By the numbers: Critters and Hiking
OK, so I’m a numbers guy I guess and I like lists. Here are two lists that summarize two of our favorite activities, hiking and looking for wildlife.
Out on the trail… We do a lot of walking during our trips to the desert southwest; it is just the best way to get around and see the sights. During this excursion to southern Utah, we hiked along nine wonderful trails. I tried to track these hikes using the GPS on my phone and/or my Garmin GPS, with mixed results. Since EveryTrail has been acting up, I used the Ramblr app on the phone. I think that I got pretty good data on most of the hikes, but in some of the canyons I believe the signal tended to get a little confused so the distances were not as accurate as they should be. Because of that, my best guess as to our hiking total is about 32 miles on the trails. Here’s the list of trails that we hiked with the mileage and links to descriptions (reviews on Trip Advisor and/or Ramblr).
Out on the trail… We do a lot of walking during our trips to the desert southwest; it is just the best way to get around and see the sights. During this excursion to southern Utah, we hiked along nine wonderful trails. I tried to track these hikes using the GPS on my phone and/or my Garmin GPS, with mixed results. Since EveryTrail has been acting up, I used the Ramblr app on the phone. I think that I got pretty good data on most of the hikes, but in some of the canyons I believe the signal tended to get a little confused so the distances were not as accurate as they should be. Because of that, my best guess as to our hiking total is about 32 miles on the trails. Here’s the list of trails that we hiked with the mileage and links to descriptions (reviews on Trip Advisor and/or Ramblr).
- Devils Garden, Arches National Park (8.3 miles)
- Sand Dune and Broken Arch, Arches National Park (3 miles)
- Skyline Arch, Arches National Park (0.4 miles)
- Corona Arch, Moab (2.4 miles)
- Park Avenue, Arches National Park (1.4 miles)
- Mesa Arch, Canyonlands National Park (0.7 miles)
- False Kiva, Canyonlands National Park (3.2 miles)
- Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonlands National Park (7 miles)
- Little Wild Horse slot canyon, near Goblin Valley State Park (7 miles)
Feathered, furry and scaly friends…We did very well on animal sightings this trip. That is not always the case in southern Utah, but this time around the critters were out and about. It’s not like Yellowstone with the huge herds of mega fauna, although we did have some of those (one of the pronghorn herds we saw rivaled anything that we saw in Wyoming early this year). Here the big critters seem to come in ones and twos, but as also tend to see a lot of little varmints out on the trails. The list below is of the animals that we saw can could identify. There were many others that we could not definitively name (several hawks, plenty of “gone” birds, that is, that were gone before we could get a really good look or a photo of them and a few interesting bugs and butterflies). We did not get photos from each animal sighting, but here's a link to the best images that we did capture.
Big and Furry
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Little and Furry
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