Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Between Here and There

One of the big surprises we’ve experienced on this trip has been the incredible scenery BETWEEN our planned destinations, particularly in Utah.

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State Highway 12 runs between Capitol Reef National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park, and according the the Utah travel website, it’s one of the most scenic highways in the country and was designated (I’m not sure by whom) America’s Highway in 2002.

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Highway 12 (if you can call a two lane, narrow, winding road a highway) runs through Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument, and here’s what Utah thinks about it.

“The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, at 1.7 million acres, dominates any map of southern Utah. It is unique in that it is the first monument to be administered by the Bureau of Land Management, rather than the National Park Service.

DSC_0070The monument is a geologic sampler, with a huge variety of formations, features, and world-class paleontological sites. The Grand Staircase is a geological formation spanning eons of time and is a territory of multicolored cliffs, plateaus, mesas, buttes, pinnacles, and canyons.”

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We generally don’t stop to take pictures when we’re pulling the trailer, but the BLM was kind enough to provide large parking areas at designated View Points, so we were able to stop.

As I’ve mentioned before, the landscape here is impossible to appreciate in a photograph. But this is another place where each time we went around a curve Penny and I each said “WOW.”

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