Back in 2014 when Kurt and I chose our wedding date, I didn’t really think about the fact that it fell so close to my birthday—at the time, we were working with the availability of our venue, a camping/canoeing outfitter. But as our first milestone anniversary approached, I realized the power of this compact block of time. What manager can say no to two weeks off so I could celebrate two occasions in one? Two weeks away is amazing. It’s restorative. It’s long enough to actually forget all of your login passwords. It’s an amazing gift (but also, everyone deserves paid time off and should be able to take it.)
For our tenth anniversary (and my forty-fifth birthday), I wanted to plan our favorite kind of trip, a camping/hiking road trip. Whenever Kurt and I chat with other travelers in national parks, Utah always come up amongst people’s favorite destination. “You have to see Utah, it’s the best,” we’d been told by multiple retirees in enormous RVs in various trailhead parking lots, and I pay attention because my greatest dream is to be retired (my other dream is to work on the ranch from Hey Dude).
The Utah National Parks are among the most popular and widely visited in the country. There is something magical about the Southwest; perhaps as Americans we’re spellbound by our own Wild West mythology. A high desert where outlaws like the Wild Bunch hid in the canyons, later populated by the early Mormons seeking the freedom to practice polygamy—talk about a place with a story or two to tell. I liked the idea of a wide variety of hikes so I could choose my own adventure based on how my body feels (I’m almost a year out from discovering a labral tear in my right hip, and continue my physical therapy routine at home).
Here is our itinerary:
Day 1: arrive in Las Vegas/spend my birthday on Fremont Street
Day 2: pick up the camper van and drive to Utah
Days 3-4: Zion National Park, dispersed camp at the Zion Wright Ranch Eco-Camp
Days 5-6: Bryce Canyon National Park, camp at Sunset Campground, take Highway 12 to disperse camp just outside of Capitol Reef
Day 7: Capitol Reef National Park, one night of Airbnb in Torrey to do laundry and shower
Day 8: Goblin Valley State Park and Little Wild Horse Canyon, dispersed camp
Day 9: Arches National Park (timed entry reservation required), dispersed camp outside Moab
Days 10: Canyon Lands National Park: Islands in the Sky district, camp in Creek Pasture Campground (BLM)
Day 11: Canyon Lands: the Needles District, camp in Creek Pasture Campground (BLM)
Day 12: Bears Ears National Monument, Valley of the Gods, and Monument Valley/stay in reserved campsite at the View
Day 13: Under Canvas Zion glamping for our anniversary
Day 14: return van in Las Vegas/spend the night on the Strip
Day 15: fly home
Las Vegas
On the morning of my birthday, we arrived at O’Hare for our 9 a.m. flight. I settled in at our gate full of good vibes, then promptly dropped a full piping-hot 20 oz. black coffee that splashed over my pants and luggage. “Vacation is ruined,” I joked to Kurt as I mopped up the mess with napkins, resigned to the fact that for the next two weeks my daypack would smell like stale Pike Place Roast.
On many of our camping road trips, it is necessary to spend a buffer first day in a city before picking up our reserved camper van. For my Vegas birthday, I chose a few things that I love: a visit to Meow Wolf Omega Mart1 and karaoke at Cat’s Meow. In true Vegas fashion, everyone in the club was either celebrating: a birthday, bachelor/bachelorette party, wedding, and one divorce. I was pulled onstage for a birthday jello shot contest which I won, a victory for the Olds!
In the morning, I woke up feeling every one of my forty-five years and every beer that I’ve ever drank. We reanimated our walking corpses with coffee, pancakes, and bacon, then took a Lyft twenty minutes away from the Strip to pick up our rental van. Our road trip was officially beginning! We were assigned a camper named Drew.
The first day of a road trip typically involves a lot of errands: buying groceries for breakfasts and dinners at camp and snacks for the trail, buying alcohol in Nevada before crossing into the wild weird world of Utah’s liquor laws, then burning a bunch of miles until finally reaching our destination, a Hipcamp spot just outside of Zion National Park.
It felt incredible to get back into a camper van (minus the Vegas hangover). Last year while my hip tear was flaring up, the thought of traveling felt like a lifetime away, so embarking on this road trip was a marker of how far I’d come in my recovery. Living in the tight confines of a van can feel like the scene in Entrapment where Catherine Zeta-Jones crawls sexily below lasers, but you’re instead contorting your spine over a pile of dirty socks to reach the wet wipes in the back so you can clean your butt. But also! we’d get to peek out our blackout curtains directly at the stars, roll down our windows to the scent of junipers and pinyon pines, listen to the coyotes howl at the moon, and watch sunrises from bed.
Zion National Park
People love Zion, to the tune of nearly 5 million annual visitors. If you don’t reach the Visitors Center by 8 a.m., the parking lots will be full and you’ll need to leave your vehicle in town and take a shuttle. Once you’re in the park, you must take a shuttle to reach any trailheads and destinations along the seven-mile-long scenic road. For a national park, you’re gonna spend the day squished next to quite a lot of people.
All that said, seeing Zion for the first time is a jaw-dropper. The canyon walls stretch 2,000 feet tall, red rock against blue sky, silhouettes of birds circle above that might either be hawks or endangered California condors. As the sun passes overhead and filters down to the riverbed, it turns the valley from a chiaroscuro painting to a renaissance painting. I could watch the way the light shifts and plays against the canyon all day.
To start our day, Kurt and I rode the shuttle to the last stop on the scenic road to the Riverside Walk Trailhead. A few hikers sitting across the aisle were talking about Starved Rock, and we realized that several of us on the bus were all from Illinois. “We Illinoisans travel well,” one of them said, “because we have to! We have nothing!”
The two most well known hikes in Zion are the Narrows and Angels Landing. Hiking to see the Narrows2 involves wading seven miles through the chilly waters of the Virgin River, anywhere from knee to chest deep, and Angels Landing is notorious for its final section where the trail is only a few feet wide across a rocky precipice, with sheer 1,000-ft drops on both sides (an estimated sixteen people have died in falls). These trails don’t play!
I struggle with a fear of heights. Exposure therapy via hiking has helped me get somewhat better, but dramatic drop-offs make me so anxious that I want to curl up so tightly into my body that I turn inside out like a Popple. But I told Kurt I’d be willing to try the West Rim Trail up to Scouts Lookout, a 3.6 mile out-and-back up 1,115 feet of elevation gain, mostly up a series of switchbacks. We got an early start to hopefully beat the crowds, finding a steady, maintainable pace for the long uphill climb. The trail is wide and smooth, large at the switchback turns, so this helped me manage my acrophobia as we gained elevation. Partway up the trail, there is a level stretch through a canyon that is home to the endangered Mexican Spotted Owl. We heard their distinctive call echoing off the rock walls.
At the Scout Lookout scenic viewpoint, people either rest in the shade before heading back down or continuing on the final steep stretch to Angels Landing. At 10 a.m., there were already dozens of people spread across the rocks snacking and chatting. I found a spot to sit and chow down on my favorite hiking snacks (clementines, landjaegers, string cheese, Twizzlers) while watching other hikers reach the top.
Amazingly, there are two vault toilets at the top of the cliff, and of course I wanted to know how they get serviced (thanks to the internet, I can tell you that a helicopter airlifts away the waste once a year in a procedure known as Operation Helipoo!).
Bryce Canyon National Park
We left Zion in the early afternoon to make the trip to nearby Bryce Canyon, using the GuideAlong app to narrate our drive3. I’d read that Zion is all about looking up at what’s above you, and Bryce is all about looking down at what’s below you. This made sense as the road climbed up 8,000 feet; Bryce Canyon sits at the edge of a high plateau. In Zion’s mid-eighties temperatures, I hiked in a tank top and shorts, but in Bryce, all the layers and winter hats came out. We even got some light snow flurries.
We grabbed a spot in the first-come-first-serve Sunset campground inside the park, then walked across the road to the Bryce Canyon Amphitheater (which Kurt kept calling the Auditorium, he is obviously not the theater major in this marriage). The Amphitheater is a giant bowl in the earth filled with hoodoo rock formations created by ice erosion, as opposed to a canyon which is carved out by a river (Ponytail Up! Come for the Point Break references, stay for the geology lesson!). The native Pauite people had a legend that the hoodoos were bad people turned to stone by a trickster Coyote. (Unfortunately, we never got to see a coyote on the trip; I’ve seen more coyotes on the Edens Expressway embankment than in the wilds of Utah).
As an avid fantasy reader and writer, I fell in love at first sight with Bryce Canyon; its otherworldy vibe made me think of cinematic worlds in galaxies far, far away. I learned from the GuideAlong app that the Park offers a lottery for ranger-led hikes during a full moon with no flashlights allowed, so hikers can see the hoodoos up close lit only in the lunar light, and I 100% need to return someday to experience this witchy vibe.
We spent two days in Bryce, the first a recovery day in which we drove the scenic route and visited each scenic overlook by car while I gave my hip and knee a rest. You can see incredible sights from these viewpoints and I highly recommend this route if you’re traveling with a group of all ages or have accessibility needs. I was also elated to learn that the park’s general store had coin-operated showers ($3 for seven minutes of hot water) so we got to take our first showers since Vegas.
On the second day, we set the alarm to wake up and watch the sunrise over the Amphitheater. In the twenty-degree morning chill, we shimmied into layers then into the front seat, moving the van across the road to the Amphitheater parking lot. People had gathered up and down the railing, wearing pajamas and clutching their phones. My teeth chattered as we watched the sky warm up with color, spilling a golden glow over the sea of hoodoos. A tour group next to us chatted loudly and slammed Baileys shots. We got our photos, then ran shivering back to the van to burrow into the blankets for a bit more rest before starting our hiking day.
It ended up being a great plan; once we got up from our nap, the trailhead parking lot was packed with cars circling and waiting for a spot to open. After a quick coffee and oatmeal prepared on the van stove, Kurt and I set out on the Queen’s Garden/Navajo Loop trail. The sandy trail meandered down a sloping ridge, winding between hoodoos until reaching the Amphitheater floor (signage at the trailhead strongly recommends wearing hiking boots due to the loose rocks). This hike would be one of my favorites of the trip. I loved hiking through rock tunnels that opened up to stunning views of the red rock hoodoos against blue sky and green ponderosa pines. Bryce is another popular park, and hiker traffic jams occasionally clogged the trail at spots like Thor’s Hammer, where everyone needed to get their perfect shot in a superhero pose (obviously I was one of them).
We hit one more quick trail, the Mossy Cave Trail, on our way out of Bryce Canyon. I found a broad tree trunk to use as a platform for my hip stretches in preparation for a long drive up Scenic Byway 12 toward Capitol Reef. I’d soon learn that my hip wouldn’t be the issue on the drive, it would my acrophobia.
Next in Part II: Capitol Reef, Goblin Valley, Little Wild Horse Canyon
Personal news
If you’re in the Chicago area, I’m super excited to appear in You’re Being Ridiculous produced by
at Steppenwolf ‘s 1700 Theatre. The storytelling series runs for three nights with an amazing lineup of writers and performers, including fellow Substackers and (check out their fantastic newsletters!).I was honored to land on CRAFT Literary ’s Longlist for their Annual Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest. (Two months after receiving this news I got a two-sentence form rejection from a different lit mag, because publishing is a wild ride!)
What do you want to see in future installments—do you like the travelogue format, or do you want tips on making road trip itineraries, finding dispersed campsites, trail reviews, camping meal menus, etc.? Tell me in the comments!
If you’d like to read more about our previous Meow Wolf trips, you can do so on my previous blog and at Roadtrippers.com.
The Narrows was closed due to high levels/snowmelt while we were there, so we only got to view the start of it from the end of the Riverside Walk Trail.
This was our first time using GuideAlong on a road trip, and I highly recommend it! We purchased the Mighty Five bundle and downloaded it in advance. The app uses GPS to match the narration to your exact location, giving local history, geological lessons, and even sharing advice on the best spots to stop for a photo.
“My greatest dream is to be retired.” Have I ever felt a sentence more?! Hahaha
Reason 3000 for not ever going camping: Trickster coyotes that turn you to stone.