We set out on Friday the first morning in 2016.  April and I up front, Asher and Pickle in the second row and then the dogs, Plato and Mishi in the back with the gear.  The drive down was gorgeous as it usually is and we were quickly out of the smog of the Wasatch Front.  We got to Arches at about 3 in the afternoon and after a brief stop to stamp the passport and ride the big horn sheep we were off to Landscape Arch.  We picked Landscape because it has us driving through most of the Park and there is a good concentration of great arches with only a short hike.  We didn’t have a lot of time so there we went.  It was cold.  The high for the day was barely above twenty but there was some wind and we had been sedentary all day.

There is something truly magical about red rocks in the snow.  We saw Landscape, Tunnel and Pine Tree arches and even though I have seen them before they looked brand new with their frosting.  It gets dark early in January and so we decided it was time to start looking for somewhere to sleep.  We knew of a place south of Moab and it was deserted when we got there.  We had filled up water at Gearheads on our way out and the bathrooms were open so we had all we needed.

The propane connector for the stove didn’t work, so back into town we went.  Mexican across the street from City Market.  Big portions and strong Jalapeños.  Asher didn’t feel very good and so he sat outside in the 12 degree night to cool off.  Luckily back at camp our sleeping bags were good and we spent a warm night.  Except for April because the zipper is broken on her bag.

Day 2 was Canyonlands.  The kids found a stream while April and I were getting us ready in the morning so we spent some time exploring that.  But then we had to get serious and off we went.  We went to the Island in the Sky District because we wanted an overall experience this time around.  We accepted early on that with the goal of 100 parks in a year we were going to get a wide experience but not necessarily a deep one.  We stopped at the Shafer Trail overlook.  What a great road.  It’s fun to see the levels go down and down.  Then we hiked up to The Upheaval Dome overlook.  What a crazy place.  The kids made a song out of Upheaval Dome in which they sang “Upheaval Dome” over and over.  It was great and not even a little bit annoying.

Our final stop for the day was the Grand Overlook.  I had never been there and it was breathtaking.   The sun was low and so the colors were deep and there was a great level of contrast.  We spent a long time just looking.  There were not many people there so it was easy to get lost in the view.  Back at our campsite we had our stove working and after a hot meal we were out.

Day 3 we played around camp a little more then we were off to Mesa Verde.  The roads on the way up to the mountain were pretty bad when we got there so we looked around the VC and then headed to Hovenweep.  We couldn’t count Mesa Verde so we’re going to hit it again later with some of the other parks we missed in the Four Corners Region.

The road from Mesa Verde to Hovenweep takes you through the Canyon of the Ancients.  I have only been through there one other time and it was dark.  It was fantastic.  Hovenweep itself was amazing.  As with many of the smaller parks you feel very close to the action.  There is a very real sense of intimacy in this Park.  Many of the ruins were worn down to a serious degree and it is a little scary to think how fast some of these and those not in parks could be gone if we don’t start caring for them better.

From Hovenweep we drove to Navajo National Monument.  We arrived late and found the flattest patch of snow.  The dirt was all covered and putting the tent straight on the asphalt sounded really uncomfortable.  I’ll tell ya, camping in January is great.  No bugs, no crowds, not too much dirt and all you have to do is put on ore clothes.  That is a bit of an oversimplification.  Camping in the winter with a family can be very gear intensive and takes quite a bit more forethought.  The consequences can be more serious as well.

We slept a good night.  I always sleep good on a mountain and the kids had overcome the sickness they were feeling.  We had sorted out Aprils bag as well so she was sleeping better as well.  The next morning we began to pack up our stuff.  I took a little walk around the campsite and surrounding area as I often do and began to fall in love with this tiny park up on a mountain.  It was such a simple place.  The focus of the park was straightforward.  It was to help people to develop a relationship with the real world.

So many of the campgrounds we have been to have felt insulated.  It feels like we are being protected from the wild.  Sometimes it feels like, as my dad says, “We are being protected from ourselves.”  It carries with it a deep and sometimes hidden condescension.  I don’t believe it is conscious and I truly hope it is not.  I hope that managers want to make their own lives easier so they put a great deal of effort into making the experience as sanitized as possible.  Navajo didn’t feel that way.  It felt comfortable in an ancient, primal way.  Kind of a reminder that this is how we are supposed to be.  It was wonderful.

Anyway, as we were packing up a couple of puppies wandered into our camp.  They caused serious excitement.  The kids didn’t know what to do.  So they ran around screamed and giggled.  Me being the awesome, clear thinking dad that I am used this opportunity to teach about the awareness you should have in foreign countries around stray animals.  I essentially took a huge wet blanket and threw it on their happiness.  It didn’t last though.  The dogs followed us the rest of the time we were at Navajo and the kids warmed back up to them.

We spent a little time warming up in the VC working on Junior ranger packets and checking out the small but great museum they have there.  After a bit we walked the Sandal trail to look at Betatakin Ruin.  It was fantastic.  Well preserved and intricate.

The puppies followed us and a couple of other visitors down the trail and when we got back to the top and ate lunch the kids played for a while with them.  They asked if we could take them home, we said no, pointing out that we don’t have enough room in the car and that we already have two dogs that we don’t spend enough time with.  They apparently only heard the first part because the next question was if we could ship them home.

Navajo Mountain National Monument was my favorite spot we went to on the trip.  I felt very at home there.  I also loved the fact that all of the rangers and personnel at the park were native Navajo.  It is a gem, hidden away and glorious.  We took the back way out and made our way down off the mountains of New Mexico into the high desert flatlands of Arizona.

Northern Arizona is a pretty amazing place.  coming down Highway 160 and then 89 we dipped into deep washes, cut by streams that are trickles in the winter and torrents in the spring.  over and past flat-topped mesas and through communities that house a messy mix of old and new customs.  We came, rather unexpectedly to Wupatki National Monument.  The Park entrance sign and surroundings were a little underwhelming.  But we picked the first off shoot road and hiked the trail.  It was so much more than we had expected.

The first ruins were maybe fifteen houses or Pueblos perched along the edge of a seasonal stream.  No water to be seen.  The houses were beautifully built and well preserved considering they had been sitting completely unprotected for seven hundred years.  The choice of place to live seemed a little strange.  The nearest water, if the stream was dry, was eleven miles away at the Little Colorado.  Aside from the physical toil it took to bring the water that far, they did it in clay pots.  I imagine more than a couple of these were dropped and the water wasted.  There must have been some compelling reasons to stay in a place like this.  We found a few at the next stop.

We stopped at the VC and got our passport stamped.  Then we walked out the back door and into a city of Pueblos that was breathtaking.  A pueblo with one hundred rooms, built in and around a rock pile along a small ridge.  A ceremonial Kiva bigger than any Kiva I have seen.  A Ballcourt about the same size as the Kiva and then there was The Blowhole.

I have never seen anything like this.  There is a huge under ground cavern with only a small opening at the top.  There seems to be only one opening because when the Barometric pressure changes (which it was, a fairly large storm was coming in and the pressure was dropping) there is a wind either in or out of the hole as the pressure inside and outside equalize.

Since we were there when the pressure was dropping there was a wind coming out like you wouldn’t believe.  It was strong enough to hold our national passport against Asher’s hand (among other things).  We played with it from a long time.  I can only imagine what the early natives thought about something like this.  The interpretive signs didn’t say much but I imagine it had some spiritual significance for them.  In any case, it was one of the coolest things we saw on the trip.

Leaving Wupatki we were going to spend the night in Flagstaff and that meant going through Sunset Crater National Monument.  After the ripples and bubbles of the Colorado Plateau red rock, the clean crisp straight lines of the slopes and the jagged terrain of the floes of Sunset Crater were a surprise.  We wandered through the park and admired the volcanoes and then as day four began to close we headed into Flagstaff.  Some food from Denny’s (April has Celiac and they are good at Gluten-free) and then to the cheapest hotel in town.

I started day 5 about as impatient as I have been on a trip like this.  Today we were going to see the Grand Canyon.  April and I had lived within two hours of The Canyon for several years and had never seen it.  Now it was time and it was hard to wait for anything.  But the night in the hotel had done us good.  We were quite a bit dryer than we were before and the kids had slept well.  They really needed it.

It’s not really that far from Flagstaff to The Grand Canyon.  We knew a storm had been coming in and we were hoping that it would hold off a bit or that it would break a little so we would have a satisfying view of the Canyon.  None of this proved true.  At least not for the first day.  We arrived and went through the usual beginnings at a park.  Stamped the passport and got the Junior ranger packets and went to the bathroom and then we went up the trail from the VC to Mathis Point.

My son is a bit of a history nut when it comes to National parks and he was thrilled that the point was named after Stephen Mathis, the first director of the Park service.  There were far more people than I thought there would be for a rainy January weekday, but there were no crowds.  We should have known then.  No one was pointing at anything, which in a National Park, especially like The Grand Canyon, means there is nothing to point at.

We stepped up to the railing and saw nothing.  Out below us was a sea of clouds that we could not see the other side of.  Visibility down into the canyon was little more than 100 feet and at that range it was no different than any of a hundred red rock canyons I have seen.  It didn’t look like it was going to break before dark fell but we were still hopeful.  We had most of day six as well.  So, disappointed but optimistic, we went to set up camp.

There were maybe six or seven other groups in the campground so we picked a place where we wouldn’t make too much of a bother and set up.  We had gotten better at the tent (it was new to us on this trip) and we got it up quickly but I couldn’t get it straight.  It’s weird to me that I am expressing my frustration about the tent in this blog post but there you have it.  April cooked the most filling and satisfying dinner we had yet and we scavenged for leftover wood in other campsites.  We had set up a tour of the Kolb brothers house for the next morning and so we settled into bed content about our situation.

Emory and Ellsworth Kolb were two brothers who came out from the east and worked for Ralph Cameron for a while.  This made a bad impression on the government representatives working in the area at the time as Cameron was a con artist and a criminal who felt that he owned the entire canyon and the NPS was trying to steal it from him.  Incidentally he saw not hypocrisy in what he had done earlier when he had stolen it from the natives.

Anyway, the Kolb’s built a house that clings (precariously is to tame and cliche of a word for this usage) dangerously on the rim of the Grand Canyon at the head of the Bright Angel Trail.  They were the primary photographers for the area for many years and their house contains their darkroom, theater and a maze of living quarters.  But more on them at a later time.  We toured the house and then made our way over to the lookout house.  Most of the other places we wanted to see were closed because of the snow.

The lookout house is exactly what you would imagine it would be from the name.  Perched on the edge of the canyon with an entire wall of windows it is an incredible place to view the Grand Canyon.  Only, there was still nothing to view.  We listened to a ranger talk about the Geography of the Canon and a few minutes later it began to happen.

We walked along the rim trail for a little bit and then the clouds began to break.  it didn’t happen all at once, as you would like it to, and it never cleared completely.  We never saw the North Rim.  But it did clear and I’ll tell you what.  Catching the glimpses that we did through the clouds was about as magical a site as I have ever seen.  We ran jumped around and pointed with people from a dozen different countries like we were on a whale watching tour.  It would start to break and everyone would point and look for a little while and then it would close again and we would spend the next couple of minutes patting each other on the back congratulating ourselves for seeing the Grand Canyon for ninety seconds.

We had wrapped up the tent after the Kolb tour and so when we had worn out our picture taking fingers we decided it was time to head back to Utah.  We had two more on our list for this trip and we had a bit of a drive to get to them.  My Grandparents have a Condo in St. George and so we headed through Las Vegas and then up back to Utah so we could hit Zion and Bryce the next day.

Waking up at the condo was nice.  Our tent and bags were pretty wet from the storm at Grand Canyon and it had soaked through the tarp on the drive.  We didn’t stress it too much because we knew that we only had one night left and we didn’t need the camping gear.   The problem was comfort can make you very lazy and it took us a little longer than it should have to get out and on the road.  Also, there is a great restaurant there that has a solid gluten-free menu and April had to try their pancakes.  So it was about lunch time when we got to Zion National Park.  Again it was frosted in snow and gorgeous.  April and I have been to Zion so many times.  We have traveled quite a bit in the backcountry there and this time we thought we would spend some time on the main drag.  Especially since in the winter you can drive up to the end of the canyon.

The White Throne and the Court of the Patriarchs were beautiful.  We parked at the Temple of Sinawava.  I have been there one other time in the snow and it was amazing then and it was this time as well.  Feathers of snow fell from the cliffs.  Water dripped from the trees and rocks and the Virgin river rumbled happily out of the Narrows.  We hiked for a little while up the trail that follows the river.  WE made a Dragon out of some snow on the fence.  Pickle and April made a snowman, Asher made huge snowboulders and threw them in the river and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.  We spent enough time at Zion that we didn’t really have time for Bryce.  We’ll have to go back there too.

In seven days we saw eight National Parks and Monuments.  Asher and Pickle were exhausted and their minds were reeling from the exposure to so much greatness.  We decided long ago that we were going to Homeschool our kids.  I know that we are making some mistakes and that we will make some more as we go but I can say that this was an unmitigated success.  Here, now, two months afterwards all of us are still digesting the lessons we learned on the trip.  We also are discovering new truths all the time.  It is impossible to quantify the growth from a trip like this.  Anyone who claims that Homeschooled children are socially maladjusted are either ignoring reality or deluding themselves.