Up and out early for a visit to Capitol Reef National Park.

I wish I could tell you what’s on this Mule Deer’s right eye; maybe it’s a mini-satellite tracking device.

We are seduced by the golden colors of fall glowing in the sunrise. Our positive first impressions of Capitol Reef are already hinting at the need for a follow-up visit.

Being suckers for petroglyphs, we add these to the list of stuff we must return for in order to have a fuller picture of the park than our quick tour is going to allow us to have.

Dirt roads are the paths to quiet riches because where the pavement ends, the crowds remain at bay, not that this place is swarming with visitors today.

A bit of Chaco cultural influence is at work on this relic of a “modern” building.

My best guess for what created these multi-colored layers is that this was a floodplain at one time. I think it wasn’t a lake as there are no black layers that would imply plant and fish life that was settling at the bottom, and the layers are seriously almost uniformly thin, so maybe it was quickly disappearing floodwaters that came and went?

If we are in Hanksville, Utah, this must be the famous Hollow Mountain gas station. We are about to turn off Route 24 for the 95 before taking the 276 to Bullfrog. Where…

…we were hoping to catch this ferry across Lake Powell. We just missed it by minutes and with almost two hours before the next ferry going in our direction, we opted to drive back towards Hite and take the bridge over the Colorado.

While we will always enjoy a good ferry trip over the water we don’t much mind a stunning drive over the desert either.

Can you guess just where the Colorado meets the lake?

Wow, this is one spectacular approach to a bridge.

Back in 1983, Lake Powell was in danger of spilling over the top of the Glen Canyon dam; under the bridge, you can see the bathtub ring the full lake left behind. Matter of fact, besides the ugly tragedy of destroying Glen Canyon by backing up the Colorado River, the water bleaches the sandstone and deposits tons of sediment in the lake, depriving the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon of the kind of river dynamics that made rafting a huge variable. Taming the beast to remove the risk of encountering the wild has been one of humanity’s greatest faults.

Why go straight home when you can detour and take in four states in one day? And I don’t mean some short little detour either; we go large and head through Blanding up to Monticello, where we catch Highway 666 so we can drop into Colorado going to Dove Creek. South through Cortez, we continue on the Devil’s Highway, where we can have a meaningful and potentially evil encounter with the Colorful State. Sadly, I have to report that neither Satan nor his minions were found on this day.

Snow-capped mountains and bald eagles, that’s America.

Into New Mexico, we are still on Hell’s Highway as we cruise past Shiprock and south to Gallup before turning west for the final drive home on this blistering fast loop out around the Four Corners of the American Southwest.