Our last stop on our road trip home was to Saguaro National Park which is split into two halves on either side of Tuscon, Arizona. After our cave tour at Colossal Cave, we spent the afternoon cactus-touring along the scenic loop of the east park and then found some dispersed camping in the foothills back near Colossal Cave.
The next morning we made our way across Tuscon to explore the western half of the park. Each half is a little different, including the visitor centers. I wouldn’t skip either one. We didn’t do any hiking but just toured the scenic loop, checking out the cactus varieties up close. That evening we were treated to a grand sunset out in the open desert west of Phoenix, near Saddle Mountain.
Oh look, another cave system! Colossal Cave Mountain Park is a privately-owned park and cave system near Tucson, Arizona. We hadn’t planned on going here but decided to stop by and check it out. As there happened to still be space available on their next scheduled tour, Darlene and I joined their mid-grade “Ladder Tour” – a little more than their basic walking tour but not so much spelunking as their “Wild Cave Tour”. Anyway, it was fun – we’re glad we stopped for it!
On our way to Texas to see the eclipse, we enjoyed an afternoon checking out the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona: lots of wide vistas and pretty landscapes, some pueblo ruins and petroglyphs, Triassic era fossils and of course lots of colorful “rockified” (okay, petrified) tree remains everywhere.
I made a number of additional miscellaneous stops on my October road trip with Pan and Hera in the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle, including along a section of historic Route 66 in the Mojave Desert, on the road in northern Arizona and southern Utah, mountain biking outside of Zion National Park, and taking the tour of Hoover Dam. This was over the course of two weeks (October 4th-19th, 2017).
Mojave Desert outside of Baker, CALooking down Hoover Dam
And here’s a video montage of my drone flights over the trip, including my last flight where I lost control, crashed and was forced to leave it behind:
What happens when the Mavic Pro doesn’t have GPS lock and you’re too high for the down-facing optical sensors to work is that the Mavic becomes unable to hold its position and it starts drifting all over the place. I was trying to compensate and keep it away from the walls but I was not at all successful. It almost crashed into one wall but halted itself when it’s forward-facing sensors detected the wall. As it started drifting towards the opposite wall, I had just decided to try to get it up and out of the shadow of the canyon entirely to hopefully gain GPS lock and regain control but it was too late – and this time it wasn’t facing the wall and didn’t detect it. It crashed and fell to a point immediately below me. While it was only like 35 feet down, it was a sheer drop with only a couple of narrow soft ledges. Without rope and climbing gear, I would have been risking my neck to try to retrieve it. Yeah, very sad to have to leave it behind, though it looked pretty busted up anyway.
The Vermilion Cliffs / Paria Canyon National Monument in northern Arizona and southern Utah includes a huge area of amazing rock and sandstone formations, including what may be the longest slot canyon in the world, Buckskin Gulch (15 miles!). During my October road trip, I got to experience a little taste of the canyon from the Wire Pass trailhead but it would take an overnight trip and gear to do the whole thing. (Here’s some details on what it involves.) I would definitely like to come back and do that as well as try to get a permit to go visit “The Wave” (restricted to 20 people per day via a lottery system) and some of the other formations in the Coyote Buttes area. I tried to get out to the White Pocket formations but the road turned out to be too sandy for mountain bike access, too far for day hiking and certainly too much for the current incarnation of the Traveling Cat Adventure Vehicle. Some serious 4WD required.
Another cool multi-day adventure trip in the area is backpacking all the way through Buckskin Gulch and following the Paria River Canyon out to Lees Ferry and the Colorado River over 4-5 days. This whole wide area is a really cool region to explore and there’s plenty to come back and see.
Click through for the full gallery, including hiking a canyon wash above Soap Creek (and losing my drone!), visiting Lees Ferry and the start of the Grand Canyon at Marble Canyon, checking out Horseshoe Bend and Glen Canyon Dam and a couple of little detours into Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Continuing my October road trip and coming straight from Bryce Canyon National Park, I was lucky to be able to snag the last remaining campsite on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon without a reservation – otherwise I would have had to drive all the way back out of the national park bounds to camp somewhere for the night. The North Rim is pretty cool though in that it gets only 1/10 as many visitors as the south side of the canyon.
I was surprised to find that the North Rim campground is right on the edge of the canyon – not a good place to go sleep-walking! ;-)
On arrival that evening, I hiked the Transept Trail over to the viewpoint by the Grand Canyon Lodge as the sun went down. The next morning I made it out to Bright Angel Point before returning to break camp and spent the rest of the day checking out all the amazing and varied vistas along the Cape Royal Road.
