RV Travel: Onward to Utah

I decided to take my family of five in an RV from our home near San Francisco out to see Salt Lake and the five National Parks of Utah, plus Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

Utah’s Pony Express Trail National Back Country Byway

The Pony Express Trail National Back Country Byway, southwest of Salt Lake, causes a traveler to ponder what life was like for those legendary Pony Express Riders, icons of the American experience.

The Erosive Grandeur of Utah’s Five National Parks

The erosive grandeur of Utah’s National Parks offers the traveler an experience available nowhere else. A grand tour of this densest cluster of national parks in the country merits a week to two-week vacation.

Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park

Masterpieces of erosive scenery caused Bryce Canyon to be set aside as Utah’s second National Park, in 1923.

Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park

To the Navajos the terrain of Capitol Reef was “the land of the sleeping rainbow.” To pioneers and prospectors proceeding west the massive cliffs, thinking nautically, were like a reef, a ridge of rocks forming a barrier.

Utah’s Canyonlands National Park

Majestic canyon vistas of the Colorado and Green Rivers are the visual reward of Canyonlands National Park. The rivers amount to ribbons of fluid sandpaper cutting through the sandstone canyons of eastern Utah.

Utah’s Arches National Park

Striking salmon-colored rock formations, including the greatest density of natural stone arches in the world, draw appreciators of erosive desert beauty to eastern Utah’s Arches National Park.

Utah’s Salt Lake City

When Brigham Young announced to his cohorts, “This is the right place,” he was viewing the east side of the Great Salt Lake. After 1,300 miles of hardship travel, started in February of 1847 in Illinois, he must have indeed thought that this was a promised land.