Day 8 - Southwest National Parks Adventure

10/01/2025

We said goodbye to Mesa Verde National Park and continued our adventure. We took a detour at Newspaper Rock State Historical Monument to take a look at the petroglyphs. The pictures represent storytelling and doodling through 2,000 years of early human activity.

We continued on to Canyonlands National Park. Fortunately, the national parks are staying open during the shutdown, the visitors centers are closed, but considering the pain this shutdown is causing for so many people, we can manage without the visitors centers. Canyonlands is big, dry and red. The landscape is surreal with giant rock formations rising out of the dry prairie. We took a short walk and headed to Moab, Utah.

Moab is the largest town in the area catering to visitors of Arches, Canyonlands and Capital Reef national parks. We rode a little bit of the Moab Canyon Pathway and Goose Island Trail. The ride paralleled the Colorado River and featured a pedestrian/bike bridge.

We are camped at Utahraptor State Park campground just outside of Moab. It’s a new campground with large pull through sites situated on a dry flatland. It has the largest deposit of dinosaur bones in North America. We can see mountains and more red rock formations on the horizon around the park. We cooked hot dogs for dinner and rested around a campfire.

We also spotted two jack rabbits running around. Look at the size of those ears!!