There’s a ton of fun activities central to this region of Utah, and so we hit the ground running. Our first full day in Kanab, we drove north of town to see the Belly of the Dragon. This is an old drainage tunnel under the road, which currently serves as a trailhead and first couple hundred feet of a hike. More importantly, it’s a brilliant place for silhouette photos!

There’s so much within walking distance of our camp site. Almost right next door to us is the visitor’s center, so we stopped in for some maps and advice. Now we’ve got even more on our list of things to do here!

In dumber news, we stayed on NM time while we were in AZ, because AZ doesn’t observe daylight savings, but the reservations do, so we could never trust our cell phones in Arizona. In fact, when we drove into Petrified Forest to explore, we had to ask the ranger what time it was, because we were surprised to see the truck clock and our cell phones didn’t match (and we only had a few hours until the park closed). Well, turns out daylight savings time ended this weekend, so if we’d just transitioned to Arizona time we would have saved ourselves a lot of hassle. It doesn’t matter to us too much, but it matters to a 1-year-olds bedtime.

Right behind our campground is K-Hill, which has a nice hiking trail. We did a mile or so of K-Hill on our second day here. We’re pretty out of shape, so this will be great conditioning to prep us for hikes around the national parks. The trail starts with a steep climb, but that was the worst of it. We both felt great after some physical exertion.

On our third day here, we went to Zion National Park! After this we were pretty wiped out, so we needed to take a couple days with lower activity + work catchup.

I took this photo from our campsite, sitting at our picnic table, after we made fry pies over a campfire. It is so nice here.

Okay, wait, did I just say it was nice here? Less than a week after we arrived, we got quite a bit of snow. We knew that we’d probably see snow while we were here, but not this much! Typically it melts within a day.

What do we do when it snows? Might as well make some baked treats! They help heat up the camper, plus boost our morale when we’re stuck inside. We had some dried cherries so I made cherry chocolate chip scones.

A neighbor told us we should check out the reservoir here, which is a few minutes south of town. It’s pretty chilly for hanging outside still, but the views were great. Ever since we crossed into New Mexico, most bodies of water look very dried up, so it was nice to see a good sized lake again.

In fact, a lot of what we’ve been doing has been truck-exploring, so that we can at least see the area even if we can’t really get outside due to cold. One night we were treated to some very lovely views as the sun lowered towards the buttes.

Okay, I know I’m harping on the weather a lot, but by mid-month we had had quite a bit of unseasonably cold weather. You can see that the average high should be around 60 and the average low should be around 35, which is pretty decent. Instead, we’ve had highs around 50 and lows around 20. This means we need to unhook water every single night so our hoses don’t freeze. It means that all morning, the temps are averaging in the 30s, which means we can’t run around outside with the kid. We expected to have a few cold days here and there, but we only had a few nice days here and then it’s just been cold cold cold. (I took this screen shot a few days before we had our really grumpy discussion about the weather.)

We’re both kind of in a funk with the weather. It’s been keeping us from doing the hikes and seeing the sights. And we’re already halfway through the month. It’s time to just accept our reality and go see things, even if we have to bundle up to do it.

To that end, we headed to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We’d heard that we needed to do it early before the snow made them shut the gates (weather here is elevation based, Kanab is at about 4500 ft and the North Rim is at 8000-9000 ft). You’ll have to read another post to find out how that turned out!

A few days later, we headed to our other high-elevation destination: Bryce Canyon National Park. We all dressed in layers upon layers, but because the day was almost windless and completely sunny, it ended up being quite comfortable there.

There is a really interesting short hike that is just a few minutes outside of town. One day we decided to go see the Dinosaur Tracks Trail! The trail to the dinosaur tracks is less than a mile, but the tracks are located on top of a butte so the entire trail is a steep climb. It probably isn’t bad for able-bodied persons, but since we both have a baby to carry, it’s quite challenging and we’re more careful with our footsteps.

Other hikers have marked the dinosaur tracks with rings of stones, so it wasn’t hard to find them once we got to the top.

One of the tracks had some water in it and was full of bees who had found a little spot to re-hydrate. By the time we left the butte, the water had dried up and bees were gone.

The views from the top were great. This is a gorgeous area, with incredible rock formations and canyons everywhere.

Atlas has been a very chill travel companion so far, and he loves hanging out in the hiking carrier. But he also needs to run around when we finish a hike, which means we spend a lot of time throwing rocks in parking lots!

One other challenge we really didn’t anticipate is the winter daylight hours. The latest we’re guaranteed to have sun is 3:30pm, because the buttes rise up and depending on our location, that’s when “sunset” happens. Atlas typically wakes from his nap around 2ish, so if we want to go somewhere in the afternoon (when it’s warm!), we need to really hustle to get it done in the daylight. Sometimes that means cutting the nap short. We’re enjoying our time in Kanab, but we are having logistical issues that we did not expect, due to being so late in the season!

It’s only supposed to get colder towards the end of the month, so we might head south a little early. We need a break from the cold. Also, I know how insane this sounds, but after about two weeks of being here, we both have itchy feet. We still have lots more to do here, but an entire month in one place feels too long!