Day 72 - Lake Powell Ferry, Natural Bridges, Bears Ears & Gooseneck, UT

Today was a very long day, I still don't know how we managed to cram so much in.

We started the day off by needing to get to the other side of Lake Powell. There are two options to do this. The first is a 2-hour trip going back the way we came to the very top of Lake Powell and crossing via a bridge at Hite. The second option was a 20 minute ferry crossing from Bullfrog to Halls Crossing which runs every 2 hours and costs $25 per car. We went for the ferry! Asides from it being so much quicker, it was a lot of fun. When we arrived at the ferry, we thought we might have had the times wrong and had missed it as we were the only ones waiting. It turns out we were the only car that got the ferry at 9am that morning and we enjoyed our own private ferry crossing.

It wasn't just the ferry we had to ourselves today, we also had a lot of long empty roads with no other cars. Great for making car related videos but maybe not so great had we broken down or got lost! We had a lot of fun shooting videos but only a small number made it into the final blog video, we didn't want it to be too boring.

After the fun of the ferry and then Highway 276, we headed to our first stop for the day, Natural Bridges National Monument.

In 1883 Cass Hite wandered up to this canyon from his camp at the Colorado River where he was hoping to find gold. Instead, he found three amazing bridges. President Theodore Roosevelt made them into a National Monument in 1908 and they became Utah's first (of many) National Park area. Given how many National Parks and National Monuments there are in Utah, it was great to see where it all started.

The three bridges have a number of names. You'll see from the video that Lee calls them by their Hopi Tribe names Sipapu (means 'place of emergence' and is the place the Hopi believed they came into the World), Kachna (named after rock art symbols) and Owachomo (means 'rock mound', a feature on top of this bridge). Other names include President, Senator and Congressman (in order of height) and Augusta, Caroline and Edwin. I think I prefer the Hopi version!

We initially only planned to do the drive around the National Monument which has a number of vistas for viewing the three bridges and surrounding landscape but when we visited Sipapu Bridge we saw people who had hiked down and decided we needed to do that too!

Although from a mileage perspective, the hike wasn't very long it was tough both getting down and getting back up. It involved a lot of stairs, ladders, boulder climbing, walking along a rock face and a very steep gradient which burned the back of your legs whether it was going up or going down. Despite the difficultly, it was a huge amount of fun and all the obstacles actually broke up the burning legs plus we had a lot of laughs along the way both at each other and other poor hikers, especially those struggling on the ladders.

I had originally wanted to visit the US's newest National Monument, one that was declared by President Obama just before he left office, Bears Ears National Monument.

When we saw the road to get to Bears Ears, we quickly changed our minds about visiting. I'm not sure its even accessible with a 4x4, you would need a tank! Asides from this monument being so new, there might be another reason why its not very accessible yet.

Last December, President Trump announced that he was reducing Bears Ears National by 85%, at the same time he also cut the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (designated by President Bill Clinton in 1996) by nearly half. Why were both of these Utah National Monument reduced in size? Minerals, oil and gas. With them no longer protected by the National Park Service, they were open to private companies to drill and mine them.

Presidents in the past have made minor adjustments to monument boundaries but never before has a president cut the size of a National Monument so drastically. The 5 tribes who see Bears Ears as a sacred site along with conservation groups are currently going through the courts. Until this concludes, Bears Ears will probably remain remote and undeveloped as it currently is.

Whilst we were in the visitors center at Natural Bridges, we got talking to a Park Ranger about our trip and our driving plan for the day. He warned us that the route we were taking, Highway 261, was going to take us through the Moki Dugway, a 23 mile road that takes you from the top of a canyon to the bottom via hairpin turns, shear drops, boulders, huge potholes and single lane unmade roads. He even showed us a picture of the road to get across how bad it is. We both went back to the car and looked at the map. Without doing this road, it was going to be a huge detour plus according to the map it was a major highway and not even a country road let alone a dirt track, there is no way a major highway would be a bad as the park ranger made out....... we were wrong! The road was just as bad as he said and I wonder how many other people have looked at the road atlas and been shocked when they see the state of this supposedly 'major' road. Luckily, with Lee's good and very slow driving, we got down in one piece and without any damage to Fin.

Despite the road conditions, the views were out of this world. We came down the canyon into an area called Valley of the Gods and it was a breathtaking moment where you realise just how small you are compared to the rest of the world. Maybe this road is like this for a reason, a metaphor for life or maybe just to give you an appreciation of the landscape you are trying to reach.

Our next stop was a Gooseneck State Park. This is a tiny state park, you drive through the gate and into a small parking lot where you look over the edge. But once you look over the edge, you realise why this park doesn't need to be any bigger. You look down on the San Juan River where it has created a number of tight menders. As you look down, you do appreciate the power of nature, the years it must have taken to create this shape and the sheer power the water must have to have eroded so much rock but also to create these goosenecks.

Next stop was Mexican Hat, a balanced rock which looks like a man wearing a Mexican hat. We hadn't planned this stop but saw a road sign pointing to a small dirt track and decided to go for it, Lee clearly not put off enough by his previous dirt track driving experience! It was a short drive and a short stop where we just took a couple of pictures and then debated whether he really looked Mexican and whether he was looking happy or sad.

Our final stop for the day was Monument Valley but to get there, we had to drive along one of the most photographed roads in America, Route 163. Its a long straight road which heads straight for the buttes in the distance. When we visited this road 8 years ago, we were the only ones on it. This time, we were with a lot of tourists and it made taking photos very difficult (unless you wanted a bus of Japanese tourists in your shot). It also made driving this road very difficult with people jumping out into the road to take family photos and selfies. You have to wonder how long it will be until there is a serious accident!

We finally made it to Monument Valley and the first thing we did was to have a shower! This was the first campsite for a couple of days with showers and after all our hikes, nights in the tent, and kayaking at Lake Powell, we stunk!