About an hour before Moab, we stopped in to explore Goblin Valley State Park, which is located near Hanksville, Utah. This one-of-a-kind park includes an area where soft sandstone has eroded into interesting shapes, which somewhat resemble goblins. With its unearthly appearance, the park’s landscape offers surreal scenery, providing fun for all ages.
There is a $15 day pass fee, but the entrance lady gave us a $5 discount because she liked Jordan’s hair… I'm not even kidding. Does anyone else find it extremely frustrating that he literally just comes out of the river and it looks like this!?
Anyway, I'm never one to complain about a discount, so we began exploring the park and ending up hanging out with the goblins for about an hour. We wandered around the main area, aptly named Goblin Valley.
On our way out of the park, we pulled over for a short walk to to visit The Three Sisters.
After saying goodbye to the goblins, we continued on our way to Moab to find a place to spend the night. We had to be a bit pickier when it came to choosing a camp spot this time, as we needed cell service since we’d both be working remotely the next couple of days. The entrance lady from the park told us about Willow Springs Road, which offers free dispersed camping only 20 minutes outside of Moab and is operated by the Bureau of Land Management. There are no set sites, but there are plenty of obvious pull-outs and pretty much any open area can be claimed (if not too close to other occupants of course). There is a vault toilet and some porta-potties sporadically placed around the area, but no water. We drove around until we found a spot that checked all of our boxes. We were treated to the most beautiful sunset as we made our dinner of sautéed peppers and onions that we had brought from home (somehow they hadn’t rotted yet) alongside a boxed dinner of rice and beans (which was actually left over from our trip to Hawaii over a year and a half ago… waste not want not right!?).
Must-sees: If you don’t have much time to spend in Goblin Valley State Park, you can enjoy sightseeing from the park overlook, however I highly recommend hiking down and wandering among the goblins in Goblin Valley. Another must-see is The Three Sisters, the most iconic of all goblin formations in the park. You can view them from the road, but I recommend taking the short, unmarked but easy-to-follow trail that will lead you to a close-up look.
On Reflection: We didn’t realize that there was an entrance fee to enter the park (it’s a state park so it’s no surprise that it did, we just didn’t take that into consideration due to hiker’s exhaustion…), so we wish we could have spent more time exploring the area. Heck, even if it was free to enter, I’m sure we could have easily spent another hour or so meandering in the valley.