Canyonlands; Getting There

I have been racking my brain trying to figure out the best possible way to write about our vacation. Each hike its own blog, group the parks together, by districts we visited. All and all I have decided to group the short hikes all together by district and Arches as its own. Also I will put the two longest hikes in their own posts. This post I will tell you the beginning of our adventure.

We left here on Friday the 25th of March at 4:30. Driving south on highway 89 towards Alpine. I'm not going to go through all of the directions to get there, lets just say that the trip is long and takes many Wyoming, Idaho and Utah back roads until eventually you hit the Highway near Salt Lake. After a few hundred miles your back to the two lane roads. Canyonlands has two entrances, from UT-181, the first entrance is to the Island in the Sky District. We were camping in the Needles District. So we kept going, we passed the entrance to Arches and then on through Moab. About 30-40 miles south of Arches is the turn into Canyonlands, well more appropriately the turn that takes you to the entrance. It is on the right hand side of the road, I think its Highway 211. then you keep on driving 22 miles to the entrance station.

The drive in is beautiful and slowly takes you through the desert terrain into the magnificence of The Needles District. We arrived at about 4 in the morning, and drove through the campgrounds, Squaw Flatt has an "A" and "B" sites. None were open so we parked at the visitors center and slept.

Around sunrise we woke up and drove around the campgrounds again looking for a site. Luckily someone was leaving and noticed we were looking. They told us they were leaving and that we could have their spot. So we paid for campsite 24 in loop "B" and set up camp, while the kids had cereal for breakfast.

After Kevin and I had the tent up, we made lunch and set out to explore Canyonlands, Needles District.