of other kooky rock formations. The hikes are hot: it’s basically bare desert with big old blobs of rock jutting up here and there, which means next to no shade. We trekked out to Landscape Arch for a good dose of CKANP exercise. The arches are sandstone eroded by water, ice, and wind, and all will eventually collapse or break apart: a massive chunk of Landscape Arch fell off in the early 90s, giving a bunch of picnickers one heck of a fright. We also hiked to check out Delicate Arch, as featured on every Utah numberplate, and Double Arch, as featured on the WPA poster hanging in our laundry at home.

• Mo is officially an Arches Junior Ranger, which she celebrated by crawling like a lizard half the way back from Double Arch.

Hmm what shall we call this arch on a mesa?

• Canyonlands offers something different still. The park has three discrete sections; we visited the most accessible one, Island in the Sky, a huge mesa towering above the Colorado and Green rivers. Its most famous feature is Mesa Arch, a small arch perched on the edge of the mesa, framing both the red valley below and the distant mountains.

• There’s a heap of great (and excellently named) National Monuments and state parks that we didn’t get to: Grand Staircase-Escalante, Kodachrome Basin, Goblin Valley, Dead Horse Point. They were on the spreadsheet, but we’re learning that we just can’t fit everything in while trying to keep all members of the travelling party from losing the plot. Next time I plan a once-in-a-lifetime trip with small children, I’ll try and do less stuff.

• We’ve all been a bit sick, which I put down to all the crazy temperature changes (the average mid-afternoon temp across the Mighty Five has been: 23; 4; 17; 30; 24), as well as lots of in and out of air-conditioning, plus the general grossness of Vegas. Kitty is also teething, so we’ve had a few nights that haven’t gone very well.

• Nude babies crawling cutely on the bed: it’s all fun and games until someone’s duvet gets peed on.

• One first world problem of full-time camping is that all your clothes get shrunk in campground dryers (most parks prohibit clotheslines for aesthetic purposes). This adds an extra element of complexity to the hiking vs beer and burgers ratio that I’m trying to balance. I used to wear too-small t-shirts as a matter of course in my youth, but the ‘I shop in the children’s section’ look is even less becoming as you approach 40.

A few moments from recent weeks that get filed under ‘Classic Dave’:

Spearheading next winter's poncho revival

• Going swimming with the truck keys in my togs’ pocket (I have priors for this kind of thing). Luckily, the battery dried out overnight and we can still open the truck.

• Forgetting Mo’s and my raincoats on the trip to Bryce, where it promptly started snowing. Thankfully the park general store had some dorky ponchos for sale.

• The caravan is small and has lots of cupboards which I leave open: I have hit my head on them about 173 times so far. A list of other things I have banged my head on: the caravan door; the caravan awning rods; a very large and solid cactus (which drew blood).

BEERWATCH: Utah still carries a heavy Mormon influence, including some of the strictest liquor laws in the country. Apart from state-run liquor stores, and bars and restaurants with a special licence, the only alcohol other retailers can sell is 4% beer. They also have a really weird rule called the ‘Zion curtain’, which means patrons aren’t allowed to see their drink being prepared, apparently to avoid punters getting all frothy and wanting to drink more.

Utah doesn’t have as big a craft scene as the West Coast or its suds-loving neighbour Colorado, but the 4% rule means those who are here have got quite good at brewing session beers that still have a bit of character, which has actually been quite nice after the typically over-boozy and over-hopped beers the US craft scene often favours.

Wasatch Brewery’s ‘Polygamy Porter’ gets a bonus point for a great name, but misses out on the bronze on a graphic design tiebreak to Uinta’s ‘Hoodoos’ Kolsch. Tight race for the top, with two really flavourful-for-4% drops: silver to Moab Brewery’s ‘Johnny’s American IPA’, and gold to Squatters’ Brewery ‘Full Suspension’ Pale Ale, which is a great example of the type of APA that NZ laps up.

MOMO’S PLAYGROUND REVIEWS: The Moab Valley RV Park scored very highly on both the pool and playground, but was narrowly pipped by the Cannonville KoA, whose loose nautical theme was embraced by pirate-in-training Mo.

SUPERMARKET SWEEP: I had a romantic vision of small-town American grocery stores being full of fresh local produce displayed with charm and whimsy, Nope, or at least not in tiny towns in the desert where not much grows. Just multipacks of Kraft Mac’N’Cheese and sad-looking processed meat patties with suspiciously long use-by dates.