Black Canyon

But about 15 miles downriver from the dam, you’ll find Willow Beach and the Black Canyon Water Trail, a great place to kayak.

There’s also a restaurant, Black Canyon Grill, open daily for lunch in summer; open Fridays to Sundays for most of March, April, May, September and October; and closed November to February.

By the time we made it to Black Canyon of the Gunnison, we were pretty excited to see something other than the hoodoos and arches that we were starting to take for granted.

So, if you’ll humor me and indulge in that mindset, I can safely say Black Canyon of the Gunnison was one of my favorite parks on this trip, with soaring drop-offs and magnificent metamorphic rocks that made us feel tiny and inconsequential in the best possible way.

Fruita is a small town about halfway between Moab and Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park that’s best known as home to Mike, a local chicken that was able to survive without a head for 18 months in the 1940s.