In March, we had family in town with cousins similar in age to my kids. They love adventures too so we decided to meet down in southern Utah and have ourselves a good time. I have a couple of friends who have spent a lot of time down south near St. George, so I reached out to them for some ideas. Word of mouth helps so much.
We got an AirBNB in Cedar City, to save a little bit of money and to be away from most crowds. I didn’t realize it was spring break for many students (my kids and their cousins are homeschooled so it’s not applicable over here) but I was so pleased with our lodging and our destination choices. Have you used AirBNB? It is my favorite way to travel.
On the drive to Cedar City, we stopped in Parowan to see two big attractions: dinosaur tracks and petroglyphs. Just a few miles off the highway is a cliffside on BLM land that has several fossilized dinosaur tracks. Seeing dinosaur tracks in real life, and being able to compare our hands to their size, was just fascinating. The kids climbed all around on the rocks and my husband who works with geologists pointed out many spots where fossils may be hiding underneath other layers of rock.
Next we headed down the road to the Parowan Gap petroglyphs. We had seen petroglyphs in Moab, on the Delicate Arch trail, a few years back, but this was just fascinating. We talked about how each culture and religion has it’s own creation story and ways of explaining things that happen.
My kids didn’t quite grasp how new email and phones are (hi I clearly remember the sound of dial up and how I’d get yelled at when someone picked up the corded phone to call out and heard the internet sound), but we talked about how the petroglyphs were ways to communicate and to document experiences and thoughts. It was a good opportunity too to show my children how not everything is for us. We don’t really understand the glyphs but that’s okay, we don’t need to.
The signs say the glyphs are from several different indigenous groups from around a 1,000 year time frame. We used this opportunity to talk more about Leave No Trace.
Here are a few more resources about the Parowan Gap:
https://parowan.org/parowan-gap/
https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/geosights/parowan-gap/