The Mighty Five – Part One

This post will be part one of a multi-post series on our trip to the Mighty Five National Parks in Utah. If you are not familiar, there are five parks in Utah that are back to back in South-Central Utah: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Arches. The trip was quite the undertaking so it only makes sense for us to break it down into beautiful, bite-sized pieces. Part one will include all of our planning and pre-trip preparation. The rest of the series will be the nitty-gritty details and a break down of each park.

While we are calling this series The Mighty Five, on this trip we actually visited EIGHT different national parks and several beautiful natural monuments. It took us a couple of months and one very long afternoon on Shiloh’s patio to plan this trip out. If you are from COMO – you know what I am talking about. Jake and I had wanted to do this trip for some time and it was always just something in the future, until one day we were approached by a friend. In early 2018, they said in passing “Hey, I really want to do this trip,” and without thinking we immediately said yes. It was the perfect time. I had grad school summer vacation coming up and Jake had worked long enough to accrue some real paid time off, so why not? After describing the trip to our friends, another decided they were going to join as well. Now we had friends and an idea!

Planning Blueprints

I would like to start this off by saying that visitUtah has a whole website dedicated to The Mighty Five and other natural Utah wonders. Itineraries, what to know, where to stay, what to see – basically everything. This is a great place to start and I recommend spending some time there. We did not follow any one specific itinerary because we wanted to create our own path. However, they do offer a number of other sites to visit and things to do. Click the photo below to visit.

First on the list was to map out our route and figure out what dates were feasible. After examining all possible routes and the hours it would take, we decided this would be a nine day trip with two of those days devoted almost entirely to travel. To make the most of our time we utilized memorial day weekend as a starting point. For those keeping track, this trip ended up taking place May 25 – June 2, 2018. A big note worth mentioning is that we decided to drive this entire trip, no plane tickets here. We drive pretty much everywhere if you haven’t noticed.

Now, I am a planner who enjoys partaking in a spreadsheet or two. I was a travel coordinator in college and it’s something that really brings me joy. I did take it upon myself to do a lot of the leg work in planning out what times we would/could get to each stop on our list. This definitely required a spreadsheet.

This is what our map ended up looking like after we finished our trip. Rocky Mountain National Park was not originally on our list but we made some time for our original favorite park.

EIGHT National Parks

When we started our planning we only knew we were doing the Mighty Five national parks in Utah: Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, and Arches. As it turns out we were going to drive right near the Grand Canyon so we decided to add that one to the list. We did not plan in a trip to the Petrified Forest National park and to end with Rocky Mountain, these just happened to be happy little accidents (Bob Ross). Some other amazing things we happened upon were Horseshoe Bend and Devil’s Bridge. This means 8 national parks and several mini adventures in NINE days.

Because of the number of parks, we did invest in a National Parks – Annual Pass (also called the America the Beautiful pass). This is an $80 pass that gets you into every national park.

“A pass is your ticket to more than 2,000 federal recreation sites. Each pass covers entrance fees at national parks and national wildlife refuges as well as standard amenity fees (day use fees) at national forests and grasslands, and at lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A pass covers entrance, standard amenity fees and day use fees for a driver and all passengers in a personal vehicle at per vehicle fee areas (or up to four adults at sites that charge per person). Children age 15 or under are admitted free.”

NPS.gov

The pass also can get you discounts at visitor center stores and you get to use the Parks Pass Lane (!!!). Some parks have an entrance lane just for pass holders and on busy summer days this is worth the cost of the entire pass alone. Military members get these passes for free and seniors receive a large discount. They can be bought at pretty much every national park or online here. #notanad

Back to Planning

The next step was trying to make this trip as affordable as possible. Luckily, we were driving and camping so that does not cost as much as hotel stays. We did borrow a Ford Econoline Van (which we now own) and those are not exactly the most fuel efficient, especially in the mountains. For four people and all of our stuff that vehicle ended up being the best decision. As it turns out, having this van turned into being our most valuable asset on these trips.

We wanted to get everyone in on this next part of the planning so three of us met up for drinks at a local bar, brought out the laptops, and got to work. As I have said in other posts finding a campsite is your primary task. This needs to be done as early as possible. Jake and I took on the task of locating campgrounds that accepted reservations near the parks and all of us picked a few hikes that we wanted to do. We tried to locate campgrounds that were inside the parks but since we had decided on this trip rather last minute (by camping standards) most reservation-only campgrounds were fully booked. Also, there was pretty much nothing available inside the parks. We settled for nearby camps that still had some availability. I specify needing these reservations because some campsites are first come-first serve only and if you do not get there early enough you are SOL. Since we were on a schedule that did not allow us to drive around looking for campgrounds, we tried our best to only book where we could reserve a spot. This allowed us to be able to arrive whenever we could. There was only one camp that we did not know where we were sleeping until we got there. That is a fun story that I will cover in that parks blog. The way the trip worked out was that we would arrive at a park, camp/sleep through the night, hike during the day, and drive to the next park in the evening. This is a very tight timeline and honestly if you can dedicate more time than one day to certain parks I would recommend doing so.

In order to find hikes we did a massive amount of research but also allowed for some flexibility. We would pick one or two hikes that we thought we wanted to do and then pick the others when we got to the park. In each park we did about 4-5 different trails. For planned hikes we simply googled the most popular hikes or sites to be seen and made sure to put those at the top of the list. When we would arrive at a park we would check with rangers for closures and grab maps of the park to select other options. Often park maps have hike suggestions and will list how strenuous they are. By the end of this entire trip I believe we calculated that we had hiked over 50 miles.

There were also several things we wanted to do that we simply did not feel were feasible. Antalope Canyon, AZ and Havasu Falls are a couple of those things. I highly recommend putting these on your list if you can. Reservations for tours are REQUIRED. We had even put down a deposit but ultimately decided to remove this as we felt we would be too pushed for time. This was the right decision for our situation but we will be making a trip back to Arizona just for this.

But how much was it?

I know what you are really wondering. A good portion of what we spent did go towards fuel, both for the van and us. The total per person for gas, group food, and sleeping did end up around $350. That may sound like a bit when you think of camping, but we did splurge twice on housing as we will explain a little later on in this series. To be fair, after you have been in a car for days on end you sometimes want a regular bed and a shower. Other than that, $350 per person for a nine day trip is not too bad.

Overall, the planning for this trip probably took about two months from the ideas phase to actually reserving and putting in deposits. The cost was well worth the trip and we will be visiting many of these places again. Our next blogs will break down each park individually and every adventure in between.

Details

• Start planning early – 6 months is the sweet spot for reserving those campsites because this is when they are released on Rec.gov.
• Try to set up reservations for campsites over first come-first served – these are so unpredictable and you do not want to be stuck without a place to sleep.
• Buy an annual parks pass – this pays for itself after about 2-3 parks and there are fast lanes!
• Bring friends – if you have the space and some adventurous comrades, you can really cut down on those expenses with some company. Also, it’s more fun that way.
• Map it out – if you are able to, try to plan your days around your desired trip rather than the other way around. If you give yourself a limited time frame you may jam pack your schedule and miss a lot. If you have a definite timeline then really try to narrow down your must-sees and possibly break the trip into smaller pieces. You cannot feasibly do the entire Mighty Five in less than one week.
• Be flexible – While we really nailed down our schedule for this trip, try not to over-plan. This can be easy to do with so many things to see but you will miss out on those unplanned adventures. Sometimes they are even better.
• Try to give certain parks more than just one day – several of the parks that we visited we would have loved to spend more time at but we had a pretty tight schedule that did not allow for more than one day in each.