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Thursday, 5/27/21: Wanda Bridge & David Bridge

This is a great way to start a hike - watching for falling rocks.

The main attraction on the Hickman Bridge Trail is the Hickman Natural Bridge. It is a 2.3 mile rather strenuous hike. The bridge is impressive as all the big natural wonders are. But the highlight for us was coming across two un-named smaller natural bridges kind of hidden away from the main trail.


There wasn’t any indication of these cute little bridges along the trail. No signage. No arrows pointing them out. No names assigned to them. So,we named them. The bridges were within 10 feet of each other. I dubbed the first one, Wanda Bridge. Wanda returned the favor and named the second one, David Bridge. Two other people saw that we had wandered off trail and came to scope out whatever it was that we found. I told them that we had just named the bridges after ourselves. They cracked up, but seemed to like the names. So there, it’s official in my book.

These black roundish rocks are called Moqui Marbles and they are all over the place. They are made up of iron oxide and sandstone.

David Bridge and Wanda Bridge. Although you can only see the first bridge, they are together. Look at the shadow and you can see that there is a separation between the two bridges.

Looking up through the hole between Wanda Bridge and David Bridge.

Now, off to the big Hickman Bridge.

Hickman Bridge. Yeah, it’s bigger than Wanda Bridge and David Bridge, but ours is a double bridge. That’s gotta count for something.

Next, it was time to tackle the Scenic Road, the main road running through the heart of Capital Reef from the visitors center down to Capital Gorge. This stunning road consisted of 8 miles of smooth blacktop and 2.5 miles of boulder strewn dirt and gravel.


The landscape along this road was severely uplifted at a radical angle. As you looked out to the horizon you felt unsteady as the landscape lines were all wrong. What you expected to be horizontal references to your eyes just didn’t register correctly with the lines going in a 30º angle. The formations, cut away by millions of years of erosion, exploded with layers of colors - tans, whites, reds, maroons, and chocolates. The textures varied from granite-like monoliths, to rock-strewn heaps, to soft sand, to sheets of shale thrown around appearing like scrapped steel plates scavenged from old ocean-going ships. Each texture had its own color. I guess it did kind of look like scuba-diving a colorful reef if you let your imagination go a bit wild.

Vistas along the Scenic Road.

We tackled the Capital Gorge Trail at the very end of the road. Basically, it was a dry riverbed navigating its way through the typical tall canyon walls. Along the 2 mile long trail, which we somehow doubled, we saw a couple of petroglyphs and what they called the pioneer registry. This was a section of wall with names carved in it by the original settlers in the 1880s.


A side trail snaked up the canyon walls to tanks, referring to round pools of water caught way up at the top of the canyon. These pools had gone dry making the effort seemingly fruitless. Indeed, the handful of people that made the arduous trek up were very disappointed. I wasn’t. Didn’t they see the spectacular views while they were up there?

The dirt road to the Capital Gorge Trail. The road was so rough that one car broke it’s steering linkage while we were there. They hitched a ride into Torrey to get a tow truck to haul it out of there.

This trail promised it all: Petroglyphs, a narrow canyon, pioneer writings on the walls, and tanks.

A side channel flowing over bare rocks.

More ancient spacemen.

A settler in 1888.

A dry “tank”. Too bad it wasn’t filled with water. It would have made a nice hot tub.

These rock pimples are actually iron deposits. Iron seems to reside in the rocks in many different forms: reddish rocks and sand, black moqui marbles, and rock pimples.

For supper, we drove to Bicknell for some of that wood-fired pizza. The little shop was closed up tight. Since gas was 20 cents cheaper in Bicknell, I gassed up and then asked the attendant about the outdoor pizza shop. She told me that they set up whenever they feel like it. There isn’t any set schedule. Now that’s a business model.


On a side note, this gas station sold non-ethanol 88 octane gas for the same price as their cheapest 85 octane 10% ethanol gas. I picked the 88. Back home, Fleet Farm used to sell non-ethanol gas cheap and I got significantly better gas mileage with it. Ethanol doesn’t have the same level of energy that gasoline has.


Oh yeah, supper? We returned to the General Store for their pulled pork deli sandwich only to find out that the deli folds up for the day at 4 pm. We were too late. But, the Chuckwagon trailer parked in the General Store’s parking lot, threw open their window for business just as we were about to leave empty-handed (or empty-stomached). We threw health to the wind and got a pulled pork BBQ sandwich and fries. It was delicious.

Glossary of terms used for newcomers: 1) V-Jer. The name of our camper. 2) Saturn. The name of our Van. 3) Duende. Our mischievous gremlin that breaks things. 4) Tata. The good gremlin that helps us fix Duende’s dirty work. 5) The Black Hole. This is what we call Walmart because every time we go in for just a couple of items, we come out spending way more than we figured. 6) QT. Quaint Town. 7) Little Buddy. This is what we call our Dyson cordless stick vacuum.

Dave and Wanda

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