Day 32: Scottsdale, AZ to Lake Powell

The last leg of our trip arrived, a travel day, but thankfully with a few more days of camping and family ahead before really zipping home. 

We had shopped for food the day before and made a plan to drive to Page/Lake Powell and camp for the night before heading to the National Parks of southeastern Utah the next day (Thank you Utah State for opening your national parks, we love you!!) We figured this would both to break up the drive for the kids' sakes and there were some cool slot canyons near Page that we wanted to check out. 

The drive seemed really long and we got to Page fairly late in the afternoon. Ben was using Google Maps to navigate to Waterholes Canyon. The website of this canyon suggested that it was only open to commercial tours, or at least most of it, but given some ambiguity, we decided to go for it and access it by a back road. Some wrong turns later, we drove over a cattle guard and found the wash that leads into the canyon. The boys loved running around on the slickrock and the canyon took some really cool narrow twists and turns. We were also thankful for the aluminum ladders at all the drop down points given that we didn't bring a rope (hmm, tour company?). 

Eventually we decided we better turn around given the approaching darkness; we also wanted to do the short hike to the Horseshoe Bend overlook on the Colorado. So, driving along back out, remember that cattle guard? There was now a padlocked chain over that thing, essentially trapping us in the native reserve where the canyon is. Surprisingly, neither Ben nor Bryan nor anyone panicked. Ben and Bry inspected the chain, padlock and fence, decided on the easiest way to tamper with it, and proceeded to use Ben's tools to take a bolt off the metal fence post, detach the supports and slide the chain up and over. 

It would have been perfect, and mostly unnoticeable, but fences have a way of expanding once they're detached so they simply could not reattach the top strand of barb wire, nor one of the supporting metal beams back to the bolt. Oh well. It will be very obvious that someone tampered with the gate, but not likely traceable to us. 

Unfortunately, the delay meant it was too late to hike to Horseshoe Bend so we set up camp at Powell, made burgers for dinner, and went to bed. Great day!