Summary

Dates: August 1st to August 30th, 2012

Miles driven: 7,228

States visited: 14 including FL, GA, AL, MS, TN, AR, OK, KS, CO, WY, UT, AZ, NM, TX

Total spent on gas, food, lodging, repairs, etc: $2,134 (almost $1,000 under my tight budget!!)

Highest Elevation:
Hiked to = 12,080 nearly reaching the boulder field on Long’s Peak. Estes Park, CO.
Driven to = 12,183 in Grand Lake, Rocky Mtn Natl Park, CO.

Best deal: Tie between $1.50 shower at North Rim of Grand Canyon campground and $1 for 6 tart apples, 6 peaches and a cucumber, all home-grown in Escalante, UT, all delicious beyond words.

Biggest Mistake: Not breaking the law and sneaking into “The Wave”, which requires a permit via a lottery system. Only 10 people are allowed per day to visit. I lost the lottery twice and was tempted to go anyway. Here’s someone I met who went.

Favorite bar/pub: Woody’s, Moab, UT

Best meal: cooking lunch at the Calf Creek Falls trailhead with Jennifer, a fellow falls hiker and solo traveler. I didn’t eat out much, but when I did every meal I had except one was pretty lame.

Best travel companion: I met so many amazing people on both planned and spontaneous hikes. It would not be fair to pick just one as my favorite, so I’ll say Pat, the stuffed unicorn head.

Biggest “doh!” moment: Getting up at dawn to drive to Yellowstone, missing Old Faithful erupting by 5 seconds because I stopped to pee, turning around and driving all the way back to camp without seeing any other sites. In total there and back, it was about 14 hours and 400 miles, much of which was through dead stopped road construction.

Longest driving day: 847 miles from the Western border of Oklahoma to Nashville, TN on day 29 of the trip.

Favorite state: Hands down it’s Utah, with Wyoming coming in a surprising second and Colorado third.

Least favorite state: Texas. I fucking hate Texas.

Most beautiful thing I saw: The rolling undulating, seemingly endless hills and canyons of Escalante Grand Staircase National Park, from the Hogback on Highway 12.

The biggest thrill: it’s a three-way tie between sliding off a waterfall in Wyoming, rappelling through the watery Subway in Zion National Park and peering into the abyss over the ledges of countless towering buttes, mesas, canyon walls and mountains.

Scariest moment: it’s a three-way tie between having my alternator die while going 80 on a busy freeway (the car just…stops), nearly falling down a 2,000′ drop while standing on the rounded, sloping top of a butte and stumbling into a horror movie-level swarm of flies in a pit toilet at 2am and making some hard choices.