Memorial Weekend...Day 3

Day 2's post left off with pancakes in Dixie National Forest, the morning of day 3. Here comes the rest of the day, starting with the drive through Dixie:

This is Posey Lake, an adorable little lake tucked in valley in the middle of Dixie National Forest. We took a walk around the lake, and Kona gave Sam a thank you kiss! She had so much fun!

The road to Escalante, UT - AKA Little Death Hollow...WTF. What a horrible name, right? Don't worry, we came out unscathed. 

Yummy lunch - "Escalante Tapas". When we camp, we treat ourselves to good food at restaurants that probably don't appreciate us coming in looking all dirty and gross. But we appreciate some good food!

We drove out of Escalante down highway 12 towards Henrieville - to see this:

This is a slot canyon, just outside of Henrieville, UT. To access it, you must hike along the rim to the end where the walls are about 4-5 feet tall, there, you can jump in (there's no flowing water) and hike through the canyon - the entire hike is a couple miles long, but we ran into a hiccup that prevented us from seeing much more than the mouth of the canyon.....

In the pictures above, the first one is the rim of the canyon, the second one is actually a bridge that was built across the canyon by shoving a few cars into a narrow spot and compacting it with dirt....you can actually see some car parts in the picture... though it's hard to tell what you're looking at...sorry. The third picture is also taken from the rim looking down, those little dots in the middle are hikers! 

So, the hiccup that we encountered happened here, at the first  drop off - it was about 8-9 feet of rock that you had to climb down - easy for us, but Kona said "Oh, HELL NO! - I'm not going down there, are ya nuts!?" And promptly removed herself from her collar while we tried to coax her to jump down. It would have been an easy jump, wasn't like we were asking her to parachute with no chute! But alas, Sam and I took turns climbing in, taking some pictures on the auto-timer, and we hiked back to the car.

That's me attempting to show you that I could touch both walls of the canyon - again, auto timer picture with the camera sitting on a rock - hence the bad lighting.

Kona, in all her stubbornness, decided time was better spent lying under a cool rock.

And that concludes the Henrieville slot canyon.

Moving on. Next stop, Bryce Canyon. It was literally right around the corner. 

The wonky rock formations are affectionatley known as "HooDoos".... though I'm not sure why. However, we did pick up a 6 pack of HooDoo beer from a brewery out of Salt Lake that was delish.... Random side note. 

Bryce Canyon is phenomenal, really cool place, but it's a complete tourist trap... so we went to some scenic viewpoints, took the necessary pictures, and headed back down to Henrieville where we caught the Cottonwood Canyon Road to Grovsners Arch.

Cottonwood Canyon Road is slightly famous road for off-roaders - when it rain it can be 100% impassable due to wash outs - it's a very sandy kind of road. The road runs from Cannonville,UT to Highway 89 - near Page, AZ. It's 47 miles long and had some awesome views, and a side road leading to Grovsner Arch.

 

From the arch, we found a camp spot for the last night of the trip:

Picture overload? Sorry about that. Lot's of cool things to see on day 3. One more day to go, with equally as cool places. 

Happy Friday everyone! 

Tomorrow Sam and I are hitting up the Flagstaff Extreme course. a high-ropes course here in town, with our friends Bethany and Chad.

I'll try to get day 4 done by Monday!