Capitol Reef

Our first trip of the year!! This past weekend we enjoyed taking a trip to Capitol Reef. It was a nice weekend. It was pretty cold the first night and our heater in our trailer wasn't working. But we still had the shelter from the wind and once we got all cozy in our sleeping bags it wasn't too bad. The weather forecast was to have snow our first day. It was cool enough that we had to wear jackets the entire weekend, but there was no snow and very little rain.  We stayed in Fruita.

Our first day: After we arrived and got all set up and ate dinner, we went for a walk through Grand Wash.

This particular rock in the picture above looked like a turtle to us.  At least from this angle.  When you walk around the other side it looked nothing like a turtle.

The next day we went on a few more hikes.  We visited the old Fruita schoolhouse.

Saw some petroglyphs and went to the Hickman Bridge.  This bridge was pretty cool to see.

After the bridge we decided to go out of the park so the boys could do some shooting. We went along the Old Notom road and found a nice spot. It was here that Bryan shot a couple of unopened cans of Dr. Pepper. The first can shot the top clean off and it landed back behind the truck.It tore those cans to shred.

After that, we decided to drive to a town not too far and buy some ice for the cooler.  When we got to the place that the map said there should be a town, we found nothing.  So we drove to another town that was located on the map and still found nothing.  There were a few houses, but no little market or anything.  So we ended up going back towards Torrey where we knew there was a gas station.  The sign said open, but it was locked.  By now we are so frustrated because our day has gotten longer and the kids are hungry and now the wind is blowing extremely hard and cold.  Just behind the gas station was a motel.  We drove to that and one of the workers came down and opened the store so we could buy our ice.  Now that we have our ice, we headed back to our campsite and built our bonfire for the night.  We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows.  This was the something the kids were looking forward to the entire trip.

The third day:  We had planned to take a nice long drive through the Cathedral Valley.  This was a 58 mile loop which began at the Fremont River.  We had to drive through the river for a short bit to get to the trail.  This was of course, one of the main highlights for Bryan.  We saw lots of neat rocks and had some nice hikes that took us to the top to look out over the valley.  One of the main highlights was the temples of the sun, moon, and stars.

The last picture above is the Gypsum sinkhole.  This sinkhole is 200 feet deep and 50 feet across.  Pretty neat hole.

We also found a spot outside of the park to shoot some more.  It was here that Daniel got to shoot a milk jug full of water.  He was pretty shocked that he actually hit it on the second shot.

We have really enjoyed being able to have a vehicle that can take us to places that are just not possible to get to on foot.  The truck got extremely dirty which makes Bryan very happy. Daniel says the best part of the weekend was when we went shooting.