canyonlands

This is the first of 3 trip reports I'll be posting from my trip into The Maze over Memorial Weekend. Check out the other trip reports from this trip: Part 2: Shot Canyon to Pictograph Fork Part 3: The Maze Overlook and Jasper Ridge This trip was a long, long time in the making. I actually...

On Sunday, May 6, my wife Jo and I picked up ladigue_99 (henceforth known as Ladigue) at the Albuquerque airport. She was arriving from Italy for a two-week journey through the southwest. Jo accompanied us for the first leg of the trip, to White Sands, and then departed for her own adventure in...

Sunday, May 6, 2012 The Original Trip Report on ADVENTR.CO After a nice night sleeping along Indian Creek, I was awake again the break of dawn and having some breakfast. I packed up camp and then headed back into The Needles for another day of exploring. I was soon driving the rough road...

Saturday, May 5, 2012 The Original Trip Report on ADVENTR.CO On Saturday morning I set out early to drive down to The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. One of my goals for 2012 was to spend more time hiking and exploring in this amazing area. Unfortunately, because of...

Arches and Canyonlands , June 2011 Day 1 Like every year I need to spent a few days in the Moab area and do some hiking and exploring. Even though I've done most of the popular trails several times, it is always a lot of fun and each year is different and offers something new to me. This...

After spending months working a class for work I finally finished and had some time to get out with my family. We left Ogden on Saturday morning March 31st and headed to Moab. After checking into our hotel we drove to Canyonlands National Park for our first hike of the trip. My wife and two...

my friend Stephen and I left Friday morning around 8 am. We arrived at the horseshoe canyon trail head around 2 pm. We immediately hit the trail. On the way down we saw one really nicely preserved dinosaur track. To my knowledge there are 4 pictograph panels in the canyon we stopped at each and...

Finally made it down to the desert for a trip other than work! This being the first canyoneering trip of the year we decided to make it a fairly non-technical one. We decided upon Three and Moonshine the first day, and Blue John the second. We drove down Friday afternoon, getting stuck in the...

The Needles District of Canyonlands are one of my favorite places to go. If your in a car you can only enjoy part of it, but in a 4×4 you can see so much more, along with on foot and all the water you can carry. I have backpacked in here a couple of times, but always on the same trail. So many...

Every year we make at least one winter trip to Moab during the off season. Hotels are cheap and the trails are typically empty aside from the few people willing to deal with a bit of cold weather. For our 2012 trip we got an early start Saturday morning and drove out to Island in the Sky . We...

Alene and I needed to get out of town for a night (cabin fever) so we decided to head down to the southern desert and visit a place I've never been before and Alene had not been since her archaeology field school in 2001. Despite many warnings about the weather from everyone we knew that was...

The Maze and the Mesa | Day 4 Tuesday, April 12, 2011 On our forth day Under the Ledge, we awoke to an awesome sunrise. The colors in the sky were just amazing! I quickly hopped out of my tent and grabed my camera for a photo. When I got my shot composed, I realized that I had taken the...

The Maze and the Mesa | Day 3 Monday, April 11, 2011 During our second night camping at Chimney Rock there was much less wind, and I ended up sleeping a lot better. When we woke up in the morning it was also a bit warmer and the wind had completely disappeared. The first thing I did was grab...

Exploring Horse Canyon, June 2010 My husband and I decided spontaneously to spend a day in Needles District and explore Horse Canyon. We've been to Lavender Canyon before and Horse Canyon always caught our attention. And we also wanted to see what we could do with our rental Jeep Rubicon, so...

The Maze and the Mesa | Day 0: Change of Plans? Friday, April 8, 2011 As you might have seen in this post before I left on this trip, there was some real concern about the government shutting down and closing Canyonlands National Park. The night before I was set to leave, I stayed up to see...

November 2010 I thought my trip south last weekend was going to be my last for a while. I was wrong. Bill and I put together a quick trip to the Moab area this past weekend. It was really an excellent trip. We made it into Arches a little late on Saturday due to getting a flat tire outside of...

October 2011 I've been going on a fair amount of canyoneering trips lately so it seemed appropriate to knock one off the list I've always wanted to do; Blue John Canyon. Blue John is famous because it is the place where Aron Ralston became pinned under a boulder and subsequently self-amputated...

It was time to get away from the daily hustle and head down to Moab where it was 5-10 degrees warmer and a whole lot sunnier. Our plan was to head down early Saturday morning but I got really sick the day before and was hoping I'd sleep it off, but to my dismay, I was not able to get up early...

September 2011 Ahhhh, September. After getting my fill of the mountains, I was itching to get back to the desert and do some good old-fashioned car camping. Long nights, campfires, good food and good friends. How can you go wrong? For this trip we decided to up the ante a bit from the usual...

Greetings again, and welcome to the third episode of the Great Western Expedition of 2011. Today, we head for The Maze. We have a framed map of Canyonlands hanging on the angled ceiling above our bed. It's been there ten years. That's how long I've been looking at the area called The Land of...