Well hello there Capitol Reef

We pulled into Capitol Reef National Park a little after noon today. The drive went really fast. Danielle drives the Subaru and I drive the RV incase you were wondering. The first couple drives with the RV I would sit there and hit the 'scan' button on the radio over and over to try and find something to listen to. I would mostly end up listening to country, but I even found a native american station once. I finally got smart and just loaded a couple podcasts on my iPod and now I drive with one headphone in. The time flew today.

Anyways, we pulled into our new campground, which we love. It's a really small place and they have chickens, horses and a dog named Dylan. The view is really great too. Since it was already mid afternoon we decided to head straight into Capitol Reef National Park and stop by the visitor center. We bought a map of the hikes in the area and spoke to a friendly Ranger who pointed out a couple hikes to do today. She also let us know that one of the things we really wanted to do, Glass Mountain, would be off limits unless we had a 'high clearance vehicle.' So we ended up picking two hikes that the ranger recommended and off we went!

The first hike was called Chimney Rock which was a 3.5 mile loop where we climbed up onto a ridge to the north of Highway 24. Once we topped out the views were breathtaking. Huge walls of sandstone on one side and a geologically puzzling rise on the other.

The next hike we did was back south through the park and then we turned off onto a dirt road and drove through this amazing gorge called the Capitol Gorge, driving through these rocks felt like being in a IMAX movie. The road was barely wide enough to pull off tight to one side and let another car pass, so I'd say it was a 1.5 lane road. On either side of you rose up these 200 foot sandstone cliffs. The hike wasn't much different. It wasn't exactly a slot canyon but it wasn't more than 10 feet wide and the whole time you were flanked by sandstone. We saw a set of petroglyphs that were.. meh.. they were okay. The really awesome man-made thing on this hike was a 'pioneer register,' basically it's a place where pioneers and early settlers came and carved their names on the stone of the walls. I believe the earliest date we saw was in the 1890's. Unfortunately, the latest dated carving we saw was possibly from last summer, there was a lot of graffiti. At first I was kind of sad seeing this, then it hit me that the authors of the new carvings were no different than the authors of the old carvings.. they're just men claiming nature as their own with a knife.

It was a great first day here in Capitol Reef, such a beautiful place and it's amazing to me that there aren't more people who visit or talk about this park. After our hikes we came back home and had a very fancy dinner, prepared by me, world-renowned chef Tommy O'Connor. On the menu was a starter salad featuring shitake mushrooms and a crumbled goat cheese, the main dish consisted of a parmesan cous cous and the star of the show was a hotdog on a microwaved two-seconds-ago-it-was-frozen hotdog bun! We eat like a king and queen.

Tommy