Goblin Valley State Park
Continuing our run of state parks, we woke up after spending the night next to Goblin Valley and then headed into the park itself to catch the sunrise. However we were not adequately prepared for how cold it was!
Goblin Valley State Park is $20 for a day pass and you can enter and leave multiple times which is nice. There is really only the one "viewpoint" although there are a bunch of hikes and bike trails scattered around the park. We drove to the main parking lot and walked down among the hoodoos for sunrise.
After 15 minutes though we were absolutely freezing so we headed back to the RV and warmed up with some breakfast and a second cup of coffee before donning some extra clothing and heading out to do the Carmel Canyon hike. Tim forgot to change into his hiking boots though so he ended up having to go back and I continued on my own, a decision I almost came to regret later!
The start of the hike is easy enough with only a few up and down parts. It's not the best marked train in the world but it's pretty obvious where you have to go for the most part. About two-thirds of the way through the trail you come into the canyon proper and that's where things started getting dicey for me.
You see, I'm somewhat claustrophobic but it's more restrictive claustrophobia so once I started having to climb up narrow slot canyons I started having flashbacks to the movie 127 Hours and the idea of getting trapped, even though Tim would hopefully notice I was gone too long, was still terrifying to me.
Thankfully I didn't have to cut off any appendages and once out of the canyon was glad I'd faced my fears and done it. It was all in all a pretty easy hike that most people could accomplish.
When I got back to the RV we headed out of the park to head into the nearby town of Hanksville to get a tire looked at that was a bit low. The problem wasn't that it was low but that it the spigot to attach the air pump wasn't accessible. A couple calls later we managed to find a mechanic who popped the wheel off and realigned it for us and so with a fully pumped tire we headed back into the park.
We went back down amongst the hoodoos and explored some more, this time with Loki, before headed back down the main road to grab a dispersed camping spot. Just before heading to sleep I took my camera out to see the stars but you couldn't really see any because of the moon. I set an alarm for early the next morning and headed out after the moonset and the difference was just astounding. I even managed to drag Tim out for a whole 20 seconds to see them.