#fujixt10

Hatch, UT is a very small town of 142 outside of Bryce Canyon NP. There was a neat little ranch to camp on in the town I found on HipCamp and it was absolutely perfect. The first night of the trip to Moab was spent in Las Vegas with friends who moved there recently. I have nothing nice to say about Las Vegas in general so I will just jump into Utah portion of things. The drive to Utah from Vegas was nice enough. There were fighter jets flying around just outside of Vegas as they did their drills from the Air Force base. It was neat to hear their engines as they flew overhead and out int the distance. Other than that, it was open desert and big rigs until Hatch.

I was not expecting Hatch to, quite literally, be a few buildings and homes on either side of the highway. But it was a perfect start to the camping part of the trip. The ranch and campground was much more impressive in person than it was on the website. The campsite was directly next to the Sevier River, a 400-mile long river which flows north through the state. Across the river was a pasture with cows grazing on the green grass. Being so far from any major cities, and near a national park, the Milky Way was visible with the naked eye. It was quite lovely to take in each night.

But, the whole point of staying in Hatch was to visit Bryce Canyon.

It was actually overwhelming to step up to the edge and see the hoodoo formations for the first time. Being faced with millions of years of geological records will do that to a person. Wind, snow, and rain have eaten away at the landscape over time leaving rock formations which Native Americans were the petrified remains ancient people who’d been punished for bad behavior. Hiking around the formations was exciting not only because seeing the rocks up close is interesting, but because hiking at that altitude creates a new challenge. Upped my VO2 on my Apple Watch pretty handily with a simple 2 mile hike! Still, it’s very humbling to be around such ancient records of the Earth’s history. It might not be as majestic as the Grand Canyon but it’s incredible nonetheless.

There was an interesting wildlife museum outside of the park as well. It was basically filled with taxidermied animals some local guy had shot all around the world. They were posed in lifelike scenes and covered places from the Mojave desert to Africa. It was fairly impressive, really. The thousands of butterflies mounted on the walls in the shadowboxes contained species I’d never heard of or seen before, so that was dope too.

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路地裏にあるドーナツショップで

展示があった素敵な写真展にお邪魔してきました。

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古民家のドーナツショップもよかったし、

地元を撮られているという写真も

添えられてる文字も凄く可愛くて

どれも素敵でした

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この日は、お天気が悪くて

雷がゴロゴロなっていた日。

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帰り道、

雨が降る前に写真を撮る。

撮る。

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早く涼しくなって

写真が撮りやすい季節になってほしい。

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Monah, in Echo Park.