Sand

This morning we got the bad news that none of our geo-fenced lottery permits had come through. It wasn’t too surprising, but it meant we had no plans for the day. Should we just call it and drive home? Should we try to find some other feature to explore? We opted to visit one of the other amazing places inside Vermilion Cliffs National Monument that Mark had heard about. None of us knew anything about it other than it’s usually pretty crowded because it’s supposed to be pretty awesome. I have never hiked Coyote Buttes at all. I haven’t seen The Wave in person. But I can’t imagine it’s any better than what we experienced at White Pocket. This place was amazing and we had it completely to ourselves. There were a couple people there when we arrived, but they all left before we walked out to the formations. It doesn’t get better than that. ...

Mother’s Day weekend is a great weekend to go camping. Nobody else is doing it. We decided to head east to Kanab, Utah with some of our friends from Orem. It never turns out how we thought we wanted it to, but sometimes it turns out great. This was one of those times. When we decided to move to Southern Utah, I thought we would probably visit Zion National Park all the time. It’s been 18 months and we haven’t been even once. We actually visited Zion more often when we lived hundreds of miles away. That may seem pretty pathetic until you realize we are surrounded by magical places that we haven’t ever seen. One of those places is Vermillion Cliffs National Monument. ...

We have wanted to go into Wadi Rum ever since our first taste of Jordan back in 2011. We drove past Wadi Rum on our way to Petra that day. It looked amazing - like a completely unique and separate version of Southern Utah. We always wanted to come back and see it, but with so many new places to go, it looked like it might not happen. Luckily, that first trip to Petra was way too short and we didn’t get to see all the things we wanted. So it was easy to convince us to come back to Jordan, spend a whole day at Petra, and then go camping in Wadi Rum. It sounded just about perfect. ...