Goblin Valley

After our less than fabulous night of sleep, we ate breakfast- cereal (yep I'm a stellar cook) and packed up and headed off to our last hike of the week.  I'd seen pictures of Goblin Valley on a friend's blog and was dieing to take my boys there.  

It's just this one valley in Utah where for whatever geologic reason, these little pillars of sand have formed.  They call them hoodoos.  And there are thousands of them- small, big, gigantic, and in every shape you can imagine.  My boys love the Veggie Tales movie- The Pirates who Don't do Anything and in it there's this pile of rocks that comes to life and is a "Rock Monster".  He even has his own theme song.  Well these hoodoos looked amazingly similar to rock monsters so Isaac and Ethan spent the whole time singing "rock monster, rock monster, ro-o-o-ock monster".  Miles was a little freaked out and stayed close to me until he was sure none of the rocks were going to come to life and start chasing him.

And then he was off just like the others, disappearing around and through and over these amazing sculptures.

The truly amazing thing is that it's a State Park and they actually don't care that you climb on them.  There were hundreds of people there doing the exact same thing as my kids.

Isla got to spend her time in the carrier as always.

Some of these hoodoos were 20 or 30 feet high and then people were even climbing the walls of the canyon since they were the same sculpture shapes you could climb on.

After enough climbing my boys ran off to play hide and seek with my dad.  It was the perfect game except that it was 90 degrees out already.  They lasted a while and I just had to calm my mommy heart since I could never see where they were and just had to watch for a streak of color running in between hoodoos.

Miles enjoyed leaping out at my dad when he found him.

It's truly an amazing place and not really a hike.  Just 20 or so stairs down from the parking lot and then you can climb and play as much or little as you like.

We will definitely be going back- just when it's a little cooler :)