Sunday, August 22, 2010

Day 48 Summer 2010 Park to Park Road Trip

Today we have 2 destinations.. Natural Bridges National Monument and Monument Valley.

On the way to Natural Bridges National Monument, this is some of the scenery that we saw.

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Arrived at the entrance and showed our Park Pass. Our National Park Pass is also good at the National Monuments. We stopped at the Visitor Center.

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Our first stop is the Sipapu Natural Bridge. This is the 7th largest natural bridge in the world.

5528 Sipapu Bridge Natural Bridges National Monument UT5532 Sipapu Bridge Natural Bridges National Monument UT

Our next stop is Kachina Natural Bridge. These bridges are a little difficult to spot, the colouring in the rocks almost camouflages them.

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Owachomo Bridge is our next stop.

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We drove out of the park on Utah 261 and headed towards Monument Valley. This part of Utah 261 is also known as the Trail of the Ancients. There is a section of the road that is called the Moki Dugway which is a 10% grade, steep gravel road with many switchbacks. The Moki Dugway was a fun section of the road to drive as you will see in these photos. Excuse the rain droplets in the photos, it was sprinkling a bit as we drove.

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The colours in the rocks are amazing to see. Just as if someone painted them.

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Further along we came to the town of Mexican Hat. This prominent rock feature is how the town got its name.

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Onwards to Monument Valley. There is a great photo opportunity at mile marker 13. If you ever saw the movie Forrest Gump, you may recognize this scenery. This is the spot where after running back and forth across the USA for 3 years, Forrest Gump finally just decided to stop running.

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We entered the park and paid our admission, our National Park Pass is not valid on Native Land.

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Apparently this spot was John Wayne’s favourite spot to look out over Monument Valley while he was making his films.

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There are many more photos of Monument Valley and all the other things we saw today on my FLICKR site.

We left Monument Valley and headed North to our hotel in Blanding UT.

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