2021 Spring Tour of the Southwest, 3.31.21 - 4.14.21, Part 2 of 11, Cathedral Gorge State Park

A few months ago I was flipping through one of those magazines you get in your mailbox. It may have been a AAA Northwest or Northwest Highways, I’m not really sure but it was all about the Pacific Northwest. Except for one page which was called “Beyond the Northwest”. The photo was of this really cool looking tall rock formation and it reminded me somewhat of what I had seen in Badlands National Park in South Dakota last year. The photo and short essay was about a place called Cathedral Gorge. It didn’t even say what state it was in but a quick Google search led me to find out that Cathedral Gorge is a state park in Nevada. One or two YouTube videos later and I told Bridgit we need to go check this place out!

So after our visit to Blue Basin in Oregon and a long drive to Jerome, Idaho, we set our sights on Cathedral Gorge State Park. To get there we left at 6AM, drove straight through Twin Falls, Idaho and south down 93 the entire way. Along the way we drove by the Ruby Mountains of northern Nevada (must go) and right past Great Basin National Park (must go there too!). It took us six and a half hours to drive there but Nevada is in the Pacific Time Zone so we arrived around 11:30AM. The campground does not accept reservations and that had me concerned the whole way down there but as luck would have it (and we had a ton of it on this trip) there was one open site so we snagged it for a three night stay.

After a visit to the Visitor Center we drove around to check out the lay of the land. The park campground has 24 sites in one loop and it was mostly van conversions, tents and a few small RVs and trailers. It’s not really designed for the big Class A rigs and every site has plenty of elbow room and a cover over the table. That was nice because we were relishing the 81 degree heat after leaving the pathetic high 40’s back home. The campground is walking distance from the day use area which is the central hub for the park. The gorge is sort of a big V shaped gorge with pillars, spires and walls on either side. One trail goes straight up the center of the V to a higher point with a lookout. Another goes on the other side of the gorge up a long draw. The walls of the gorge itself are hundreds of feet high and just a massive jumble of sandstone spires. Water has eroded between the spires to create tons of narrow slot canyons. Not really canyons but fissures in the rock, some areas are almost too narrow to squeeze through in places and then they may open up to a large room unseen from the front. Others don’t even start at the base but have to be climbed up to and then drop down into them. It is a total playground for fun exploration.

We spent the late afternoon as the sun was going down shooting pictures by the day use area. The early evening light really lights up the walls of the gorge. We spent some time exploring some of the “caves” as they call the fissures. The light from above would fill the caves with a soft orange glow. We were having so much fun just crawling around on the rocks like little kids!