As with many people that lived through last year, we’ve been socially distancing, leaving the house only when needed, and cooped up since spring of 2020. Since we love traveling, this has been a struggle for us – we took a short trip camping in the fall, but haven’t been on any long trips since before Covid.

In November, we started thinking about what a trip would need to look like for us to feel comfortable taking one right now. The criteria came down to this:

  • it needed to be a road trip – we weren’t up for flying yet
  • we still wanted to socially distance, so it couldn’t be a large city (not really our style anyway)
  • any places we stayed needed to be clean

An obvious choice was somewhere outdoors, away from people in general – this lead us to National Parks. We also wanted it to be big! So we decided to road trip – in January – to Utah and hit the big 5 Parks.

Trip Overview

  • Three Days to Moab. We decided to take our time, to not push ourselves too much right off the bat, so we planned a couple of days roadtripping out to Utah.
  • Three Days in Moab. With both Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, we knew we would need a few days to see what we wanted to.
  • Three Days in Zion. Technically, this was one day of travel and two days in Zion. We were able to see what we wanted with this amount of time.
  • Two Days in Escalante. We combined Bryce Canyon National Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument into two days.
  • One Day in Capitol Reef. More of a stop-over, we regretted not giving ourselves more time here.
  • Two Days Home. We actually cut this from three to two, powering through the last 14 hours from Denver home.

Three Days to Moab

Our trip to Utah was fairly uneventful, given we were driving through the mountains in the middle of winter. Once we got to Denver (glazing over Nebraska), we took I-70 through the Rocky Mountains. This can be a tough drive if the weather is bad or heading into a weekend – lots of people headed into the mountains to ski – but we had mostly smooth sailing!

Booth Lake Trail

We had one stop near Vail, where we attempted hiking the Booth Lake Trail. I say ‘attempted’ because we hadn’t quite acclimated to the elevation yet, and only got maybe a half mile into the hike and had to turn around. Not a great first showing!

Dolores River along the Unaweep Tabeguache Scenic Byway

After an overnight in Grand Junction, we took the Unaweep Tabeguache Scenic Byway part of the way before veering off toward Utah. We encountered a bit of snow – not enough to stop us, but it would be nice to take this route again in nicer weather so we could better enjoy the scenery.

We still got some nice views, covered in snow

After half a day of driving, we made it to Canyonlands National Park for our first of many completed hikes (Booth Lake didn’t count).

Check out pt. 2, including recommendations for awesome hikes, food, and lodging.