If you haven't been to Upper Muley Twist Canyon in Utah's Capitol Reef National Park I highly recommend putting it on your list. I'm pretty guarded with specific beta on public social media but figure "The Trailhead" is a much smaller community than somewhere like IG/FB so it feels safer to share some special places here.
There's plenty of good detail online and on the NPS website for Capitol Reef to help anyone who wants to take this on, but I will mention when I called the park road info hotline to see how road access to this particular area was I was told it was 4WD/High Clearance only - but my friend and I saw multiple (apparently) stock Subarus at the TH along with burlier vehicles, so if you've got a higher clearance crossover with good AWD you may be able to make it - but obviously any long, rough dirt road into a remote area is always an "at your own risk" proposition, so keep that in mind.
Rather than talk about everything for the trip, I'm sharing some favorite images from my most recent trip out there when I took a friend for his first time. Mile for mile, I don't know of any desert hike with more variety of terrain on a single route - this one's a treasure.
***The first few images from this set are not from the Upper Muley Twist area, but rather from a remote (and relatively unknown) overlook about 30-40 minutes drive away, just outside the Capitol Reef NP boundaries. I'm not going to give the name of that area here (I like to leave some exploring on the table for interested parties). Hope you enjoy the views! I may add a comment here or there after certain images.*
Not a bad spot to watch the end of the day! (Views from the aforementioned overlook the evening before we dayhiked the Upper Muley Twist Canyon route.)
(A few more detailed views captured between the overlook area from the previous images and the spot we ultimately made camp for the night.)
Sunrise views from the Strike Valley Overlook, the most popular area most visitors out here make the short hike out to. Upper Muley Twist Canyon, being significantly more arduous overall, gets much less traffic. Even so, my friend and I only saw one other photographer out in this area during our time out/up here before we started the main Upper Muley Twist Canyon route.
Some views from the earlier stretches of Upper Muley Twist Canyon.
Near the end of the "in canyon" portion of the route there's a small offshoot slot canyon you can wander through for a few minutes - it's not very long but I think stretches of it are immensely scenic. During this trip there was even a 20-30 foot slender waterfall pouring into the canyon from a season creek (likely highly ephemeral because we had a really high snow year that preceded this spring season). Anyway - the slot is a highly-recommended detour before you start the big climb up to the top of the Reef.
I was rockin' my HMG Northrim 4400 (70L) on this trip. It's a huge pack to carry around, but fully cinched down it's more like a 35L pack than a 70L (a friend calls it my "transformer pack" because of how radically different it looks when fully loaded vs fully cinched down). This was not too long after I'd acquired the pack - it's significantly dirtier now, but still just as rough and tumble as it was at this early stage.
