Utah - Day 1

Several delays and two missed connections later, we finally arrived in Salt Lake City the morning after we were really supposed to...and then after wast-, I mean waiting, 2 and a half hours in an airport, our bags finally joined us in SLC.  All told, this set us back about 5 hours in our planned schedule, but somehow Steve and I got through what we had planned today on only four hours of sleep!  I hope you appreciate how dedicated I am to write this blog right now, because I am fighting sleep as I type this.

Once our bags came, we were out of the airport as fast as traffic laws would allow.  We headed out of SLC towards Dinosaur National Monument.  Most people go somewhere warm on spring break...SLC welcomed us with snow.  I absolutely despise snow, but in the mountains, I find it much more tolerable and quite frankly, stunning.  I really don't know what we were looking at here, as far as a name of the place goes, but this snow covered lake was huge and very pretty.  So pretty, that we stopped for a quick picture, which doesn't do it any justice at all.

 

Once we got through the mountains, the weather changed drastically and we lost the snow and welcomed mid-50's weather!  Dinosaur National Monument was our first stop.  Part of this park is in Utah and the other part (more so than the Utah part) is in Colorado.  Unfortunately, on the Colorado side, there is still plenty of snow, so it is closed for now.  So we stuck to the Utah side which is the side that has the actual fossils found of dinosaurs from 145 million years ago!  We were just in Waco Mammoth National Monument in Texas a few weeks ago, and we were blown away by that park.  But Dinosaur NM is WAY better!  Not only do they have more to show, but they even let you touch real fossils!

Thanks to our flight issues yesterday, we had to cut our visit short at Dinosaur and we only saw the fossils.  But what is really cool about Dinosaur is that it's two parks in one:  the fossils, and then a very scenic park!  We had every intention to do the scenic drive here, but we just couldn't because of time if we still wanted to see Colorado National Monument.  We had already decided we'd be back at some point so that we could see the Colorado side of Dinosaur when it is open in the summer, so we didn't feel entirely bad cutting this one short.  It will definitely be worth going back to because the very small taste we had was awesome!

Our next stop was Colorado National Monument.  On our way, we spotted some elk off in the distance.  We were probably a football field away from them, but their butts are hard to miss!  ;-)

Sadly, the Colorado NM Visitor's Center was closed when we got there, so no stamp, magnet, postcard, or Christmas ornament for us.  On the plus side though, the park is always open.  We got there around 6:00, so we only had an hour to do the 23 mile scenic drive before we lost daylight.  This park was incredible!  We stopped at almost every single scenic overlook including Balanced Rock, Independence Monument, Coke Ovens Overlook, and Fallen Rock (the rock face just slid off years ago...maybe Sara and John were there a while back ;-)!).  These are all shown in order below after the general canyon overlook picture.

Colorado National Monument is home to some bighorn sheep, which is always a highlight for me when we see them in a park.  About halfway through the scenic drive with no bighorn sightings, I started to say to Steve as I'm staring out the passenger window looking as high up as I can, that I guess we just weren't going to see any today.  Next thing I know, Steve slams on the breaks because we saw this little bighorn just hanging out on the side of the road!  This late in the evening, we had the park to ourselves, so we stopped the car and took a couple pictures.  Wildlife sightings are always such a treat!

We ended the night with dinner and beer in small glasses at Moab Brewery (sadly our only brewery on this trip).  Really good beer - their seasonal Nut Brown is quite delicious!  The funny thing is, after we ordered samples of all the beers, they informed us that Utah law only allows us to have 2 alcoholic beverages in front of one person.  So we were served our sampler two at a time, which gave us a little chuckle.

Stay tuned for more of our Utah trip!  Tomorrow's parks includes Arches National Park, Natural Bridges National Monument, and Hovenweep National Monument.