Capitol Reef National Park

After leaving Goblin Valley for the day we decided to disperse camp near the park in a spot we'd seen the day before and then head out to Capitol Reef in the morning. We had dinner and spent a couple hours playing Machi Korro legacy before Tim headed to bed and I went out to see the stars.

Unfortunately because the moon was nearing full it was really too bright to see with the moon up, so I set an alarm for just after moonset and woke up again at 6am and wow what a sight to see. With the complete absence of moonlight the stars were so bright and there were so many! I'll forever be glad I dragged my arse out of bed into the freezing cold to see the view.

After I made us some coffee we headed out to Capitol Reef which was only about 50 minutes away. It's definitely one of the smaller parks but there's still a lot to do. Like Bryce Canyon it's all mostly on the one strip of road so you'd be hard pressed to miss anything.

We stopped at a few spots and then parked up at the parking lot for Hickman Bridge and did the short loop hike there which offers some great views and a natural rock bridge which is awesome. After driving up to the pictoglyphs we discovered that our fresh water tank was leaking which wasn't great news. We think it froze overnight (it got down to 8F) and then the drain hose cracked. Unfortunately there wasn't much we could do about it on the trip since it would probably take a while for anyone to fix and we didn't want to stop.

After some lunch and a view of the pictoglyphs we headed out of the park on our way to our RV park for the night. We stopped at a gas station to empty our fresh water tank and ended up talking to a guy who was wrangling goats for an hour which was super fascinating.

Our park for the night was Wonderland RV which was really cute and quite spacious. Even though the park was pretty full it didn't feel like it compared to a lot of the parks we'd been to before.