Hoodoo you love? - Escalante Petrified Wood State Park, Utah 5/22

Ned and I took an early morning bike ride thru Zion Park along the Pa’rus Trail. The morning sun was just hitting the tops of cliffs and the light made for some great pics. We biked along the Virgin River, which was rushing in full force and a cool temp of 46 deg! Yikes. Two years ago when we last visited Zion during the month of June, we were swimming in the river and it moved along placidly. What a difference a month makes. After spending a pleasant morning biking and enjoying the drive thru Zion, we headed toward Bryce National Park. While the skies stayed a clear bright blue, the wind picked up and the temperature dropped dramatically. We had planned on doing a horseback ride along the rim of Bryce Canyon, but it was 58 degrees, blowing quite a bit and the wind chill was a killer. We decided to hop the park shuttle and spend the time exploring the sites. When we reached Bryce Point, which has a spectacularly amazing panoramic view of the hoodoos, we asked a very sweet older gentleman if he would take our picture. (See above). After carefully snapping the shot, he proudly beamed, “60 years ago I was a staff photographer in the army.” He was so touched that we had asked him to take our picture. That’s our “hoodoo” you love of the day! It’s really hard to appreciate just how spectacular this park is. Nothing quite captures the depth and breadth of the scenery. We also sampled our first ice cream of the trip, which was made by Farr’s Ice Cream of Ogden, Utah. It was beyond delicious! (Ned gave me too much information on how much butter fat he thinks it contained, which I have intentionally omitted from my brain). One of our goals on this trip is to do some ice cream tasting and comparison across the USA. I can honestly say that we are off to a great start and Farr Ice Cream has definitely set a very high standard. We continued our drive thru the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, climbing over mountain passes and dipping into valleys. We finally arrived at Escalante State Park, famous for it’s abundance of petrified wood. We were fortunate in that we got the last campsite in the park. Apparently, there is a traveling caravan of Casita Trailers who have taken over! Being the last campsite, you can pretty well imagine that it’s not the most ideal. We are parked on a slope, but Ned did a great job getting us leveled out with his handmade chocks. We are camped at a bottom of a cliff and decided to take the trail to the top of the mesa and view the petrified forest. It was a hike, but well worth the effort. We walked thru a pygmy forest, saw lava boulders, brilliant red wildflowers and were rewarded with great scenic views, and of course, deposits of petrified wood scattered about. After our hike, Ned hung up our brightly colored hot pink hammock under our adjoining picnic table “veranda”. I’m sure we were quite a sight as we sipped mojitos and munched popcorn