Poetry Friday Written From I-70 in Utah

Good Poetry Friday, wherever you are! Currently, I am in the great State of Utah. We are on our southwestern National Parks trip. It is the second of such trips – the first was in 2021. I don’t know where the last five years have gone!

On this trip, we traveled to Denver by plane and stayed with our son in Fort Collins.

While there, we hiked in the Colorado foothills on a couple of trails through gulches and drove to Mount Blue Sky, a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain, to view the world from the summit. It was beautiful!

On Tuesday, we drove to Moab, Utah, and saw the sunset from the Windows section of Arches National Park. We went to Arches on our last trip and loved it. We saw two sunrises there, but no sunsets, so this time, we went at dusk, hiked, and stayed until the sun went down at 8:34 pm. And, yes, we were in shorts the whole time!

Wednesday took us to Canyonlands National Park, also outside of Moab. It was our first visit there and we loved it. The rock formations and billions of years of geological evolution and erosion are evident all around you! We ended up at the bottom of Schafer Canyon by accident, but as Bob Ross would say, it was a happy little accident.

The narrow gravel road filled with switchbacks and potholes descended 1500 feet down to the canyon floor. Luckily, our AWD vehicle handled it without an issue. We learned that uranium mining was an important reason that trails were built in this area.

Once back at the top, we continued to explore, but now we were on foot, hiking through trails that went to canyon overlooks. We both had over 20,000 steps or 8 miles of hiking in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands that day.

Next, we stopped at Dead Horse State Park, where the legend of how the park got its name provided an interesting story. They also have an evaporation operation for harvesting potash (KCl), which was both beautiful (intense blue) and interesting.

The day before yesterday, we went to the Needles section of the park, south of Moab. It takes an hour and a half to get there, but it is well worth the drive. There were petroglyphs, odd rock formations such as mushrooms and needles. We saw springs and caves used first by ancient peoples and Native Americans, then by cowboys who were cattle ranchers in this area. Cattle ranching ended in 1975 in this area, according to the interpretive signs we saw.

My mom would have loved this – she did a whole unit on the West and Cowboys when she taught in the 70s. Unfortunately, my parents never made it to this area.

Today, we are headed to Bryce Canyon National Park by way of Capitol Reef National Park. We decided at breakfast, after talking to two ladies from North Carolina, to travel the scenic route. We all headed to the same hotel in Bryce Canyon! We hope to see them and their cute little dog there.

Our trip has been both relaxing and joyful. We have avoided crowds and communed with nature. It has inspired me to write and I’m keeping a digital notebook of stories ideas. I even worked on my picture book during the trip – editing for a tenth iteration of the story!

My Canva files of photographs with new haiku from the trip can be found on my author website at https://caroljlabuzzetta.com/. I hope you stop by and check them out under the poetry tab. While there, why not sign up to follow me? Thanks!

prickly pear in bloom
dots the landscape with color
only briefly here

© Carol Labuzzetta, 2026.

Dead Horse Canyon Loop
Be chosen or perish soon
Equine fates await

© Carol Labuzzetta, 2026

Thank you for all the participation last week when I hosted Poetry Friday. This week;s host is Mary Lee at her blog (A)nother Year of Reading. Thanks for hosting, Mary Lee. Be sure to stop by and read her summer party of Poetry Sisters and an old school round up of posts for this week!