West Trip Summary

As wrap up for the West Trip (no pictures in this one), here was our basic itinerary. This was recorded after the fact, so it doesn’t show any options or contingencies and some of the drive times are from memory or are otherwise inaccurate. The rough color coding is this: green was as planned and I wouldn’t change the plan; yellow was maybe slightly unplanned or has slight modifications to the plan; red indicates that something should have been done differently. The last few days have a good chunk of yellow because our original plan was to go around to the South rim of the Grand Canyon, which would have taken a few days longer. Since we didn’t do this, these days were kind of planned on the fly.

I think my general perception looking back is that we probably should not have tried to do mountains in conjunction with Arches, Zion and the Grand Canyon. They were simply too far away and required too different of equipment to easily mesh into the same trip. It also was a bit rushed, allowing no time for acclimation to altitude, which probably would have been nice. If going to hike mountains, I think I would try to stay in one place in Leadville for a week and just go from there. It would allow a few days for acclimation and maybe a day for rest as well as eliminating the need to pack up everything in the morning, making for earlier starts which would be necessary.

Another thought is that, as can be seen from some of the yellow, we could have scratched a couple days (probably Grand Junction, Aspen and the slot canyons), which in addition to the mountains would have had the trip down to 8 days, halving the number of vacation days needed. This is debatable, since on one hand it’s nice to conserve vacation days for kayaking and skiing, but on the other, it’s nice to maximize the fact that we had two partial travel days and the cost of flying out west.