Andrew and I took our camper van on her Maiden Voyage this last week to Colorado and Utah! I'll be posting a ton more info in the next week of everything we did, things off the beaten path, how van life treated us, what we learned about van life and more on my travel blog that you can check out here! We started at the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado and did one of the hardest hikes of our lives called Star Dune! Star Dune is tied with another sand dune for the tallest sand dune in North America.
We slept at "wild camping" spots every night which means they're free and usually don't have any sort of facilities by them. This was one of our favorite spots we found!
We drove to Monument Valley and had to get a photo in front of "Forrest Gump Point" since we met working at Bubba Gumps!
Next we made our way to Zion. We hiked to "Observation Point" which looks down on Angel's Landing. We want to do Angel's Landing some day but it wasn't in the books for this trip.
Then we made our way to Bryce Canyon. Bryce Canyon ended up being my favorite of Utah's Mighty 5 National Parks!
The biggest perk of living out of a camper van is that you can decide to go somewhere that wasn't in the plan if you hear/see something new! I was doing some research during our drives and found Factory Butte and Moonscape Landing as top places to see in Utah. This is Factory Butte:
And this is Moonscape Landing! I won't lie and say this overlook wasn't terrifying, but it was SO freaking cool. And you can wild camp right next to all of this so we spent a little extra time here instead of getting up and leaving right away in the morning. I have to say this was probably the craziest landscape we saw the entire trip. Looking out on it, it really felt like we were camping on the moon.
We hit up Capitol Reef next and did some hiking!
We really wanted to see the Bentonite Hills by the Mars Desert Research Center but we weren't positive that our van would make it after reading about the road to get there so instead we checked out these "Painted Hills" by Hanksville, UT. We climbed to the top and this is what was on the other side!
We hiked a couple different slot canyons as well called "Red Hollow" & "Wire Pass to Bulkskin Gulch". This specific one we had to do some "chimneying" (a climbing technique where you use your back against one wall of a narrow canyon and your feet against the other wall) to get through part of it!
We made our way into Moab and had quite possibly the best donuts of our life at a place called Doughbird!
The day we had planned for Arches and Canyonlands didn't go quite as planned. We got up for a sunrise hike and it was pouring rain. We tried to still explore a bit but we weren't prepared with rain gear and apparently it hadn't even rained in a month so we were a little unlucky there. I tried to improvise with a trash bag at one point to try and stay a little dry lol.
The rain continued on and off the rest of the day. We headed to Canyonlands and it did clear up towards the end. Behind all those clouds are the La Sal Mountains and once those started poking through it added so much more to Canyonlands!
One last story that I'm sure I'll talk about on the show. When we were hiking in Bryce Canyon, we were getting to the end of a loop trail and saw a bunch of rescue teams. A guy had slipped over the edge and luckily was still alive but hurt badly. The rescue teams wouldn't let us through so we had to do the loop again to get back to our car. So happy the guy was okay but also a great reminder to be extremely careful when you're near the edge of cliffs. (In this picture the guy that fell is hidden towards the bottom left corner and there's a medic in an orange helmet helping him. He fell from where the guy in the yellow jacket is standing).
I feel like we were gone for a month with all the places we went and things we saw and now I'm ready to be back on the show tomorrow :)