Utah's Mighty Five Road Trip

By themadgardener , 15 June 2026

This article is under development and it may take a few days before I have the entire trip documented!

Planning Essentials 

On all my trips I make sure we have a solid plan on what we are going to do along with ideas for backups.   I aim to maximize the amount of time we can spend exploring when visiting destinations 1,500 miles away from home!

  • Utah National Parks Map Bundle - I have not done a lot of comparison shopping of other brands but the National Geographic Maps have consistently worked well for me. I buy these well in advance as I prefer a nice large physical map when planning adventures.  I then carry the map, for the current park, in my back pack as a back up plan should my technology fail.
  • Garmin GPSMap 67i Rugged GPS Handheld with inReach Satellite Technology this unit is worth its weight in gold as it pairs with my phone and allows us to check our location ensuring we are on the right trail.   While in Bryce Canyon we nearly took the wrong trail, which would have gotten us to where we wanted to go, but would have added at least a mile to our hike.  Furthermore, the inReach technology has an SOS feature should one of us get injured and it typically is the case, in National Parks, that cell phone reception is limited and spotted.   Garmin has many different options but I prefer larger devices as I find them more ergonomically friendly.   Furthermore, I was able to buy one of the refurbished models which saved me a few hundred dollars!

I started this trip from Bowlus, MN and traveled to Jamestown, ND where I connected with my two sons who were attending an event in that area.  

We spent the first couple days on easy activities as a means to get used to the elevation.   Average elevation in Utah is 6,100 but even that can be misleading with the state's range being 2,350 feet to 13,528 feet.  So in the list of places, we visited, I will also list elevation statistics.   Our first National Park was Zion National Park, located in the south west corner of Utah and then we worked our way East and North and we took advantage of National Monuments that could be visited on our way to Zion!

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