US Trip 2014 – The scenic route

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This part of the trip was from Hanksville to Tropic, through Capitol Reef National Park and Scenic Byway 12.

After a good night sleep, we were ready to head towards Capitol Reef National Park, the first stop today. Since we found all the caches (2 DNF) in Hanksville yesterday, the first stop after leaving Hanksville was inside Capitol Reef. We were a bit surprised when we realized that this was a no-fee National Park. The first cache of the day was the virtual cache GC5899 The Old Homestead. And it turned out to be a lot colder here than we had thought! Guess it will get hotter later in the day.

The Old Homestead

We spent some time driving around Capitol Reef, and finding another virtual and two earthcaches. We even got to pick peaches in one of the orchards. That’s the first time we’ve seen a peach on a tree, way too cold in Norway to grow peaches. Not much people around in the park, this is a very calm and quiet park!

As we’ve done several times before, we got some help to solve the earthcaches from the rangers at the visitor center. We also bought a stack of geology books, which will hopefully help us answer all the caches we’ve/are going to find and maybe create some of our own.

Orchard

From Capitol Reef, we continued towards Torrey. We stopped to find a few extra caches along the way. Near one of them we discovered what looked like an old house in the side of the mountain.

A house?

Since we had a bit better time than planned, we decided to find a few extra caches in Torrey. Torrey had several nice and well made caches, definitely worth the stop! We even got time to buy some more souvenirs near one of the caches.

From Torrey we turned on to Utah Scenic Byway 12, towards Tropic. It was easy to understand why this road is named Scenic Byway! We stopped at several viewpoints along the road, and some of them even had caches we could find! Once more we found ourselves on a summit higher than the highest mountain in Norway. We did not know we were going this high today!

Another interesting thing about Scenic Byway 12 was all the different landscapes, from lots of trees to bare rock. We took lots of photos along the way.

View towards Capitol Reef

When we got to GCX8Q7 Calf Creek Vistas, we did as we often do, chose the steep and hard way to the cache. Instead of walking directly to it, we took a detour over and on the top. But we got to see the amazing view from the top, so it was totally worth it!

Byway 12

We arrived in Tropic a bit earlier than we had planned, so we found a few extra caches, before checking in at Stone Canyon Inn. The cabin we got was simply awesome! Too bad we had to get back out to make the most of the sunlight. We decided to drive up to Bryce Canyon National Park, to see the sunset. We made it, and got to Inspiration Point before it was too late.

Inspiration Point

When we got back at the cabin, we tried to take some long exposure photos of the stars. Didn’t turn out too bad, but we still have more to learn before we can take the real awesome night photos.

Night  at Stone Canyon Inn

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