We chose this park because even though we had technically reached our destination, we really felt the need to run my poor Ford Fusion into the ground by continuing to put on an obscene number of daily miles.

I kid, I kid.

OR DO I?

This park wasn’t initially on our radar at all, but as soon as we bought that national parks pass, we came down with something of a national parks fever. By our first weekend in Arizona, we still didn’t have a hiking itinerary set in stone (or sand, or anything at all), so when we saw that there was a national park a mere 2hr drive from our Airbnb, it felt like as good an option as any. We knew that we wouldn’t be able to get out that far on a weeknight, and we expected our weekends to fill up quite quickly with our highest priority hikes or hikes that we would need more time for, so this first free Saturday was a gift.

The couple weeks of early wake ups was starting to catch up with us, so we did ourselves the small kindness of not cramming our Saturday schedule all the way to the brim. We would wake up whenever we woke up, hit the road after breakfast, explore the national park, and then hit a state park or two on the way home if we still needed more hiking. Spoiler alert: we were terrible at estimating how long we would spend at the park and didn’t make it to any others.

Petrified Forest National Park is set up kind of like Arches National Park where there is one main road that cuts through the park and you drive from interest point to interest point where there may be an option for a longer hike. The key differences, though, are that a.) Arches was an out and back road that dead-ended at the furthest point in the park, whereas Petrified Forest had entrances/exits on both ends of the park so you could drive through either way without backtracking, b.) we think there were “free roam” areas of Petrified Forest where you could just walk off into the desert and explore and even camp, which is really unusual for a national park, and, most critically, c.) Petrified Forest allowed dogs on every trail and at every stop.

Because it is where our GPS routed us, we entered the park from the north off of I-40 and drove the route from the Painted Desert to the Rainbow Forest, and that is our STRONG recommendation for others as well. Like we mentioned above, you also have the option of doing the park in the reverse of our route by entering off of Highway 180, but that would definitely be eating dessert first. One of the things we’ve learned as we’ve gotten into hiking is you never want the payoff/big reveal/moment where the clouds part and the angels start singing at the beginning of your route. You’ve got to work for it, and if it comes too soon, the rest of your day is going to feel pointless. That means that at Petrified Forest, you don’t start with all the petrified logs; you enter at the Painted Desert and as you work your way through the park you’ll see a few petrified bits and bobs, but they will just be tantalizing little teasers until you get to the main event.

The Painted Desert

First up on our self-guided tour of the park was the Painted Desert. We only viewed it at a distance from rim trails, but even from far away, it was striking. In Arizona you pretty much get two flavors of rocks: you have your standard tan, grey, and brown sand and rocks for most of the state, and in Sedona and the surrounding area, you have the signature red rocks. But in the Painted Desert, there are loads of colors on display. This area got its name in 1540 when Spanish conquistadors and explorers noted that the canyon walls looked as if they had been colored with strokes of a giant paintbrush. In actuality though, it was not a larger than life artist, but our good ol’ pal Geology who was responsible for the canvas of banded colors we saw before us. And believe it or not, he had been working for more than 200 MILLION YEARS on this particular masterpiece. Most of the Painted Desert that is visible from within the national park is part of something called the Chinle Formation, which is made up of layers and layers of river deposits made over the course of about 20 million years in the Late Triassic Period. After those layers – each a slightly different shade of red, orange, blue, or lavender – were all packed down, the conditions were ripe for erosion. Most of these stone and mineral deposits were semi-porous and prone to erosion, which is why today, a mere 225 million years from that fateful first layer of rock, we see such beautiful canyons, buttes, mesas, and mounded badlands, and the tapestry of colored sand and stone is on full display.

Although I’m sure that this explanation was more rock talk than you, Reader, have had all week, I’m certainly not the expert here. I do have a couple things still rattling around in my brain from my 9th grade Earth science class, which I adored (shout out to Ms. Catchpool), but if you want to learn more, or learn it correctly, and you are not currently registering for 9th grade science courses, you can peruse the NPS site which does a great job filling in the gaps!

Puerco Pueblo and Newspaper Rock

Puerco Pueblo trail was an interesting stop as it allowed us to walk out amidst the remains of a large pueblo. A pueblo was a multi-room and sometimes multi-story stone dwelling that functioned as both a home and village center for the Ancestral Pueblo people. This one was estimated to have 100 rooms and the stone structures that we were walking among were more than 600 years old. It was interesting to try and imagine what life was like for the Ancestral Pueblos – and by all accounts it seemed like a thriving community – on terrain that to us seemed so harsh and mean. Honestly, we weren’t dazzled by the structural remains at this stop, but we were pretty floored by the petroglyphs.

On many of the rocks at Petrified Forest National Park, you can see something called “desert varnish” which is simply a thin, dark coating made up of minerals, organic material, and clay that builds up naturally over time. If you weren’t looking for it specifically, you would almost certainly miss it, because in most places a dirty rock isn’t that special. But here, and at hundreds of sites in this park alone, a dirty rock is a canvas. Using another rock, wood, bone, a beak, or something else, the Ancestral Pueblo people would scratch away the desert varnish and expose the lighter stone underneath, creating a symbol, drawing, or likeness.

In a location that was occupied by hundreds of people at a time for possibly hundreds of years, it made sense that there would be more evidence of life than just buildings. Here we had art, and like all art, it is totally up for interpretation, and no one (not even experts!) can seem to agree on what exactly these artists were trying to communicate. It was awesome. And we could see it with our own eyes, right in front of us, and could weigh in (with exactly zero authority) on what we thought the symbols could mean. In the petroglyph below, for example, you can clearly see a bird and something else at the end of its beak. Modern day members of the Zuni tribe think that this could be a representation of the artist – almost like a signature or a tag – and their ties to various clans (i.e. mom from Crane Clan, dad from Frog Clan). The Hopi people, however, would say that this is a visual representation of a story wherein a giant bird visited villages to eat bad children. The bird seems to resemble the white-faced ibis, which is native to the region and is known to eat frogs, so another interpretation is that this petroglyph is a way to show reverence to or appreciation for water and aquatic resources. The world may never know!

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After we whet our appetites for petroglyphs at Puerco Pueblo, we headed less than a mile down the road to Newspaper Rock where an overlook with binoculars allows you to zoom in and see hundreds of different petroglyphs concentrated across a few rocks in formation. NPS denotes a spot like this with such a high concentration of petroglyphs (more than 650!) as hugely significant. This wasn’t the work of a single person, a single generation, or even a single village, but rather the stories of the multitude of Ancestral Puebloans who passed by, hunted, farmed, or lived near the Puerco River between 650 and 2,000 years ago (NPS says it best). It was really something, and I think I could have stayed at those binoculars looking for petroglyphs all day.

Blue Mesa

Our next stop was Blue Mesa, which was the coolest stop so far from a landscape perspective. There was a short 1mi trail that dropped you into a basin of blue clay badlands from the flattop mesa up above. I would guess that this experience was the closest I will ever get to exploring a crater on the moon. You could get up close and personal with the hilly, mounded formations, and if you didn’t know any better, it would be easy to mistake the grays and blues of the exposed mudstone with wrinkly, dusty elephant skin. This was also the first spot where we got to see petrified wood at close range, which piqued our interest for the next few stops!

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Crystal Forest and Rainbow Forest

Doo doo doo dooooo!! The Main Event! These are a few of the “forests” that gave the park its name. I put “forests” in quotation marks though since I think this was right around the point in our day where M admitted that he was still looking for a dense swath of Redwood-esque stone trees, and I don’t want you, Reader, to make the same mistake. These are considered petrified forests simply because they are large collections – some of the largest in the world – of petrified trees, but none of those trees are actually standing in the traditional forest arrangement.

So what is a petrified tree? How does something become petrified? What is the science of it all? These are a few of the burning questions that M and I were sitting with throughout our entire trip. Each stop that failed to explain (or in many cases even address) the nominal attraction of the park made us more and more agitated until we got into the car after Blue Mesa and I exploded “I don’t get it!! What the F#&@ is a petrified tree?!” absolutely scandalizing Dog. M was able to talk me down from it, but I vowed to *gasp* look it up on The Internet if we didn’t start learning about petrified forests real quick. As part of our own Parks Code of Conduct, we really try to limit the amount of time we spend on our phones in the parks. We bring out phones for pictures, trail tracking, and emergencies, and try to keep them in our pockets for everything else. Particularly at parks managed by NPS, there tends to be really good information at every stop (our beloved plaques!) and plenty of material to read between stops too (our beloved park newspapers!), not to mention the maps, so it’s usually all we can do to absorb all of this new knowledge during our visit. But on this trip, I read every plaque and the whole newspaper, and still was no closer to understanding the inner workings of a petrified forest than I was when I entered the park. And then we got to the Forests.

Now, Reader, I’m not going to do you the disservice of trying to paraphrase NPS on this one. Instead, I present to you a photo – taken through literal tears of joy – of a plaque titled “Petrifiquestions Answered.” When I tell you that God Himself could not have designed a more perfect plaque for me in my moment of need, from the pun to the meltdown-averting content, you better believe it. A couple of things to note for context before you read the plaque: way, way back in the day, like all the way back at the beginning of the Mesozoic Era, our beautiful Planet Earth was experimenting with supercontinents (again!) and had created the landmass Pangea. And Pangea looked very different from present-day Arizona. Looking out at the vast expanse of sand and dirt and rock that make up the park, any person could have reasonably assumed that this ground had never seen water before. This desert was a Thanksgiving turkey that no amount of gravy could redeem. You know the kind – you’re 8yo, at Grandma’s house, the turkey had been in the oven since the beginning of time. So just IMAGINE OUR SURPRISE when we learned that our turkey dinner desert was once a dense, lush, tropical rain forest! On Pangea, this area was positioned over the equator and probably looked a lot like the Amazon Rainforest does today (or how it looked before we really started trying to kill it – humanity is a scourge). So as you have all of your petrifiquestions answered below, imagine Arizona as the Amazon.

In summary, petrified trees are ancient organic matter that has been turned to literal stone through the magic of Earth science. Out of the national parks that we visited on this trip, these petrified trees held the distinction of being simultaneously the least impressive things to look at and the most impressive things to think about. That fact in the lower left hand corner of the plaque still blows my mind every time I think about it, which is all the time. These petrified forests, which took millions of years to form, were already in their current states and positions when Tyrannosauruses roamed. A T-Rex who was alive 83 million years ago was looking at these same stone logs, probably tripping out about geology and chemistry just like us. It’s for sure the funnest fun fact of our trip, possibly of our whole lives.

You can see from the photos below why these stops were called Crystal Forest and Rainbow Forest. There were short walks around and through some of the sites with the heaviest presence of petrified logs, and it was so cool to see these things up close. The quartz crystals were dazzling in the early afternoon sunlight, though without motion, these photos don’t do it justice. And the petrified logs that took on the rainbow title looked like massive, showy agates. Both types of logs seemed almost fake in that they were trying to be two different things at once. My brain had a lot of trouble processing what my eyes were taking in. They were truly stone – a ranger at one of the stops encouraged us to knock on some of the logs to confirm – but they were so obviously trees as well. We. Loved. It.

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Our first week in Arizona was a bit of a whirlwind. When you say that you’ll be staying somewhere for a month, that seems like a really long time. Before we actually arrived we felt like we were going to have all the time in the world to adventure and relax, but as soon as we got there, we felt the pressure of the calendar. We only had 31 days in Arizona! That’s 31 days to unpack and get settled in, get to know the area, research, document, and prioritize all the trails within a 150mi radius of our airbnb, hike at least one trail per day, coordinate visits with family and friends, pack up, and hit the road again. And we’ll be working the whole time! We realized right away that one month was not going to be enough for us to live our life like we planned to in that part of the country. There was just so much to do! Maybe we could have done it all in 6mo if we were really disciplined. But as it was, something had to give, and usually that something was our downtime and recovery days. Even though we were coming off of two weeks of traveling, and more excitement than any of us had had in our short little lives, we couldn’t take a break. We had to dive right in to this part of the adventure so that we didn’t waste even one day.

Life

We arrived to our Airbnb mid-afternoon on a Monday that we had taken off work, and our first act was to finally (blessedly!) unpack the car. We had been doing this awkward dance with all of our belongings where we would kind of half-unpack the car at every stop. Some things came out every time (small duffle bags with ~4 days worth of clothes, toiletries, dog supplies), but other things only had to come out on a situational (dog kennel, hiking gear) or environmental (will this item freeze/heat up if left in the car?) basis. Some things we didn’t need for short term travel, but thought we would need for a longer stay, and those tended to stay in the car. A major learning from this trip was to think about all of these factors before packing up and to group like items together. We were primarily concerned with fitting everything into the car when we left Milwaukee, so there were seemingly random items scattered throughout our luggage. When we partially unpacked in Omaha after our first night of driving, we thought we got everything that could freeze out of the car, but there was a random bottle of sunscreen in our game bag for some reason. Luckily nothing exploded or was ruined, but we were definitely learning and improving our process as we went. Bonus: as we got more organized, the car actually seemed to have more space. It could have been because Dog was working his way through the 15lb bag of dog food, but I choose to think it was because we were getting better at packing. All that to say though, that we were absolutely ecstatic to empty the car.

Once we put everything away, our next order of business was to stock the fridge. We had been on the road for two weeks, so we hadn’t had very much in the way of homemade meals. Obviously, M and I love to treat ourselves, but we didn’t plan on eating out for many of our meals while we were in Arizona. Our initial plan was to make lunch our big meal every day, and then prepare a nutritious dinner ahead of time that we could eat while on our hikes in the evenings. That didn’t work out even one time because a.) we didn’t have the time to prep and cook two separate meals over our lunch hour, and b.) we never wanted to stop during our hikes to sit and eat dinner because that would waste our precious daylight, and c.) the hikes we were doing during the week were rarely long enough to warrant a snack stop, let alone a meal break. But other than that, we had a pretty good plan for meals. Before we left, we rounded up a handful of recipes that used similar ingredients. We were only going to be there for a month, so we didn’t want to buy a huge variety or huge quantity of things that we couldn’t use up. To that end, we actually brought with us a pretty impressive assortment of spices from our own spice cabinet at home. They were only things that were actually in the recipes we planned to use, but definitely things we didn’t want to buy in Arizona only to leave there, or bring back home and have double of. I also printed off (and laminated because I am a bit much even for myself sometimes) tiny little ingredient lists for the recipes we identified earlier. We put these on a key ring and left them in the car so that we would have them on hand at the grocery store after a hike, and never have to look up recipes in the moment, or worse, just wing it at the grocery store and hope you didn’t forget anything (because if you did, the closest grocery store was 20mi away, and it was going to be a whole to-do). Our first trip to the grocery store was a stressful one. We were not familiar with the store names, so we couldn’t pick out right away which one (Safeway) would be the best (Safeway) for us to stock up on all the essentials (Safeway). We chose Sprouts. We had done some shopping at Sprouts in Colorado and enjoyed ourselves. It’s a health food store, kind of like a less-bougie Whole Foods, so for the most part the brands are not household names, and the selection could best be described as “eclectic.” That was not what we needed after a long travel day and with a huge list of ingredients to stock otherwise totally empty cabinets and refrigerator. You’d be looking for something basic like iced coffee, and this store would offer you up something like dehydrated papaya crisps that you don’t even know how to compare to the thing on your list. It seemed like there was at least one ingredient from every recipe we could not find, the most critical being poblano peppers. We (naively, it seems) assumed that because we were in the American Southwest, we would be tripping over peppers. Basically all of our recipes included them. We had been on a poblano fast leading up to Arizona because we thought we were going to consume so many while we were there. But no poblanos at Sprouts. And when we went to Trader Joe’s later in the week? No poblanos at Trader Joe’s. That’s when we decided Safeway was our jam. But back at Sprouts our stress levels were steadily increasing, and both M and I were headed for full meltdowns in the middle of the Blend Your Own Peanut Butter aisle, so we just paid $250 for the weird labels of 75% of the food we needed and called it a night. From that point on, Sprouts became an epithet in our household.

Working from the Airbnb also became something of an unexpected challenge for us. Neither M nor I would have taken this trip if we didn’t have a very firm handle on our jobs and how to do them remotely. We had quite a nice rhythm back home, but of course, as soon as we crossed the first state line, something in the cosmos shifted and we both found ourselves absolutely buried in work. M was effectively working two jobs while training up a new team member, and I found myself hosting working sessions for teams I had only met (virtually) days before while also accounting for the unexpected multi-week absence of my main functional partner. It was chaotic to try and balance all the extra work and still draw a hard line around our personal time. If we had been at home, I think both of us would have been able to flex a bit more and log on earlier or stay working later to accommodate the barrage, but with the time change, I was already taking calls starting at 5AM. Even though it was hectic, I think the weeks we spent working from Arizona, and especially that first week, really helped crystallize the idea that we were “working to live” and not “living to work.” It was so liberating to be able to close the laptop and within 15min be totally out of cell service (something that never happens at home), and then see the next morning that the company hadn’t burned to the ground in our absence. And actually, we both received recognition or awards for the work that we did during this time. This trip prompted a huge shift in our mindsets and how we consider our work-life balance.

Trails

A disclaimer: sometimes it was really tough to put a name to the trails that we hiked. We used the trail-finding app AllTrails, but as my aunt says, “it has its limitations.” It wasn’t always accurate to what we saw on the hike, and our trackers always seemed to display a different mileage count than what was listed for each hike. Plus, with any given trail, there are off-shoots and connecting trails, lookouts, and points of interest, so you might design a route that touches four or five different named elements. What we came to learn pretty quickly is that Arizona is basically one vast spidery network of major and minor hiking trails. That made it tricky to plan hikes and stick to them, and it will make it difficult to convey exactly what we did and where we went each day, but we are going to try our best!

Boynton Canyon Trail

6.1 mi – 810 ft elevation gain – Out & Back

Our very first Arizona hike was at Boynton Canyon in Sedona. We didn’t yet have a bucket list of hikes we wanted to do, so I just cruised through AllTrails until I found one that had good ratings, wasn’t too challenging, and allowed dogs. M was really out of it that day, so I drove to the trailhead, which took us about an hour and was our first trip through Sedona and on the Red Rocks Scenic Byway. I was absolutely floored with the views just from driving in. When we arrived at the trailhead, there was a little pay station where we could buy a Red Rocks Day Pass for $5 or a weeklong pass for $15 (what they didn’t tell you at the station is that you could get a yearlong pass for $20). As we were contemplating whether on not we thought we would be back in this area three more times in the next week, a couple of women asked us if we wanted their day pass! Now we are not in the business of cheating parks out of money that is due to them, but we also don’t like to snub strangers when they make a generous offer. We accepted the pass and made a pact between the two of us that we would purchase a pass for this area before our trip ended. This was actually not the only time strangers gave us their day passes. Because we usually wouldn’t get to the trailhead until 4PM or so, most hikers were on their way out, and the rangers had already left for the day, so it was an easy way to get your Good Deed of the Day in. The trail itself had one climb right away with some cool views, and was our first experience with the red dirt Sedona is famous for. Like idiots, we wore our tennis shoes instead of our hiking boots, and very nearly destroyed them. On the trail, we passed two women who said they had just seen a cat run across up ahead of us. I didn’t think it was that interesting of an anecdote until they mentioned that it was a wild cat and was the size of Dog who is comfortably 60lbs. We didn’t see the big cat, but we did keep Dog on a tighter leash than usual. Boynton Canyon is also one of the best known vortices in Sedona. A vortex is a swirling concentration of the Earth’s energy that is supposed to aide in meditation, healing, and self-discovery. I saw it mentioned a few times on AllTrails, but it really came to life when we passed other hikers chanting and singing. We didn’t feel any particular energy at Boynton Canyon (or any of the other vortex sites we hiked), but we’re not here to yuck other people’s yum. We only made it about half way through this trail before it started to get dark and we decided to turn back. Since this was our first day trying to work and get out the door for a hike, we got a later start than we would have liked. Plus, M still wasn’t feeling that great. We wish we could have done the whole thing, but we learned a lot from this first attempt (and actually from our second hiking attempt the next day). At least until daylight savings time hit, we would need to be Ready To Go as soon as we logged off. That meant we needed a hike picked out, hiking bags packed, and snacks prepped and on hand when the clock struck 3:00PM. We also figured out that if we were going to drive an hour to the trailhead, the hike itself couldn’t be longer than 5mi or so. Anything further away from us would have to be shorter, anything closer could be a little longer. Overall, this hike was a fair introduction to Sedona, but not one we felt compelled to come back and complete. We gave it 3 stars out of 5.

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West Fork Trail

6.8mi – 623ft elevation gain – Out & Back

We chose a hike at the other end of Sedona for our second day of exploring. For this one we would travel north to Flagstaff, pivot south, and drop down the face of Oak Creek Canyon. From our Airbnb, it was a shorter but more treacherous drive to this part of the city than the main portion. We arrived at West Fork right around 4PM and while we were searching for some way to pay at the ranger station (no automated booth this time!), ANOTHER couple graciously bestowed their day pass upon us. So for those of you keeping track at home, we were 2/2 for getting gifted day passes, and were feeling pretty sure that this was just how hiking worked – what a lovely pastime! West Fork Trail follows a small river that we suspect (but never confirmed) was Oak Creek, the canyon’s namesake, as it winds along steep canyon walls of red rock, and through shockingly dense pine forests. We saw in AllTrails that there were 13 river crossings on this trail, and we were excited at the potential to use our water shoes for the first time on the trip. We didn’t end up breaking them out on this trail because we didn’t have the time for a partial wardrobe change, but I am confident we will find a time and place to use them. Before you get to the river, you pass through the ruins of an old hunting cabin where there are a few plaques with information on them. This time our love of learning did come back to bite us because I think we spent a little too much time reading which made us have to cut our hike short. As we approached the actual trail, we came across a strange scene: there were corrals built up with 20 or so natural walking sticks propped up against them. M immediately grabbed a stick and wanted to use it during the hike, but I pointed out a.) they looked like they were there for a reason (“Yeah, for us to take!” M responded), b.) we are in the middle of a pandemic, so lets not touch the one thing in the forest 100 other grubby hands have touched, and c.) we have actual hiking poles – that we paid money for – in the car if he wanted to use one for the hike. Not willing to fight me about it in the middle of the wilderness, M left the sticks where they were and we forged on. When we got to the first river crossing another half mile down the trail, however, we had something of an epiphany. There was an older couple using two walking sticks a piece to stabilize themselves on the wobbly rocks and slick logs that VERY loosely constituted a crossing point. THAT’S what the sticks were for! Uh-oh. Both M and I scanned the forest for any felled branch or fallen stick that was halfway straight and tall enough to be useful. As it turns out, this is the point in the trail where everyone has a similar epiphany and performs a similar scan of the forest, so the pickins were slim. But the sun shines on J. I spotted a viable stick about a half second before M and dashed into the brush to claim my prize. Now, you, Reader, might be thinking that since we were only in this predicament because I had refused to let M take a stick from the corrals earlier on, perhaps I would let him use this stick until we could find a second. That would of course be the right thing to do. But unfortunately for M, the universal and unalienable truths of Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers, and The Girlfriend Is Always Right were at play here as well, and we were totally at their mercy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ M did find an old gnarled branch after the third crossing that looked more like a question mark than a walking stick, but he insisted on using that so that he could be done searching. After that initial hiccup though, the trail was really cool! It’s always fun to hike along a natural water feature, and we had a grand time trying to guess where the “official” river crossings were (we definitely did more than 13), and watching Dog splash through the water. Because of the height and angle of the canyon walls, there were a lot of places on the canyon floor where there was still snow, but it was a perfect hiking temperature, and mostly out of the sun. When our fitness trackers showed that we were at 3.4mi, which was supposed to be the end of the trail, we weren’t at a natural stopping point, and the trail continued to stretch out ahead of us, so we had a decision to make: turn around and get back to the car, or press on and find the end of the trail. The sun hadn’t set yet, but it had dropped below the canyon walls. We knew that it would get darker faster down there by the river, and we were on unfamiliar terrain that would be dangerous in the dark. It was an easy, but frustrating decision to turn back – we were having so much fun on this trail, and really didn’t want to miss any of it! On the hike back, we did less playing and more hustling as dusk was settling in around us. Despite cutting the hike short, we were already having trouble picking out the path and seeing where we could safely put our feet on river crossings. The last 30min was in total darkness, and was actually really stressful. At any point we could have pulled out our headlamps, but we kept thinking we were at the last river crossing and that we wouldn’t need them after that. What we learned from this hike is something we probably should have learned from the classic cautionary tale of Hansel and Gretel as children, which is to mark your trail in a meaningful way (or in our case count your river crossings) and not stay out after dark. Luckily for us, we didn’t run into any cannibalistic forest witches though. We finally made it back to the trailhead, left our walking sticks amongst their comrades at the corral and got to the car. Despite a rocky start and finish, we absolutely adored this trail, gave it 5 out of 5 stars, and made immediate plans to return on a weekend and complete the whole route.

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Pinewood Neighborhood Walk

3.25 mi – 265 ft elevation gain – Loop

On Thursday it snowed! Well actually it snowed overnight on Wednesday, and up until about 10:30AM on Thursday. Then the melting began. We were kind of charmed by this first snow, and didn’t mind using it as an excuse to explore the neighborhood. Supposedly there were some hiking paths that we could walk to, but we never found anything that was really worth the time. We did find a trailhead that seemed promising, but the map was not clear and the whole area was a huge mud pit from all the precipitation earlier in the day. But muddy trails in other parts of the neighborhood DID allow me to play amateur tracker and try to determine what animals had crossed the trail before we had. Mostly, it was dogs. BUT there was one set of tracks that I think COULD have been a mountain lion. I took pictures of them while we were out and then did some sleuthing on the World Wide Web when we got home, but the results were inconclusive. Boo. After that we tooled around the rest of the neighborhood and tried to learn the street names and get oriented, which wound up being more of a task than we expected because for some reason the names of the streets changed at every intersection. A classic 4-way intersection in our neighborhood would have 4 street names instead of 2. It was like somebody had all of these great ideas for street names but not enough streets to use them all, so they changed the name of every road at every block. Madness.

Salida Gulch Trail

4.5 mi – 479 ft elevation gain – Loop

Next up on the hiking location sample platter we were building for ourselves was Prescott. This city is one we had heard about before because one of my cousins often travelled there for baseball growing up, but other than that, we didn’t know too much about it. Prescott is an hour and half from where we were staying, so it was a bit too far to drive for a hike on a standard weeknight. Luckily for our situation, M has an early Friday every other week where he can log off at 1:15PM. On those days where we want to do something during a Friday afternoon and I don’t want to take a vacation day, I can usually still cut out a little early and make up any missed time over the weekend. So that was what we did on this Friday, and we planned two hikes in Prescott to make the drive worthwhile; one for the exercise, and one for the views. Salida Gulch Trail was the trail we used to get our steps in for the day. It wound around a large hill (or small mountain – not actually sure what constitutes one or the other) and even though there was a fair bit of climbing, it was spread out enough that we didn’t even notice it until suddenly you could see for miles. This area is also active grazing land for local ranchers (err… their cattle), and the trail had a half dozen livestock gates on it that you had to be sure to lock up again after you walked through! After doing a couple hikes in Sedona, we were surprised by how different the landscape was just 50mi west. It was all pine forests and scrub brush and gray stone in Prescott. If you had showed us the pictures we took hiking Salida Gulch before we had been there, we wouldn’t have been able to guess that they were from Arizona. We were having fun getting to know so many different parts of this beautiful state though! We gave this trail 4 stars since it did what it was supposed to do, but didn’t go above and beyond our expectations.

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Constellation Loop

2.4 mi – 236 ft elevation gain – Loop

Right after Salida Gulch, we hustled over to Constellation Park which is managed by the city of Prescott. We had already gotten our exercise in for the day, so this trail was strictly for the views, and it delivered! Constellation Park was filled with really cool and bizarre rock formations that you could scramble up, onto, and around. To me, it looked like the fake savannah habitats at the zoo, so I immediately felt like a little meerkat (a neutral feeling) getting to amble around my new exhibit. This is the exact type of park that I could’ve killed a whole day exploring as a kid, and even as an adult, it was pretty cool to have this natural playground at my fingertips. M kept wanting to climb to the top of the farthest rock formations to “see what was on the other side” but we tried to be good stewards of the land and stick to the trail, which here, was marked with painted white dots on the rocks. Dog seemed to enjoy this trail as well, and earned his mountain goat badge here for his ability to confidently climb up and down the rocks, even when there wasn’t much purchase on the stones. This park earned a full 5 stars from us, and we were actually kind of bummed that we didn’t have a picnic dinner to eat on the rocks here!

Petrified Forest National Park

Boy, were we on a national park high coming into Arizona. We wanted to keep that momentum, so we found a nearby (-ish) national park to visit on our first weekend here. It was a bit of a drive, so we knew we wouldn’t be able to do it after work, and our first Saturday was wide open. I’m going to give each national park its own post, so I won’t spoil the surprise here!

Pass Mountain Trail + Cat Peaks Pass

8.69 mi – 963 ft elevation gain – Out & Back + Loop

On Sunday we got to meet up with my aunt and uncle who live in the greater Phoenix area – such a treat! They suggested meeting up at Usery Mountain Regional Park in Mesa at 7:30AM to beat the heat. That was a great plan except for the fact that we were staying 2hrs and 20min north of Mesa, so in order to get up, get everything ready for a hike (including Dog and all of his supplies), hit the road, and stop for breakfast as soon as restaurants open up for the day, we were looking at a wake-up call sometime in the 4AM hour. M told me to just take the hint that my relatives didn’t want to see us since no one in their right mind would agree to those terms for a leisurely Sunday morning hike, but I was undeterred. We woke up at 4:30, hit the road at 5:00, stopped for Starbucks along the way, and made it to the park just 10min late. Even with the drive, I’m so glad that my aunt and uncle chose this park for a hike rather than something closer to us, because it is a lot more quintessential AZ in the Phoenix area than it is up north where we were staying. It has the sand and the saguaros (cacti) and everything you think of when you picture the desert, and we hadn’t seen that yet on our trip! We started off along Pass Mountain Trail, which is a 7mi loop around Usery Mountain. We took in the views and caught up and had such a sweet morning! We ended up turning back at around 2.5mi because a.) we were a little worried about how Dog would do on the rockier portion around the back of the trail, and b.) there was another really scenic trail called Cat Peaks that we wanted to get to as well before any of us tapped out from the heat. Cat Peaks had less climbing, but was equally scenic and put you up close and personal with the desert flora. Overall, we loved the park and the company and gave these trails top ratings as well.

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Finally, after two weeks on the road, our destination was in sight. On Monday, March 1st we could officially check in for our month long stay in Arizona. We took Monday off of work in order to make the 4.5hr drive from Hurricane, Utah to Munds Park, and since we had all day to get there, didn’t hit the road particularly early. One thing we had been learning about hiking as a hobby is that you don’t really get to sleep in on hiking days, so we seized this rare opportunity to wake without setting an alarm. It was glorious.

I don’t have too much to say about the drive, except for that it was flat and… remote. Every time we passed a house or a ranch we’d say “I wonder who lives there?” and speculate about the personality and backstory of someone who could make it so far away from a city and all the associated amenities. It genuinely felt like the two closest cities were the ones we were driving to and from. We saw a billboard with an arrow pointing east advertising a McDonald’s ONE HOUR AWAY. I think the last time I was further than an hour away from a McDonalds I was in a plane over the Atlantic ocean. Must be a hardy people that choose to live out in the middle of the desert like that. Oh, and we also thought that we would stop by the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on our way down to Munds Park, since our route would take us right past it, but alas, the North Rim was closed for winter and would not be opening up until May. Not a huge blow to our master plan or anything since we would still have pretty easy access to the South Rim from where we were staying, but still notable about the drive.

The Accommodations

Our Airbnb was a smartly appointed 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom home in the only neighborhood in Munds Park (more on that in a second). It was a permanently affixed mobile home in a neighborhood that was a mix of mobile homes, cabins (the most adorable A-frames you ever did see), two-story houses, and massive estates; a combination of styles we were not used to seeing in the same subdivision, let alone the same street. But our little home had everything we could want for a month-long stay. We had a bedroom with plenty of space to store our clothes, a nice bathroom with a tub/shower that had hot water and great water pressure, the world’s tiniest washer/dryer combo, a large kitchen with everything required to make a meal, dependable wifi for working from the Airbnb, and a fenced-in side yard for Dog. Everything else was a bonus. The extra bedroom and bathroom also allowed us to host guests in the event that anyone from our real life back home wanted a very cheap vacation to Arizona (M and I tried to convince all of our siblings to make the trip out, but no dice). We quickly unpacked and settled into a comfortable rhythm of life in Munds Park.

There were some quirks with the listing we had chosen, although they were minor compared to the value we got from the list of necessities above. Basically, the home was not particularly well-constructed. The floors and countertops were crooked, which means that doors would hang open or swing closed unless someone intervened, and we watched many-a-roma tomato wobble toward the edge of the counter before snatching it back. For the first week of our stay, we’d take our noise-cancelling headphones off from work only to hear Dog crying softly from the bedroom where the door had swung shut and locked him in (after that, he learned to stay close on our heels when we left the room). The kitchen sink had the pressure and splash capacity of a fire hose when the handle was cranked all the way on, but when you tried to dial the force back at all, the weight of the handle itself would slowly force the piece all the way down into the off position. This meant that if you wanted to do the dishes, fill up a cup, or even wash your hands at a comfortable water pressure, you had about 1.5 seconds before the faucet turned itself off, or else it was a two-man job – one to hold the handle in place, one to operate in the basin. And for some reason, all the heat vents in the entire house were smack dab in the middle of the room that they controlled – in the middle of the FLOOR of the room they controlled. So in the middle of the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom, the bedroom, there were metal grates with metal levers that stuck up into the air like stubby little knives. It took us less than an hour of cutting our feet walking over these grates to move all the rugs in the entire listing over the edges of the grates (or sometimes over the entire vent) in order to protect our piggies. And I mentioned the tiny washer and dryer previously, but it was really, really small. Like we had to do a load of laundry every other day because 4 outfits is all that would fit, and if you wanted to wash towels or blankets or sheets or anything else, it was almost guaranteed to need its own load. This ultimately meant that we could have packed way less stuff because we were expecting regular-sized machines and to do laundry once a week or so. We ended up liking our daily laundry routine, but it was still something a bit weird that we weren’t initially prepared for.

The “City”

Munds Park is technically not a city, but a “census-designated place” of 631 people, which I didn’t know was a thing before getting there, and had to look up. According to Wikipedia (don’t tell my 7th grade English teacher I’m citing Wikipedia), census-designated places exist only for statistical purposes, so Munds Park isn’t even real! It is basically a statistical mirage presenting as a city. But it fooled me well enough because it has a labeled highway exit and a town Outpost (kind of a DIY post office), so you know, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck (“…you can call it a city” is how I think that phrase ends). I feel very confident that I can name every single compositional element of Munds Park because I saw it all with my own eyes. Off of the single freeway exit you will find two gas stations, an RV park, a motel, a golf course, three restaurants (no chains), the Outpost, a playground, a volunteer fire department, and the one neighborhood I mentioned before. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Amazing.

The Location

We weren’t staying in Munds Park for the amenities, we were staying there for its proximity to outdoor adventure! A quick look at a map before booking showed us a town that was close to Flagstaff, Sedona, Prescott, and even the Grand Canyon to the north and Phoenix to the south. Since we didn’t have any ideas about where we wanted to hike in Arizona, picking a home base with a ton of options for day trips was one of the smarter things we did. We figured we would sample all the drivable areas in our first week or so, and then have a better idea about where we wanted to focus the rest of our hikes. It was actually really stressing me out that we didn’t have more hikes on the calendar before we arrived – those that know me would be willing to attest that I’m not really a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of gal – but in hindsight, it was nice to have the flexibility to make day-of calls for particular hikes. We learned quickly that aside from the national parks, it was pretty futile to try and stick to any kind of hiking plan. We had lofty goals of planning hikes days or weeks in advance and then had to toss most of them out the window due to weather, timing, inaccuracies with AllTrails, crowds, etc.

Munds Park is also positioned squarely in the middle of Coconino National Forest, which was amazing, but also slightly inconvenient. Because there are protected lands on all sides of Munds Park, there aren’t a ton of roads connecting our little city to other cities. Interestingly (and frustratingly), our Airbnb was only 8.62mi to Sedona city center as the crow flies, but it would take us about 50min to drive there, since unlike the lucky crow, we would have to go around a major portion of the forest and descend more than 2,000ft to get to the central elevation of the city. All those pesky natural wonders we were there to see really got in the way of our driving! Sedona wound up being our primary stomping ground, which meant that we had about 2hrs of driving every day, but it was a beautiful commute, so we’ll bite our tongues. As for the other major destinations for us in Arizona, we were about 20min south of Flagstaff, which is where we did all our shopping and errands, 1.5hrs from Prescott where we did a couple hikes, 1hr 45min from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, which we knew we for sure wanted to visit, and 2hrs north of Phoenix where we had family and friends that we could meet up with on the weekend. All in all, a perfect location, but a LOT of driving.

The Weather

A great thing about traveling to Arizona in the springtime is that we get to escape the Wisconsin cold. While all of our friends were shivering and shoveling, we would be steaming and sunning ourselves in the beautiful American Southwest. Or so we thought. One bit of critical information that we failed to look up before actually crossing the state line into Arizona was the elevation of Munds Park, which we now know to be 6,590ft. While we weren’t surrounded by craggy peaks or anything, that is definitely high enough for the region to be considered mountainous. And do you know what happens in the mountains in spring? It snows. The first snow day we thought was kind of funny and ironic, but we had a total of seven snow days during our stay, and the novelty definitely wore off. There didn’t appear to be a clear strategy for snow removal either besides just “let it melt” (which, admittedly, it did do remarkably quickly by our standards). Our Airbnb didn’t have a snow shovel, just a garden shovel, so on days where we got a lot of snow, we couldn’t get out of the driveway and had to settle for a neighborhood walk instead of a red rocks hike. We were so baffled by the consistent flurries that we looked up the average annual snowfall for Munds Park. In a regular year, Munds Park will see around 12in of snow. At its deepest, the snow on the ground while we were there was 8in. A cruel joke.

On days when it wasn’t snowing, it was still pretty chilly in Munds Park. Looking back in the national weather service archives (there is no dorkier start to a sentence – don’t even try), it appears that our March was one of the cooler Marches in recent years. But luckily, our little cold patch didn’t extend too far beyond our census-designated area. The temperature in Sedona – which is less than 10mi away, remember – was regularly 10-15° warmer than at our Airbnb. Whenever we were traveling south on the freeway, which is basically a downward sloping ramp all the way into Phoenix, we would play a little game where we would try to guess how many miles it would be before the thermometer had climbed 20°. Usually it was an appallingly short distance. We chalked it up to the elevation and low humidity mainly, but the weather definitely plays by different rules in the mountains.

A Real Time Update

In real people time, we are actually already back from our trip! Time flies! The blog posts kind of got away from me as we did SO MANY cool things that I want to give proper time and attention to in writing about them. I’ll try to do a post or so a week until we round out the trip, but now instead of hikes and drives and time zone changes, my blogging will be competing for headspace with my daily life events, which right this very moment are building and planting a vegetable garden, fostering more puppies (two at a time this time!), and enjoying the beautiful Wisconsin springtime! But you can rest assured that we took diligent notes and logged all of our activities from the trip so that we can share them with you 🙂

The next stop on our whirlwind adventure through Utah was Bryce Canyon National Park, which would round out our weekend of three national parks in three days. Bryce Canyon was the park that I was personally most excited to see. In the past few years a couple different friends had been to Bryce and shared pictures, and I was very, very intrigued by the hoodoos, the spiky, orange stone monoliths that the park is known for. They did not disappoint.

Although we were more prepared for this park than the others, having sourced recommendations from friends on trails, directions, timing, etc., somehow we were still unprepared for the weather. We had checked the weather in the morning, as one does when getting dressed for a day of outdoor activity, but had failed to take into account the simple fact that our Airbnb was a full two hours and apparently several climate zones away from Bryce (more on that later). On our drive over, we watched in indignation as the thermometer dropped steadily from 52° to 19° and confirmed when we got there that the temperature at the canyon would not get above freezing for the day. Great. Luckily, even an unprepared J is more prepared than the average tourist, and we were able to don our emergency hats and mittens to keep comfortable. Plus, once you were in the canyon, you were pretty well out of the wind, which was nice.

Queen’s Garden and Navajo Loop

The Queen’s Garden and Navajo Loop trails seemed to be the main route through the park. On both the recommendation of a friend and the park ranger that we spoke to at the visitor center, we took the route clockwise. This served two purposes: first, it kept the main payoff of the trail in terms of views at the end rather than the beginning, and second, it allowed a steep, snowy portion of the trail that is partially shaded in the morning a chance to dry out a bit in the sun before we got there.

This hike dropped us into the canyon right away and gave us a chance to get up close and personal with some of the hoodoos. Once we were at the bottom, I felt like an ant on an ant farm, but in the best possible way. It was a giant natural playground! The trail wound around and through the rock formations and the surprisingly lush forest at the bottom. When it was time to climb again, the trail split into two different routes, Wall Street and Two Bridges. We were under strict instructions to take the Wall Street route, but unfortunately, the decision was made for us since Wall Street was closed for the winter. Two Bridges was the portion of the trail that the ranger had been referring to that was covered in ice and snow overnight, and was actively melting during the day. Until that point, the route was pretty easy and uncrowded. Apparently though, most hikers at Bryce that day did not get the memo to go clockwise around the trail, and they were all coming down the Two Bridges trail, which was slick with orange, cakey mud. I am immensely pleased that we were climbing, not descending for that portion, because the traction was minimal and the potential to look like you just ran a Tough Mudder was maximal.

While we did enjoy this trail, we spent most of the hike looking for the iconic view of the “hoodoo forest” that we had seen in our friends’ photos. We didn’t actually find it on this trail, but the payoff at the end was a pretty cool view from the top of Sunset Point. We wish Wall Street had open, because the view from that side of the lookout was stunning!

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On this trail we also learned about the geology and topology of the region and how the hoodoos formed. Around 50 million years ago, the area that is now Bryce Canyon was a lake and flood plain, so streams would carry particles from surrounding areas of higher elevation and deposit them in the basin. The minerals settled and solidified into rock that was then raised to its current elevation through the collision of a few key tectonic plates. All of this laid the foundation for the hoodoos by creating a fun blocky plateau that was a mixture of a ton of different kinds of rock – limestone, sandstone, and dolostone to name a few. Then came the master sculptor that is erosion. Moisture from rain and snow melt seep into the porous stone and dissolve the calcium carbonate trapped within the rock. The calcium carbonate occurs at different levels in each of the various rock types, accounting for the wacky formations of the hoodoos and the lack of uniformity in the erosion process. Plus, the current elevation of the canyon sees more than 200 nights a year where the temperature is both above and below freezing. When the moisture trapped in the rock freezes, it expands and puts pressure on the stone, weakening it. When it melts, the water gets back to work dissolving the calcium carbonate, and carries the sediment down to the canyon floor. So cool!

Rim Trail to Inspiration Point

Inspiration Point is the reason you should go to Bryce Canyon. A friend had outlined a route for us that included driving to Inspiration Point, but by the time we finished the Navajo Loop, we were feeling pretty good, and just kept walking along the rim chasing cooler and cooler views. The Rim Trail from Sunset Point to Inspiration Point appeared on the map as 0.7mi, but actually walking it was more like 1.4mi one-way. We’re not quite sure where the disconnect was since there wasn’t much opportunity to get lost just following the rim of the canyon. This trail was definitely less traveled than the other, and the conditions left it snowy and windy, but the constant breathtaking views back into the canyon were more than worth it.

When you get to Inspiration Point there is a main platform, and then two additional lookouts if you are willing/able to climb a bit. We were ready for that climb and went all the way up to the tippy top. This was the slickest part of any of the trails that we did since the packed snow was frozen into an icy ramp at what was effectively a 45° angle. Luckily, we had our Yaktrax and our hiking poles that helped us gain traction on the ice. The view from both of the additional lookouts was beyond amazing, but we couldn’t stay for too long – the wind up there was even crazier than on the rim!

Seeing the hoodoos along this entire trail and at Inspiration Point was the view that we had been looking for since arriving at Bryce Canyon. It was the “hoodoo forest” we had hoped to see from the beginning. To me, all the hoodoos standing at attention and lined up like that looked like the terra-cotta army at the burial site of of China’s first emperor. I’ve never seen the terra-cotta warriors in person, but whatever image I must’ve seen in a National Geographic magazine growing up really stuck with me, because it was all I could think of looking back into the canyon. If this was all we had seen at Bryce Canyon, the trip would’ve been worth it.

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Mossy Cave

This was a very short bonus trail that we tacked on to the end of our trip through Bryce. It ends at a small drippy waterfall in a little sheltered cave. Depending on the season of your visit, you’ll see either a cave full of icicles or a cave full of spongy moss. Of course, we got the icicles, and it was awesome! A perfect little chaser for our hoodoo bonanza from before. This would be a great trail to bring little kids on since you can splash around in the streams and waterfalls. There are only a few parking spaces at this trailhead though, so avoid peak hours if you can!

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The main event in Utah was always supposed to be Zion National Park. There are loads of really cool and unique hiking opportunities, and it was only about a half hour away from our Airbnb in Hurricane. We were staying with a couple of M’s friends from college, and while we were taking an extra long weekend to get through Utah (took both Friday and Monday off), they had to be back to their place in Salt Lake City on Sunday. That meant that Saturday was Zion Day. We woke up early and got to the park by 9AM intending to complete the park’s two most popular hikes, The Narrows and Angels Landing, before the park closed and we had to get back to the pups.

The Narrows

The Narrows came to us with glowing recommendations from several friends. It is the very northernmost part of the park where the walls of the canyon close in around the river, making it – you guessed it – narrow. For this hike, you actually walk up through the river for as many as nine miles, and then turn back. We initially planned to do this trail last because we figured we could just turn back whenever we were getting short on time and catch the last shuttle back to the visitor center.

A quick chat with the nearest park ranger revealed our lack of preparedness for this trail. It was February, and the river was high and cold. We would need to rent dry suits and special dry socks and shoes from a place in town. That wouldn’t be an issue, except that we would have to carry the bulky suits and shoes with us all day on the other trail. We couldn’t keep the equipment in our car because of how the canyon shuttle buses worked – once we returned to the visitor center where we parked, our shuttle ticket became invalid – and we couldn’t get to the trailhead without the shuttle. Shoot! To top it all off, we had a VERY dramatic encounter with the equipment rental employee where he positively insisted that we couldn’t do both Angels Landing and The Narrows in a single day, and all but refused to rent us the gear (terrible business model). We’re pretty sure we were getting a little bit of Chubby Hiker Prejudice from him which has only happened one other time (a state park ranger once correctly guessed, “You two must be here for the Doughboys Trail”) but that one was funny, and this one was annoying.

All of this is to say that we didn’t end up doing The Narrows on this trip to Zion. I’m keeping this section in here though in the hope that we make it back at some point when the water is warmer and we can apply all of our energy to this trail. Oh, and after we completed Angels Landing? Plenty of time to have made it a few miles up The Narrows. We had left it all on the field from an energy perspective, but our party unanimously agreed it could have been done.

Angels Landing

Hooo boy. This one. We really didn’t do too much research ahead of this hike, and I have to say that’s the way to go. Had we known even roughly where the summit was, had we watched a single YouTube clip, had we read more than two total reviews on AllTrails, there is a pretty good chance we wouldn’t have even tried this hike. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Angels Landing is the most strenuous hike in the park. It appears in the park newspaper as:

I’m assuming that normal people would look at those stats and brace themselves for a tough hike. But assuming is all I can do, because as absolute morons, we looked at the listing and said, “How could it possibly take us 4 hours to go 5 miles?? Even with the 1,500ft elevation gain, I bet we get it done in 2.5 hours. Three tops.” Like I said, morons.

To even get to the trailhead for Angels Landing, you need to first hike the West Rim Trail. This accounts for about 1,000ft of your elevation gain, and is basically a switchbacked climb straight up a canyon wall. This portion of the trail ends at Scout Lookout and is itself rated as hard on AllTrails. By the time we got to the lookout, we could have easily taken in the view, felt accomplished, and turned around for the descent, and I applaud everyone who had the good sense to do so. We decided to forge on. Just beyond Scout Lookout is a little posted sign that says, “Since 2004, 10 people have died falling from the cliffs on this route. The 1.1 mile round-trip route from Scout Lookout to Angels Landing is a strenuous climb on a narrow ridge over 1,400 feet above the canyon floor. This route is not recommended during high winds, storms, or if snow or ice is present.” And then way at the bottom in tiny letters, “Your safety is your responsibility.”

Awesome.

This is probably a good time to remind you, Reader, that M is afraid of heights, I love safety, and it was a February day when this trail is best traveled between May and October. Essentially, we were not ideal candidates for the hike, nor were the conditions ideal, although there were no major weather events at the outset that would have given us pause. But we saw a TON of people heading out to the landing, several of whom seemed less prepared (when I tell you I saw people climbing this ridge in canvas skater shoes…) and less cautious (JUMPING from rock to rock!) than us. We figured even if this was an above-average day in terms of attendance, there must be tens of thousands of hikers on this route every year and only ten had fallen to their death. The statistics were in our favor. We made a quick team pact not to be Number Eleven and to keep our wits about us, and we were off.

If you know anything about Angels Landing, you probably know about the chains. They are the most iconic feature of the trail, and the park’s best attempt at a safety feature that doesn’t infringe on the scenery. Personally, I say screw the scenery and install a massive net if you’re going to keep letting people hike this ridge, but I digress. The chains are exactly what they sound like: thick metal links running from post to post most of the length of the ridge. They exist not as a guardrail between you and the drop, but as an anchor to steady and pull yourself up the mountain. More often than not, they rested on the rock itself, and by the end our knuckles were scraped and bleeding from the movement of the chain back into the rock. A fun lesson that we learned is that a chain is not like a railing in that chains buckle and sway and bow as people ahead of and behind you grab on and let go. We had an absolute vice grip on the chains whenever they were available, which, disturbingly, was not always.

The route is along a very narrow spine of a mountainous ridge, with some wider, flatter parts that were you could stop and rest or let people pass. When I say very narrow, I mean single file with no margin for error. Angels Landing is an out-and-back route, not a loop, so this was one of the more difficult aspects of the trail to navigate; you had near-constant two-way traffic on a single lane trail. It required a lot of communicating with strangers and coordinating who stands where, for how long, and with what support. Our squad was happy to take the lead in that department because it allowed us to outline a traffic pattern where we could keep our hands on the chains at all times. There was constant calling up and down the line like a high-risk version of the game Telephone – “How many are in your party?” “Are you comfortable on the edge?” “Is there any space up there to pull over and wait?” “How close are we to the summit?” At the beginning, we weren’t too assertive. We would just try to look as scared as possible (not difficult) when people would pass us so that we could keep hold of the chains. But about midway through the ascent, we lost all shyness and would call out to hikers coming at us, “If you keep ahold of the chains, you’re getting a bear hug because I’m not letting go either!” That part was kind of fun. I liked being Captain of the Mountain.

This was a physically and mentally demanding trail, to say the least. In addition to the small task of walking a sandy balance beam with a 1,500ft drop on either side, we still had more than 500ft of elevation gain to achieve. The ridge dips a bit after Scout Lookout, and then rises pretty steeply toward Angels Landing, so it wasn’t really a hike so much as it was a climb. There were a lot of times where there weren’t great footholds worn into the rock, or they were too far apart for somebody with stubby little leggies (me!), so I found myself using the chains to pull myself up some of the way as well. For someone who doesn’t regularly lift anything heavier than a Mac Book Pro, it was a challenge. And then there was the crippling influence of our anxieties – M’s over the heights, and mine over the death – that kept all of our muscles nice and tense for the entire trek. We each had different coping mechanisms. M tried not to look down, always stayed to the middle of the trail (even on the wider, flat portions), and kept repeating his mantra that there is no difference between falling from 1,000ft back at Scout Lookout and falling from 1,500ft on the way to Angels Landing. I was very focused on not tripping and not talking. The reason I had to focus on these two things is because I trip ALL THE TIME in my regular life (a specialty of mine is falling off sidewalks. Flat sidewalks.), and if I talked at all I knew I would accidentally talk M out of finishing the route by poking holes in the flimsy logic of his mantra.

About three quarters of the way there, I decided it wasn’t worth it to make it to the peak. The views were changing only marginally as we got further and further into the canyon, and I had absolutely nothing to prove. I could feel my legs and arms shaking, and worried that I wouldn’t have enough left in the tank to make it safely back to Scout Lookout if we continued. Plus, the wind had picked up significantly, and the warning from the sign at the trailhead was seared into my brain. That first gust of wind hit us while we were resting on a wider spot on the trail, and in an instinctual effort to lower his center of gravity, M hit the deck so fast I thought he had slipped and fallen of the edge. Not to mention that although M was actually doing really well with the trek given his fear of heights, I was always nervous that the next glance toward the canyon floor was going to be the one to send him into a panic attack or paralyze him with fear, and what would we do then? Call for an air rescue with our zero bars of service? Send a message back with one of the hikers and hope that within five hours a ranger can get to us? No thanks. I relayed my concerns to the group, and was immediately outvoted. Apparently my hiking party didn’t subscribe to the all around best practice of playing to the most cautious person’s comfort level. M wanted to finish the route so he could say that he did it (pride!), and the others in our group didn’t want to make it so far only to turn back right before the peak (sunk cost fallacy!). They offered to have me sit and wait for them, or to turn back on my own and meet them at Scout Lookout, both options that had me separated from my group and alone on The Ridge of Death, the least safe thing you could do. I weighed whether or not to make a bigger fuss about the whole thing and start fighting a little dirtier, but ultimately decided to press on, albeit with a much worse attitude. Team work!

Well, we made it to Angels Landing and none of us fell off the mountain, so that was a huge win. As expected, the views were breathtaking, and you felt like you were right on the edge of the world.

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There was definitely a sense of relief in having made it to the Landing, but it was too soon to celebrate because we still had to get all the way back, and that trip would be even more treacherous than the trip out. For starters, we were more fatigued going this direction. From a cardio and strength perspective, we were drained. It was also tactically more difficult because we had to either climb down the steep slopes blindly feeling for footholds below, or slide down on our butts facing forward and try not to pick up ANY MOMENTUM AT ALL lest it carry us right over the edge. That said, we felt absolutely no urgency on the way back since this was all we had to do that day and could take frequent breaks. And there was a bit of confidence boost that comes with being the folks that have been there and done that, so to speak. When you’re on the way back across the ridge, you are the upperclassmen telling the freshman and sophomores how far it is to the top, and encouraging them when they’ve already made it past the toughest part.

The euphoria didn’t hit until our boots were on solid ground at Scout Lookout. As soon as we knew we were safe, we were giddy with a sense of accomplishment and pride. Even though we still had a 1,000ft descent ahead of us with the West Rim Trail switchbacks, nothing could touch us. There was only a slight blow to our egos when we stopped our Fitbits at the bottom, and the entire route had taken us 4hrs almost on the nose.

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Do I recommend this trail? No. Would I ever hike it again? Also no. Am I glad I did it? Yes, but only with the benefit of hindsight. The only reason I have any positive sentiment at all toward this hike is that I know we survived it. I can’t make that guarantee to anyone else or even myself on another pass, so I definitely don’t recommend this trail. It was easy to get swept up in the hikers high after completing the route, but I also want to honor my feelings from the mid-point in the hike. When we got to Angels Landing proper, all I saw was a really imbalanced risk vs reward equation, and I remember thinking that it wasn’t worth it. If we are ever back in Zion and I can’t talk the rest of the group out of hiking Angels Landing, I will happily have a picnic at Scout Lookout alone or take one of the easier scenic rim trails while I wait for them to return. As M said, the best part about Angels Landing is that we never have to hike it ever again.

All of that might sound a bit dramatic, but less than a week after our visit to the park, a man fell to his death at Angels Landing. And eight days before our hike, a different man fell to his death from a buttress on the trail leading up to Angels Landing. So within two weeks, that trail racked up two casualties, and our hike was smack dab in the middle of them. You can play the probabilities all you want, but those incidents were much too close for comfort.

One of the best parts of Moab, Utah was its proximity to a couple really cool parks. We hadn’t originally planned on hitting a ton of national parks on this trip – maybe four total – so when our impromptu route change brought us within striking distance of two more, we were pretty stoked. We couldn’t check in to our Airbnb in Hurricane, Utah until 4PM on Friday and it was about a 5hr drive from where we were at in Moab. We figured that we could wake up early, quickly drive through Arches, hit a state park for a hike with Dog before noon, and then see the second national park, Canyonlands, on our way out of town. Now, I’m sure that you, Reader, are doing some elementary calculations right now and can see that 2 national parks + 1 state park + 5hr drive = insanity, but we prefer to keep reality out of the conversation when planning a trip, so this all seemed very reasonable to us.

Arches National Park

Our first stop of the day was at Arches National Park, which again, we assumed we could drive through at a pretty reasonable clip and see everything we needed to see. We allotted at most one hour for this park, but figured with our level of motivation we could be in and out in 35min. The thing about Arches is that it has some short hiking trails, but is mostly a 36mi road that winds around the red rock formations that Utah is famous for, and has a bunch of lookouts where you can pull over, take a picture, and read a little bit about the geological forces at play in the area. And since we had Dog with us in the car and he was not allowed out at any of the trails, we supposed that Arches was basically the National Park Services equivalent of a drive-in movie theater.

Of course, we were wrong.

The first thing that we failed to take into account for our mad dash through Arches was the stunning beauty of the landscape. It had our jaws on the floor the whole time. It made us want to drive 15mph and take it all in. We stopped at every lookout, and took every little diversion road. The red rocks and sandstone formations were so different from what we thought of as “nature” in the Midwest that it absolutely took our breath away at every turn. Just from looking at the map, we had assumed that we could make the drive partway through the park and turn around when time got tight, just cutting the remaining formations and viewpoints from our agenda. But about one mile into the park, we knew we wouldn’t be able to do that, and we would be completing the whole route.

Second on our list of missing the obvious is that we are gigantic nerds. Have you ever been to a park and seen the little plaques with information on the native flora and fauna? Did you also see me and M elbowing school children out of the way so that we could rock-paper-scissors for who got to read the plaque aloud to the other? We live for those suckers. How did that plateau get its name? What did this spot look like 40 million years ago? What kind of rock am I standing on? How did any of this get here? What happens when it rains? Who were the first people to lay eyes on this part of the earth? We know it all because we read the plaques. The way I see it is if a 300 million year old rock wants to tell me a story, I better be educated enough to appreciate it. But that education and storytelling time came at the cost of our quick trip through the park. It was a fair trade, though, as we now know all about the lifecycle of an arch (our favorite thing that we learned), and after that lesson, we were spotting “pre-arches” and “baby arches” left, right, and center.

Lastly, it turns out we did want to get out and hike a little bit! We still had Dog in the car, but it was difficult – nay, impossible! – to turn down the opportunity to get up close and personal with the park’s namesakes. We did a couple little half mile loops and out-and-backs to some of the signature spots in the park, but we couldn’t leave the car for too long because even though it was chilly outside, it was very sunny, and we didn’t want Dog to cook in the car. We did push past our self-imposed away-from-the-car time limit at one stop when we accidentally got lost in the desert on a “primitive trail” around the back of a set of arches. A primitive trail is basically a less friendly, less well-traveled, less obvious way through the wilderness that is more immersive and exploratory. This trail was reasonably marked for about half of the way, and then we totally lost it. There seemed to be only one route we could possibly take over a rocky ledge, but there was clearly Not A Trail where we landed on the other side. We followed the sandy bootprints of some other poor lost hiker before us until we saw a low lying “Stay On Trail” sign in the scrub and picked up the main thoroughfare again. One thing to know, Reader, is that we are huge proponents of park rules – we do not stray from the path, we pack it in and pack it out, we give revegetation areas wide berths, if there is wildlife around we do not approach or agitate – so this was a pretty big blow to our sanctimonious self-bestowed titles of Not Wanderers. But we had to get back to Dog! He was fine, and the car was a comfortable temperature upon our return.

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All in, we spent 3.5hrs in Arches National Park, but we could have spent all day there if we didn’t have somewhere to be, and a pup to entertain. We would absolutely recommend it for anyone in the area, and it was particularly kid and family friendly!

Dead Horse Point State Park

After we blew through basically our entire scheduled park time at Arches, we knew we were going to have to cut a park from the itinerary. It would have been really cool to get Canyonlands in and keep racking up the national park total, but when it came right down to it, Dog made the decision for us. He wasn’t able to get out at all at Arches, and Canyonlands would be more of the same, so we opted for Dead Horse Point State Park (terrible name) which shared a border with Canyonlands and did allow four-legged adventurers on the trails.

A quick conversation with a park ranger at the visitor center led us to the East Rim Trail to Dead Horse Point. It was a 4mi walk around the rim of a pretty massive canyon carved out by the Colorado River. There were stone walls for a lot of the trail and fences at the designated overlooks, but particularly out at Dead Horse Point itself, you could walk right up to the edge. We did not, because that is how you fall off a canyon ledge to your death. For those of you reading this blog, worried about our party of travelers and our proximity to certain death on this trip, don’t be! You wouldn’t know it by looking at us, but we are actually a dream team for not getting too close to the edge. M and Dog are both scared of heights, and while great heights do not have any particular effect on me, I do have a healthy fear of falling to my death in an unsecured environment. Also, I love everything about safety. At several points in my adult life, I have seriously considered changing my middle name to Safety. J Safety Something or Other – it has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, I like my current middle name and also know that Safety has some sort of football connotation, and I don’t need anyone thinking that I like football. The only thing at odds with our dream team operations is that Dog is a little bit stupid, and we are nervous that he might chase a blowing leaf or a sun spot from a watch right over the edge of cliff without knowing that it is a cliff. So we are always on high alert for that enthusiasm to manifest itself, and try to keep Dog at least a leash length away from all edges of everything always.

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Anyway, we didn’t fall off a cliff, and we got to see some awesome views! This stop was a perfect way to stretch our legs before we settled in for the 5hr drive west. The timing, of course, was way off from our plan, and we didn’t hit the road until about the time we should have been checking in at the next place. We definitely could have killed another couple of days in this part of the country, but adventure was calling our names elsewhere!

We spent a few days in Denver on either end of our trip to the mountains and it was a whirlwind of seeing friends, seeing the city, and testing our theory that we could successfully work the hours of a different time zone than the one we were physically located in. Our major takeaways? Denver is awesome and so are the people that live there. We could have easily doubled the amount of time we spent in the city and still never had a dull moment.

M’s cousin and childhood friends both graciously opened their homes to us for our time in Denver, and between seeing them, some of their friends, and one of my best friends from my college days, it was way more social interaction than we’ve had in the last year. We were lucky that most of that population had been vaccinated, but even luckier that Denver’s famously sunny days allowed us to stick primarily to outdoor activities like hiking Red Rocks, brewery patios (we hit three different breweries during our three total nights in Denver), or game night on the front porch. It just felt so good to be outside and not immediately turn into an ice sculpture! Working from Colorado didn’t go as smoothly as socializing from Colorado did, but we managed. After a short week of 6AM logins (and a few 5AM logins because I am still working on setting boundaries), we were totally wiped, and not at all looking forward to a whole month of that skewed schedule. It’s not rocket science, but somehow we hadn’t really considered until then that if we were waking up for Central Time mornings, our bedtimes should be based on Central Time evenings. WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED??

While we were in Denver our plans for the next leg of the trip changed a bit. Diligent readers of this blog will recall that we had planned to have a one-night “layover” in Salt Lake City on our way to southern Utah, but when we had to adjust our route to dodge some winter weather in the mountains, it no longer made sense to drive up to Salt Lake City. Instead, we charted a course straight to our Airbnb in Hurricane, UT and picked a city at the halfway point to spend Thursday night. That city was Moab.

A quick Google search of Moab turns up a cute little town that is right on the edge of adventure! After booking a one night stay at the Expedition Lodge (a delightfully renovated motel), we found ourselves suddenly within striking distance of two more national parks – Arches, and Canyonland – and several state and local parks. We figured we could wake up early on Friday and knock out a hike or two at each park and then finish up the last 5hrs of the drive to Hurricane. As is our tendency when planning a day of hiking, we completely disregarded the physical limitations of time, space, and the human body, so we didn’t accomplish near what we had planned, but you’ll read about that in our next post.

All in all, our stay in Moab was way too short. The town looked like it would have been super fun to bum around in for an afternoon and there were so many options for outdoor adventures in Utah’s signature red rock landscape. When we were checking in at the motel, the receptionist asked if we had ever been to Moab before, and when I said it was our first visit, she responded matter of factly, “Oh, you’ll be back,” and handed me my keys. Originally we thought that that was a pretty cocky response from the front desk worker of a roadside motel in a town we had only just learned existed two days prior, but it turns out she was totally right. Before we had even finished breakfast on Friday, M was trying to plan a return trip.

For our first weekend in Colorado, we decided to head north and west of our home base in Denver to the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. We spent three nights in a teeny tiny, very cute cabin in Grand Lake, Colorado with M’s cousin. Our very ambitious plan was to go for at least two hikes each day – one in the morning with Dog to get him tired out, then a longer one in RMNP where Dog is not welcome because he’s a dog, and the national park is a national park. Unfortunately, we failed to take into account several different factors of mountain hiking, like our own physical fitness (hello altitude!), how far away various trails are from one another, and road/trail conditions due to various weather events. In 2020, Colorado experienced the three biggest and most destructive fires in the history of the state. The forests around us in Grand Lake had been absolutely decimated by the East Troublesome fire in October of last year, so a lot of trails and parts of parks that we had intended to hike were closed due to fire damage. So we had to adjust our plans on the fly. As it happens, we got to do exactly one hike per day, and that was perfect. And, contrary to our expectations, we only got one hike in at RMNP, but the entire weekend was still very cool.

Snowshoeing at the Nordic Center

This “hike” was actually a backup plan used to salvage a day that was otherwise bereft of physical activities. And it was one of my favorites! After spending more than two hours in the car trying to dodge road closures and find a suitable dog-friendly hike, we ended up calling our Airbnb host and, on her recommendation, the Grand Lake Chamber of Commerce (lol) who directed us to the Nordic Center. This place had cross country skiing, sled dog training, snowshoeing, and… no hiking. Sometimes if the snow is packed down enough, you can get permission to walk on snowshoe trails, but that wasn’t the case here. We were nervous to try a brand new sport with Dog, but snowshoeing seemed like it had the lowest barrier to entry and honestly, we were sick of driving around. So we strapped on our snowshoes and off we went!

Walking in snowshoes took a little bit of getting used to, but ultimately, it didn’t slow us down too much. The snow was up to our knees in most places on the trail and well past it in a lot of others. We know this because Dog had absolutely no qualms about tearing off trail to do a wacky donut or two in the powder. On a related note, if you’ve never seen a dog get the zoomies in snow drifts as tall as they are, I would highly recommend it. Dog looked like a slow motion antelope, or maybe a really, really graceless dolphin as he tried to crest the snow drifts with each leap. He gets an A for effort, an A+ for enthusiasm, and a D for execution. But the altitude, the constant manic motion, and the resistance from the snow combined to make one tired pup. When we got back to the cabin around 4:30PM, Dog crashed and slept through until morning.

All in all, we had a There were only a few portions of the trail where we had to do much climbing, and with the exception of a few massive snowballs that got caught on the spikes, the snowshoes worked flawlessly. We experienced that weird mountain phenomenon where even though there were feet of snow on the ground and the temperatures were below freezing, the sun was bright and warm, and we were much too toasty in our jackets. We shed those pretty immediately, and were rocking the sunglasses, winter hat and long sleeve T look that ski bums pull off so effortlessly, but that made me feel like I was dressed by a toddler. But it worked! The hike was very scenic, but rather tragically so. The fires from last year had hit the Nordic Center trails, so the forests that we were hiking through weren’t much more than clusters of sooty sticks. The devastation from the fires meant that we could see for miles and miles at pretty much every point on the trail, which would be the closest thing to a silver lining I could muster.

We saw a few other snowshoers on the trail, but the most notable was a group of women we offered to photograph at the end of a trail. When I counted down to the picture, one of them said “Saaaaaay Fireball!” which definitely caught our attention. Then they tossed us a travel sized bottle of Fireball whiskey and gave us instructions for making a “Fireball snow cone” which I will graciously share with you, Reader: when the conditions are right, simply scoop up a handful of snow and form it into a snowball, add a splash of Fireball (which you will of course be always carrying in your pack, like the health and fitness icon you are), and take a bite!

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Monarch Lake Loop Trail in Arapahoe National Forest

On our second full day in Grand Lake we were determined not to make the same mistake as the day before. We had our hike to Monarch Lake mapped out and we were ready to rock and roll first thing in the morning. We had heard that Monarch Lake had some of the most picturesque scenery in the whole state, and the Arapahoe Natl. Forest was largely welcoming to dogs – a win win! Plus, this area was mercifully untouched by the fires, so it was all lush evergreens and clean snow. On the day we hiked (and indeed, every day that we were in Grand Lake), the morning forecast was quite gray, overcast, and snowy, but the clouds burned off around midday and the sunlight polished those mountaintops right up.

The road to the trailhead was closed about a mile from that actual start of the trail. That was fine, except that it made the hike two miles longer than we had expected, and if you’ve ever tried hiking up and down a mountain in the snow, you know that those extra miles don’t go very quickly. But still, we were undeterred. M and I both had Yaktrax that gave us traction on the ice and snowpack, and all of us had hiking poles which turned out to be instrumental in finding the hard packed snow of the trail vs the loose snowdrifts to the left and right. The big miss on this day was that we didn’t make Dog wear his fashionable yet functional snow booties and jacket. It was definitely cold enough to warrant them, and especially in the more exposed parts of the trail, he was asking for paw warm-ups pretty frequently.

Once we got to the trailhead, the path seemed to take a pretty basic 4mi loop around the lake. We arrived at the same time as a pair of snowshoers, so we each set off in a different direction around the lake and joked that we’d cross paths on the other side, but oddly, we never saw them again. This was one of a few indicators that suggested to us that we may have taken a wrong turn at some point, but we made it back to the trailhead and the mileage roughly matched up to what was on the map, so who knows what happened.

This hike was moderately difficult due to uneven terrain, steep inclines, and the abundant opportunities to posthole. “Posthole” was a new word we learned on this trip, and had to use literally constantly. In this context, it refers to breaking through the snowpack of a well-traveled trail and sinking through to the ground. Your leg is the post, and the hole is the hole. Posthole. This trail was narrow and it was easy to misstep off of either edge, resulting in a boot and pant leg full of snow. Plus we had some downed trees and other obstacles that we had to climb over, under, or around. It was fun, but definitely not for the unmotivated hiker! We remarked a couple of times that it would have been really difficult to complete this hike with any more or less gear than we had with us. Also, we’re pretty sure we missed a moose by less than an hour while we were about 1/3 of the way around the lake. We saw deep, narrow tracks in the fresh snow, and as soon as we came upon them, Dog got really scared and moved from his position in the lead to back behind M, safely in the middle of the pack. He didn’t relax for a few hundred feet, but after he put his hackles down we figured the danger had passed. We’re really glad we didn’t come face to face with a moose because those guys can be unpredictable, and we had the added wildcard of the deaf pitbull who might not understand our moose confrontation deescalation protocol in a crisis. Shoutout to M’s cousin for instilling in us a healthy fear of moose encounters!

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Colorado River Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park

We hit this trail on our way out of town, but that doesn’t mean it’s an afterthought! We desperately wanted to get at least one hike in at RMNP while we were in that part of the state, and the park ranger’s recommendation was to hike up along the Colorado River. There was an out and back trail (usually not our favorites, since you see the same things twice) that could go as far as 8mi up the river. We had a time constraint because we had to be back to the Airbnb to check out and pick up Dog, so we set an alarm and tried to make it as far as possible before the buzzer.

The benefit of hiking on a snowy Monday morning is that you basically have the entire world to yourself. We made it about 1.75mi before turning back, and didn’t see another soul. This trail was primarily used for snowshoers and cross country skiers, but was approved for hiking as well. It seemed as if we were the first hikers in a while though, and the snowpack wasn’t super solid, so we had another chance to try out our new vocab word! Plus, this trail had some portions that were completely obscured by windblown snow. It was a total guessing game to try and find the trail, and we postholed on maybe 60% of our steps in those areas. But the trees were perfectly frosted, the mountaintops delightfully snowcapped, and the river was running despite the freezing forecast. Between all that and the lightly falling snow, we really felt like we were enjoying the perfect Colorado morning.

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Hot Sulfur Springs

This was not a hike, but rather an outdoor bath in little cement pools fed by natural springs. If that sounds delightful after a weekend full of mountain hiking, it was! If that sounds weird as an outdoor winter activity, it was! The hot springs resort we visited allowed groups or individuals to make 2hr reservations that would give them access to their mountainside maze of 15 different pools. The higher up the mountain you went, the hotter the pools were. We made a reservation for three people in the 6PM – 8PM time slot.

Although we arrived right on time for our reservation, a lot of the bigger, hotter pools were already pretty crowded by the time we were choosing a spot to soak. We ended up finding a tiny cement pool about halfway up the mountain. It was set way off the path with high walls on three sides, and the temp clocked in at 107°. We stayed there for about an hour before we started steaming like little dumplings in a sulfur soup. At that point M made the courageous decision to get out of the pool for a Gatorade run and recon mission, where he discovered a bigger, cooler (both in temperature and location) pool near the bottom of the mountain. We all braved the freezing cold night to secure the prime real estate. This one was more open to the air, and had the spring water flowing into the pool from a spout about 15ft up the tiled wall. Overall, it was a delightful experience right up until we had to get out and shuffle run to our car before we froze into popsicles.

Well, that’s it for Omaha! We were only there for about 38hrs total, with most of that time spent working or sleeping, so time really flew by!

We stayed at the Embassy Suites in Old Market, which has been a favorite of mine since I went to school in Omaha due to a.) the multilevel koi pond, river, and tropical plant landscape that wove in and around the entire lobby and first two floors, and b.) possibly the best hotel breakfast this side of the Mississippi. Since my time at university, the koi pond has actually been removed (and I assume all the many hundreds of koi found loving homes) and the jungle landscape replaced with a tamer, more modern plant- and light-scape, but it is still very zen and cool. Add in the awesome location, the fact that nearly all the rooms are two-room suites, and that there is a nightly happy hour with free drinks and snacks that you literally couldn’t pay us to miss, and this is the best stay in town. Unfortunately, COVID ruined most of the hotel experience for us. Breakfasts were served in prepackaged bags, and we weren’t super comfortable using the common areas of the hotel, like the gym, pool, or business center, that would set a hotel stay apart from a stay in a home. And even though the hotel had a mandatory mask policy that the staff demonstrated flawlessly, only about 30% of hotel guests actually wore a mask when moving about the hotel, in FLAGRANT noncompliance with the posted signs and general pandemic etiquette. And there were a ton of guests there for it being the middle of the week! So between the near certainty of viral exposure inside the hotel, and the bitingly cold temperatures outside, we spent probably 90% of our time in our suite.

We only left the hotel to retrieve food and for one walk up and down my old campus. Anyone who has ever visited Omaha can attest that the restaurant scene is one of the cooler parts of the city. Omaha is a really artsy and eclectic city for how agrarian the economy of rest of the state is AND it has the most restaurants per capita of any major US city (I didn’t fact check that little tidbit when I heard it on a campus tour 10 years ago, and I’m going to ask that you, Reader, extend me the same courtesy). There are all kinds of global food options, as well as a ton of trendier choices for the foodie in all of us, so narrowing the world of possibilities down to two lunches and one dinner was a heartbreaking decision. Ultimately, we took the nostalgia tour and hit up three restaurants we had been to before. We went with M’s Pub for lunch, and if you can believe it, TOTALLY FORGOT to take a picture of M in front of the sign. Ugh. Then we turned our campus walk into dinner pickup at The Blatt for some heavy bar food. And our last trip out of the hotel was to get lunch the next day at The Grove Juicery and Wellness Cafe. This is the one I really want to talk about. One thing to know about M and me, Reader, is that we both have pretty indulgent personalities. We are big fans of the whole Treat Yo’ Self movement, and have huge problems with impulse control while shopping, particularly for food. Ideally, someone with these known personality flaws would gravitate toward a partner who provides a little pragmatism as a check and balance on the frequent “I deserve this!” and “Why the hell not?” justifications flying about. Well, we didn’t. We found each other and grew our problem exponentially by adding in a likeminded enabler. Where am I going with all of this? We spent more than $50 for lunch at the juicery. We bought acai bowls and added in superfood after superfood. We mixed in boosters for energy and focus and had them sprinkle adaptogens (a word I was pretty positive they made up until I typed it out just now and there was no spell check on it…) on top. We ordered wellness shots in tiny little 2oz bottles. And the best/worst part is that we absolutely do not subscribe to any of the hocus pocus about the efficacy of these “wellness treatments” – we just like to egg each other on.

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The only other thing of note that we did was the campus walk. It is an important day in every graduate’s life when she gets to show her dog around campus. Because of the freezing temps, and also probably the pandemic, there weren’t very many students on campus, and almost no one stopped to oooh and ahhhh (or possibly we couldn’t hear them through their masks) over how cute Dog was in his jacket and booties, so he was feeling incredibly cheated. Dog says Creighton is still on his short list, but that he’s going to consider other colleges as well before making his final decision.

We had planned to pack up whenever we found spare time throughout the day on Thursday, load the car around 2:30PM, and then collect our final items (wallets, work computers, Dog, snacks) at the end of the workday, check out, and be on the road by 4:30PM. Interestingly though, the universe had other plans and we ended up making a hasty departure from the city. It was about 3:15PM and while we had loaded the bellhop cart, we hadn’t yet made the trip down to the car to load up. Then the fire alarm went off. If there is one thing to know about me, Reader, it is that I love safety. I was ready to grab the car keys, Dog, a jacket, and proceed in an orderly fashion to my nearest exit. In my mind, we could wait it out in the car, and if it was a false alarm, we’d be back in a few minutes, and if it was a real fire, great, we made it out with our lives. M had a different perspective. In his mind’s eye, he saw a situation where there was a real fire event, we evacuate without any of our possessions, aren’t allowed back into the hotel for hours, and are dramatically delayed departing Omaha for Denver. Or even worse, the fire burns down the hotel and all of our clothing, supplies, and work materials, and we need to just drive back home, cancelling our trip altogether. He thought we should throw the rest of our stuff onto the cart as quickly as possible and hit the road for Denver. All the while, the fire alarm is blaring.

A quick recap of all the ill-advised things we did while the fire alarm was sounding:

• Made several visual sweeps of the open floor plan to determine the “legitimacy” of the fire alarm
• Had a reasoned discussion about whether to keep working, evacuate, or make a break for the car and flee the state altogether
• Decided to flee the state altogether
• Collected all of our remaining worldly possessions to make one big trip to the car
• Took the elevator
• Stopped by the front desk to check out of our room
• Propped the side doorway open with our loaded bellhop cart causing the responding firemen to have to use the revolving door
• Pulled the car around to the check-in/check-out rotunda which also happened to be a Fire Lane – Do Not Block kind of situation
• Packed the car in record time under the disapproving gaze of all hotel guests at the safety rendezvous point

The good news is that while it wasn’t a total false alarm, it was a very low risk fire event. The fire department responded, but they were chill about it. They had already parked their engines and trucks outside the fire lane before we pulled our car in. But still. Do as I say, friends, not as I do.

Our departure date is approaching fast! That means I only have a few days to tell you, Reader, what our plans and goals are so that you can hold us to them!

While we are in Arizona, we plan to keep working Central Time hours. Both M and I tend to keep a 7AM to 4PM schedule at our jobs. Although this will mean logging on at 5AM for the majority of the trip, it also means that we will be done working by 2PM every day, which is definitely a fair trade. We plan to do local hikes in the evenings on weekdays and make longer trips on the weekends. Right now we only have four vacation days scheduled during our trip, as we want to try and save some of those for important things that are happening later in the year. We do have two more floating vacation days that we can take if we need them, but we’re kind of hoping we don’t have to. We also purchased the Arizona state parks pass for 2021, so we’ll really need to get after it if we want to make that purchase worthwhile.

We have three main goals for our trip:

1. Go for a hike or walk every day (excluding travel days). What constitutes a walk vs a hike, you ask? Most people think it has to do with the terrain, but it is actually much simpler than that. It is a walk if I have my tennis shoes on, it is a hike if I have my hiking boots on, it is nothing if I have my Birkenstocks on. For the hike or walk to count for the sake of this exercise, we must also be hitting at least 10,000 steps every day as well. If we hit 9,900 steps in a day, no dice.
2. Play each one of our games once a week. That’s right, Internet, we’re Games People^TM in addition to Parks People^TM. Through the many long months of this pandemic, we have tried seemingly every two-person game on Planet Earth, and we have come away with clear favorites. Of our favorite two-person games, only three travel well, so we set out on the trip toting Morels, Hive, and a deck of cards for gin rummy. The reason we want to include a goal to play games on our trip is to break up the routine of work, hike, Netflix, sleep that we think we could fall into pretty easily. The games give us something else to focus on, plus they’re fun.
3. Dry March. This one is pretty simple, but we don’t want to drink any alcohol for a month. We won’t be going to any bars or breweries or anything once we hit AZ, so if we wanted alcohol, we’d have to buy it to keep around the Airbnb. We figured we might as well save the money and calories and just skip the casual beers. I’m not a big drinker to begin with so this isn’t a huge sacrifice, but I will participate in solidarity.