It's Right There In Front Of You!

Don't Forget To Explore Your Own Backyard

Before we retired to Nevada, we lived on a tidal creek flowing into Tampa Bay for 25 years. During that time, I spent a considerable amount of time on the water fishing for anything that swam.

Somewhere along the way, I made the switch from fishing out of a powerboat to kayak fishing. It didn’t take long to figure out that, for years, I had been driving over fish to get to fish. The greatest things that kayak fishing taught me were to slow down and downsize. The happy result was that I was traveling shorter distances, but seeing and experiencing more. All of the sudden, those otters, manatees and bald eagles I had been speeding past all those years came into focus.

I think the same concept is applicable with our current travel plans. While we aren’t going to give up our plans for a cross country trip in a couple of weeks or next summer’s Alaska adventure, there is a treasure trove of trails to hike and places to see right here.

We took a day trip to an area I had been eyeing, Gold Butte National Monument. In my research on the area, it was strongly hinted at that a 4WD vehicle would be necessary. After speaking with some of my neighbors who off road with Razr’s, I was assured that the Subaru could handle it. That being said, 48 miles = 2 hours of extreme bumps.

We were pleasantly surprised that the roads weren’t too bad, however, a significant part of the trip was limited to 10-15 mph. We set our sights on a section of the area known as Little Finland. We parked next to an abandoned cattle corral and set out on the Little Finland Loop Trail. Easy hiking down a wash (Amy’s favorite) and along a road. We reached the Little Finland formation after around 3 miles and found it to be almost otherworldly. Millions of years of wind and water erosion can produce some wild stuff.

It became immediately clear that we could easily spend an entire day exploring this amazing place.

Eventually, I reluctantly agreed to get back on the trail to the car and we were pleasantly surprised to find we were only a half mile away. Well, we wanted to do a hike!

On our way out to civilization, we were pleased to find several great places to camp with the van for a weekend getaway and a few cool things to see.

CCC Dam

And finally, one of the coolest rock formations I’ve seen.

I’ll see you next week at Zion NP, Bryce Canyon NP, Utah 12 and Capitol Reef NP.