Goblin Valley

Tuesdays are our (un)official day off. We have been training a girl to run the office for most of the day each Tuesday so we can go off and do whatever we want. Tourists often ask if we have any advice on what sights to see and if there are any tricks or pointers said tourists need to know. Well, we are new to the area and we haven't been to any of the local State and National parks, so we decided to go visit most, if not all of them.

Today we ventured out to Goblin Valley. It is about a 20-30 minute drive North of Hanksville. The main attraction are these rock formations called "Goblins". As you can imagine, erosion over a great length of time is what forms these interesting shapes. There are a few easy hikes you can do, but it was really windy and cold, so we just meandered around and took lots of pictures. Hattie loved to run around, and we loved to let her run around. It's a safe place for kids to play because there aren't many things they can hurt themselves on. So Hattie just ran around like crazy.

I like to shoot panoramic pictures (multiple images stitched together via computer software), so I included three of them on the bottom of this post.

The picture with the yellow flowers was taken on the way to "Little Wild Horse Canyon" which turned out to be a long, boring drive with nothing interesting (at the time) at the end except sand and a river bed (I guess there are petroglyphs somewhere around there).

Anyway, it was cloudy and the lighting was good for pictures, but it was really cold and windy. Luckily the impending rain storm didn't happen until we got home.

The right side of these pictures have been cut off on the blog, so click on the picture, the click "All Sizes" at the top left of the picture to see larger versions. I don't have a Flickr Pro account, so the panoramic pictures are scaled down quite a bit.

PS- We are going to print one or more of the panoramic ones to put in the motel office.