Capital Reefs National Park and Beyond

No cell coverage again today :(

I forgot to mention this little bird that visited our campsite multiple times at Arches National Park.  It obviously was used to campers with RVs leaking water on the pavement.  The plug on our hot water tank has a slight leak, and water drips out and down the side of Miss Travelaire, making a small wet spot on the pavement.  This little bird sees the wet spot, then flies up to the motorhome side where the drop of water comes down, and while keeping himself in midair like a humming bird, drinks the drop of water.  Then he waits for the next drop and repeats.  After seeing this I put a dish of water out.  It really made his day!  Who knows where else it can find water in a dry place like this!

On our trip this morning from Canyonlands to Capital Reefs, the landscape changed gradually from grasslands, to rocky hills, to giant cliffs.  Doreen had the camera and was taking pictures as we drove along.  Here's a sample:

Once we reached Capital Reefs, we were surrounded by huge colourful cliffs.

We stopped in at the visitor center, where the ranger said we should take a short tour down their scenic drive.

So that's what we did, and here are some of the scenes.

We decided we had seen enough of arches, canyons, cliffs and rock formations, and headed on for an hour and a half to Otter Creek State Park (N38 10 00, W112 00 56), which is situated at the south end of a long narrow lake.  By this time the scenery had changed back to smooth hills and farmland.  It's obviously very windy on this lake at times, and thus the big brown shield surrounding the picnic table.  But today the lake was glassy, mirroring the distant hills.

A couple of reasons for coming to the state park instead of camping in a National Park again are the availability of electricity, so we can run our little electric heater, and the availability of showers.  Well, we had showers ok, but on a scale of 1 to 10, they were near 1 or 2 at the bottom end!  We are not too impressed with the Utah State Parks, better than California and Washington, but nowhere near as good as Oregon.  Also, we avoided the high gas prices and fires coming down through California!

If all goes well, we should get from elevations upwards of 6000 feet here in Utah down to more like 1000 feet tomorrow.  That means nice warm weather since this sunny spell seems to be continuing.