When some people need to relax they’ll veg in front of the TV. For others taking it easy might mean going for a drive or hitting the driving range. But for me and Jason nothing says unwinding like biking 15 miles through desert sandpits, gnarly bedrock, and bouncy baby-heads. Yes, for us becoming exhausted in Moab is as relaxing as it gets.

Jason and I just made our biannual visit to Moab. We waited to take our fall trip this time until the madness of our party had waned. The weather in Moab in November can be a little touchy but on this occasion it was utter perfection. And by utter perfection I mean t-shirts and shorts and huge smiles.

We started our excursion off with a hike to the base of Castleton Tower, a 400-foot monolith also known as Castle Rock, in Castle Valley. Castleton Tower stands on a cone of boulders and gravel over 1000 feet high, the kind of terrain that appears impassable when you’re looking at it from the bottom. This difficult trail was obstructed often by chunks of stone and hard to follow at times. Ascending it required some creative clambering skills. But, honestly, that’s what made it fun. There’s nothing wrong with strenuous when it’s part of an adventure. We were so enthusiastic about this hike that not only did we make it up to and around the Tower but we also chose to detour on a sketchy path to check out The Rectory, another outcropping of rock that rises above the opposite side of the ridge. We were pretty tired by the time we got back to our car but we were also pretty satisfied with what we had experienced in way of scenery and exploration.

Our second day in Moab was spent biking the Kokopelli Trail to a place called Yellow Jacket Canyon. We had never ridden this path before so I was as intrigued by the prospects of its new terrain as Jason was by its name. I guess our intrigue got the better of us. We hit this 14.4-mile loop expecting it to be relatively easy in comparison to other Moab trails we have ridden but, although the route was wide enough for off-road vehicles, it was rather rough in places. Sand was the villain of the first third of this expedition. If you’ve never tried going up miles of steep hills on a bike while deep sand attempts to consume your tires you’ve never known frustraustion. Yeah, that’s what happens when frustration and exhaustion get together and produce deformed spawn. We were literally making our way at about 1-2 miles an hour for a while there. At that glorious speed we would have made it back to our car at about never. Luckily, downhill stone eventually replaced uphill sand and we cruised over the deformed bedrock quickly. Quickly, in this case, means we hit speeds up to about 13 MPH but mostly stayed around 6 MPH, which I realize doesn’t exactly fit the standard definition of that word. But hey, after creeping along practically slower than a grandpa with a walker that seemed pretty fast. Lots of bumpy stone and a series of baby-head infested hills later we emerged back onto the highway and from there we were soon back to our car. By the way, for those of you unfamiliar with biking lingo baby-heads are rocks the size of a baby’s head that can make wrecking practically effortless.

Our final call on the Yellow Jacket Canyon section of the Kokopelli Trail? This trail was definitely not as pretty as others we’ve done in the area but the solitude was nice. We only saw one couple on a 4wheeler the whole day. The path was more of a technical treat than we were expecting but the sand sucked unimaginably hard. We’re glad we tried it out but I don’t think it’s going to be top on our list of redos.

On our final day in Moab we biked Flat Iron Mesa. This trail has a reputation for being an easy family-friendly kind of ride. But that reputation, in our opinion, is not deserved. I don’t know of any children that would willingly conquer Flat Iron’s endless hills. The level of complaining you’d get from the kiddos would make getting them to take the garbage out seem like a delight. No, Flat Iron Mesa wasn’t the easygoing ride we were expecting but I guess since we didn’t ride it for its easygoingness we can’t really grumble about its lack thereof. We were interested in this route because of the enthralling possibilities for sidetracking. Many enticing wilder trails shoot off from Flat Iron making it a great starting place for countless adventures. We took one of these options to an overlook above Kane Springs Canyon. The view from this lofty perch was mesmerizing but the 3.5 mile spur we had to ride to get to it made the rest of the desert look like downtown Manhattan. I don’t think anyone else had ridden this trail in months, maybe years. It was so overgrown in places that deciphering where to stick our bikes was like solving a Sherlock Holmes mystery. When all was said and done, Flat Iron Mesa, with our additional excursion to the end of the known universe, was a 17.5 mile journey that took over 4 hours and finished off any energy reserves we might have had. Fun? Yes. Family-friendly? No.

Our trip to Moab was predictably fantastic. We’ve never returned from our favorite vacation spot dissatisfied. We biked 32 miles of tricky terrain and hiked to the top of rocky ridges. Now that’s restful! Before you shake your head too much at our choice of relaxation though I should add that there’s not much to do in Moab once the sun goes down and these days the sun goes down pretty early. After dark Jason and I mostly just read books, watched TV, and typed posts. We’d never make time for hours of that at home. So, see, our idea of taking it easy isn’t too far off from yours. We just prefer to ride across the desert before we settle in to read a good book.

There are many remote regions in Utah. Places that you’ve never heard of that are no less lovely than some of the state’s more traveled spots. Jason and I just visited one of those areas.

I am an eager explorer; my unquenchable curiosity is no doubt the culprit. So when I recently came across information on Kodachrome Basin, a state park that Jason and I had never been to, I decided that it was time we took a little trip. Kodachrome Basin State Park is in south-central Utah about half an hour from Bryce Canyon National Park. You’d think that with its proximity to Bryce it would be a popular detour but apparently that’s not the case. I, however, was intent on not only visiting Kodachrome’s striking spires of sandstone but on making them a destination instead of an afterthought.

Jason and I set aside a weekend for our adventure and stayed in a cute KOA cabin about 15 minutes outside the park. We spent a day investigating Kodachrome’s unfamiliar terrain and found that while this region’s garbled rock formations and vivid landscapes reminded us of several other places in Southern Utah, it had a look of its own. For starters, it was surprisingly green. When you’re in the middle of a desert you don’t expect to see fields of flourishing Indian rice and corral grasses bending gracefully to the wind. Kodachrome’s slopes gather water, which explains its basin title, so the environment is relatively lush. My favorite thing about Kodachrome though wasn’t its abundance of plant life but its absence of human life. We saw only a handful of people on each of the trails we explored. That seclusion made the park’s grandeur even more pronounced.

The trail options at Kodachrome weren’t limitless but they were more than enough to fill up our day. We took in a birds-eye view from the plateaus of the Angel’s Palace Trail then we checked out Shakespeare Arch, the only arch in Kodachrome, from the slickrock above it. To finish off our day we hiked the Panorama Trail and walked among its pipe giants and secret passageways.

On our way back from Kodachrome we diverted into the neighboring Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to gawk at Grosvenor Arch. This double arch, with its gold-streaked sandstone, was impressive and unlike any other arch I’ve seen. Its immovable curves were worth the long jerky dirt road we had to take to get to them.

Although the focus of our excursion was surveying the hitherto unknown, Jason and I couldn’t go right by Bryce Canyon and not go in for a bit even if both of us have been there on numerous occasions. That would be a crime against convenience and nature. But no need for concern, Bryce ended up being part of our explorations of the undiscovered anyway. We opted to try out a trail through the canyon that we had never taken before: the Peekaboo Loop. This path is nearly 5 miles long and is categorized as strenuous thanks to its many ups and downs. That classification is precisely why we could never successfully convince any of the family members or friends we’ve gone to Bryce with to attempt it. And now that I’ve done this loop I have to say that laziness really is the bane of beholding beauty. The Peekaboo Loop was much less crowded than Bryce’s shorter trails and the scenery was stunning. Pale sandstone hoodoos towered above us and bled into their more colorful counterparts making the terrain look foreign to Earth. Gorgeous!

Eventually all good things must end though. Our wonderful weekend was over far too quickly but we stretched out the fun a tad by deviating from our route home to check out a couple of cool places. We took a few minutes to hike to the Mossy Cave and stopped at Widtsoe, a real ghost town deserted in the 1930s.

Though not technically inside Bryce Canyon, the Mossy Cave path is part of the national park. It heads up a brightly tinted canyon to, not surprisingly, a mossy cave along with a waterfall created by the early Mormon settlers a hundred years ago as a segment of the Tropic Canal. Despite its uninspiring name, the Mossy Cave was a pleasant easy hike.

Widtsoe was a peculiar place. While not completely a ghost town, someone had recently built a large cabin up on the hillside behind it, it still had that forgotten vibe. Its few remaining buildings, which somehow had escaped the government’s bulldozers in the 40s, looked like they belonged on a horror movie set with their crumbling plaster and rotting wood. Jason loved their spookiness and I had to hold him back from stupidly jumping right into the decay. Although the remnants of this town were odd enough, the cemetery was stranger still. Most of the graves were from about 1910-1930 but there were a few as recent as 2012. This graveyard was as isolated as they come. With nothing but the desert wind rustling through the hardy junipers and the tinkling of wind chimes left by loved ones to disturb the absolute silence, I can’t think of a more peaceful resting place. But it was also on the eerie side. The arid landscape had not been altered much by those interred and the graves were so haphazardly placed it almost seemed as if the ground had just sprouted the tombstones along with the dry grasses. Only the mounds of dirt marking the burial sites implied a human presence but those piles, which conjured images of the Wild West or the rushed entombments of an epidemic, amplified the atmosphere of creepiness rather than reduced it. Yes, the Widtsoe cemetery is probably not a place you’d catch me lurking in after dark.

Our Kodachrome weekend was perfection. We discovered magnificence that made me small, serenity that left me silenced, and eccentricity that gave me goose bumps. Not bad for a little outing just a few hours away. Utah has a lot to offer off the beaten path. Jason and I won’t ever get tired of examining its unknowns or revisiting our favorites. After all, life isn’t something to be endured but something to be explored.