Long road trip. Short hike.
Many of our friends are teachers so if we want to adventure with them we usually have to wait for summer or in this case spring break. We decided to embark on a 4 day, 38 mile backpacking trip to Paria Canyon which crosses through Utah and Arizona.
One of the best things about Paria (other than it’s remote and beautiful) is that you can bring your dog (off leash)! So that meant a tacking on a road trip from Chicago to Utah but it also meant we could travel around to visit a few national parks as well.
But Franklin, our dog, maybe had too much fun, too fast. Here’s a quick video about what happened to him.
You now know the untimely demise of our trip but this is how we got there.
We set out on a lovely day in March with our first stop at our local dog park since we had a lot of hours of sitting in the car ahead of us. We made a lot of stops along the way to make it fun but it still was a lot of driving. I used roadtrippers.com to plan our trip and loved it. On day one we stopped at:
– The Iowa 80 Truck Stop “World’s Largest truck stop”
– Thornberry dog park in Iowa (we went to a lot of dog parks)
– Monument to the First Train Robbery in the West
– A giant Volkswagen Beetle Spider (Iowa you’re a little weird)
– We meant to stop at Holy Family Shrine but missed the exit and only saw it from the road, it looked awesome
Road trip day 2 started at Fort Cody Trading Post but we also made stops at Bighorn Park Off Leash Dog Park and some Giant Soda Cans. Not nearly as many official stops as the day before but we stopped at some random quick hikes around Colorado (because they are everywhere) and pull offs in Utah, I couldn’t tell you where we were but no matter where we were it was lovely.
We made it to our first real destination on March 25th. Bryce Canyon was our first stop. There aren’t too many places where you can bring a dog at most National parks so we covered Bryce Canyon and Zion in one day. If you don’t have a dog with you give these parks the time they deserve, Bryce Canyon is my personal favorite.
Next we picked up our backcountry permits in the lovely city of Kanab, checked into our hotel and packed up our bags!
Hike day one where our small tragedy began. We met up with our hiking buddies at Lees Ferry campground (where we were meant to end our hike) and after picking them up we drove to White House trailhead to begin! I did quite a bit of research on the best path for us and decided to follow this awesome blogger’s plan (yay for other people doing the legwork!)
Everything was so beautiful and we really loved every minute. Franklin (our dog) just ran and ran and was so happy. Once we made camp we noticed that he was acting really strange and though he normally holds his tail up he was unable to lift it. He also wouldn’t poop because he couldn’t hold his tail up so that’s when we got really nervous.
We decided to wait for morning to see if we could go on but he was having the same problem in the morning so we made the hard choice to go back. We just didn’t know what happened; it turned out to be a sprained tail that just needed to heal on its own but we didn’t want to chance it in the backcountry. We hiked back and then scrambled to find a place to stay for the next 2 nights.
We ended up finding an Airbnb where Franklin could recover for a full day and then headed to Lake Powell for some much lighter hiking.
Since we lost some good hiking time we found some other gems to visit including a, most hidden, trail used by bikers that is on the back side of Zion National Park, a Dessert Botanic Garden, and the well known Horseshoe Bend.
We weren’t quite ready to head back to Chicago so our last major stop was to the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is not my favorite place. It’s fine, some people love it, I just don’t. Maybe it’s the crowds or how tourist-y it’s become but it’s never been a go to place for me; I’d seen it before and wasn’t a fan then either but everyone should see it once.
Our road trip home was through Route 66 so you know we made a lot more stops including:
– The World’s Largest Petrified Tree
– Petrified Forest National Park (an out of this world place with blue and purple sands
– The continental divide
– A giant red arrow
– Cadillac Ranch (super cool)
– VW Slug Bug Ranch (super creepy)
– Britten Leaning Water Tower
– The Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ (it’s huge)
– Wind Turbine Blade Display
– Oklahoma City National Monument
– POPS Soda Ranch
– The World’s Largest Praying Hands
– The Golden Driller
– Blue Whale of Catoosa
– Laumeier Sculpture Park & Museum
– Railsplitter Covered Wagon (giant Lincoln)
– Paul Bunyon Statue
There were a lot of giant things to look at.
A+B 