Eight Days on the Road: Cathedral Gorge State Park

Just the beginning….

• 📍 Cathedral Gorge State Park

• 🚙 450 miles

• 📈 Elevation Change: 4,750 feet

Favorite moment: The road, the slots, and the Milky Way!

There’s something exciting about pulling away from home at the beginning of a road trip, knowing that for the next several days, everything you need is packed in the truck and the road ahead is wide open. This time, I was setting out on an eight-day camping trip, with my first stop taking me from Southern California into Nevada and Cathedral Gorge State Park.

Cathedral Gorge turned out to be a perfect place to begin the trip.

The campground itself was small and simple, surrounded by a landscape that immediately made it clear I wasn’t home anymore. The formations around the park are unlike anything I normally see along the coast—tall, sculpted walls of pale rock carved by erosion into narrow passages, ridges, and dramatic shapes.

One of my favorite parts of the park was exploring the small slot canyons. You can walk right into some of the narrow openings between the formations, where the walls close in around you and twist farther back than you might expect. Every turn seemed to reveal another little passageway, and the changing light made the rock look different from one spot to the next.

It was the kind of place that made me want to keep wandering just to see what was around the next corner.

On my way out of the park, I stopped at a few places overlooking the gorge itself. From above, you get a completely different perspective. Trails lead down into the bottom of the gorge, where you can walk among the formations and see the landscape from below. Even from the overlooks, the views were beautiful and gave me a completely different perspective of the formations I had been exploring earlier.

But Cathedral Gorge wasn’t finished showing off when the sun went down.

That night, I headed out with my camera hoping to photograph the Milky Way. There were some low clouds hanging around at first, and for a while I wasn’t sure they were going to cooperate. Eventually, though, I could see the Milky Way stretching high across the sky.

Standing there in the dark, surrounded by the strange formations of Cathedral Gorge and looking up at a sky filled with stars, was a pretty incredible way to spend the first night of the trip.

Cathedral Gorge was only the beginning—one night down, seven more days on the road, and a lot more places still ahead.

Thanks for journeying with me!
~ Bridget