PANGUITCH, UTAH
Today I packed everything out of my house in St. George and headed easy for Moab, near Arches National Park. It's a five hour drive through terrain marked with ever-changing mountains and landscapes. And very limited phone service.
To break up the trip (and to add a good hour to the trip), I swung through Panguitch to hike in Red Canyon, a collection of red rock formations along Highway 12 in Utah.
Red Canyon
Red Canyon is beautiful, its red sandstone rock formations reminiscent of those in Bryce Canyon, but spotted with tall pines for a beautiful evergreen color contrast.
I did one loop that covered Birdseye, Pink Ledges, and Golden Wall Trails and an out-and-back called Buckhorn Trail.
Love this shot with the red rock, the green pines, the blue sky, and that balancing rock! Still can't get over how these are formed and how in the world they stay standing!
A bigger-than-life cairn:
Does this trail look up hill? Trust me. It is. :)
Does this trail look downhill? Trust me. It is. :) Hard to make out in this pic, but do you see all the switchbacks zigzagging down the side of the hill? See the angle of the trees, how you are seeing them from the tops down? If you look closely, you can just make out a person in the center of the photo, right where the tree line begins. This is Buckhorn Trail.
Butch Cassidy's Childhood Home
If you're a big fan of the Wild West era and good ol' spaghetti westerns (talking to you, Dad), you will love this stop.
Brianne had suggested this as one of many sites to see in Utah and it worked out perfectly that I passed right by it as I took Highway 89 from Red Canyon to Moab, so I pulled in to check it out.
Butch Cassidy, notorious Wild West outlaw born in 1866, was raised by Mormon pioneer parents. He was the oldest of 13 children and grew up in Utah. The family moved to this particular site when Cassidy was 14; he left home at age 18. It was beautiful, nestled into the foot of a hill with trees growing up around it.
Here's a closer look at the house he lived in. The interior is sparsely decorated with a bed, a cookstove, and a couple kitchen chairs from that period, plus a ladder to a little loft area where I assume a lot of the kids slept. I suspect in reality it was FAR more cramped and cluttered with all the things it takes to keep a large family warm and fed.
The site includes some placards about Cassidy's career in crime. It was interesting, even though it celebrates the life of a criminal!
In other news ...
My car turned over 30,000 miles today. I've now put on more than 4,000 miles in seven weeks!