Our Utah Adventure
Hoodoo’s of Little Egypt
As is often the case, my web site takes a back seat to many of the other projects that I have going on. I must admit that tending to the Art by the Sea Gallery’s web site has taken more attention than this one. That being the case, it’s time to make an entry and briefly discuss our recent trip to Kanab to see my youngest brother who had recently moved there. This was our first venture out since a visit to our son and family in early March, 2020 before everything got shut down. This was a driving trip and early on I seriously considered renting a trailer for the journey but the more I thought about it, that seemed a bad idea so we went with staying in hotels and eating in restaurants, a lot more practical idea that allowed for greater driving distance per day.
The goal was for the middle brother as well as Susanna and I to meet in Kanab Utah for several days to visit the youngest brother. I had never been to Kanab, Utah, that I can remember. It’s possible that Scott, my middle brother and I drove through there in 1992 when we were moving our parents from Sierra Vista AZ to Seattle as we did drive through Zion NP but that was so long ago, that I have no memory other than driving through Zion and having the traffic stopped for us to drive through the Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel. In any case Kanab was quite a surprise and a very nice small town. Seriously, I should not have been that surprised as there is an amazing amount of natural beauty and parks that surround Kanab to make it an important hub for ones adventures. There is Zion NP to the West, the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to the South, Lake Powell, Vermillion Cliffs and the Wave to the East, Brice to the North and an amazing amount of hoodoo’s and natural wonders all around the area.
One of the places that we all visited together were the House Rock Clay beds down House Rock road, a little south of the Wave parking area. The clay beds consisted of two groups, north and south. We just visited the north ones. They are an amazing concentration of multicolored clay formed from erosion and are suppose to be a part of chinle formation. We spent a couple hours here wondering around looking at the various formations. Pretty amazing, but I ended up seeing quite a few of these type of formations at the base of a lot of mesas in the general southwest Utah area.
We stayed about 4 plus days in Kanab and then started our journey back to Portland. But I wanted to spend some time in Hanksville to the north and East of Kanab. Hanksville proved to be another wonder, a very small town but surrounded by more amazing places. To the West was Capital Reefs National Park, to the north, Goblin Valley State Park, (the primary reason for the visit here) and another place I learned about, Little Egypt with its hoodoo’s.
Goblin Valley State Part, evening
Little Egypt, early morning
All the discovery of what Southern Utah has to offer made me wish I was younger and had to energy for the many backpacking places to hike into and photograph, like the Wahweap Creek hoodoo’s (https://www.thewave.info/TowerofSilence/Tower%20of%20Silence/index.html) and the Cathedral Loop road in Capital Reefs National park. But time was short and we needed to get back on the road with two long days driving through Nevada and souther Oregon till we arrived in Sister’s for a couple of days relaxation at the Five Pines Hotel. A wonderful trip and maybe I will have a chance to get back in the fall to experience driving Highway 12, reported to be one of the most scenic Byways in the US.
You can see more of my images at my Fickr link at the top of this page. But before leaving I will post one last image that was fun, a derelict cement truck that must have gotten stuck in the clay soil and got abandoned.
