Salt Lake City Start - Where do we go from there?
 

I would love some help planning the following:

Summer vacation trip with my husband and two boys ages 12 and 13. Boys love to be active - some hiking, but love swimming and white water rafting. 10 days total with a rental car - the only limit is that the flights are in and out of Salt Lake City. Date would be the second two weeks of June.

Our boys have never been out west (we are from Massachusetts) and my personal experience in that area is limited to Vegas and Southern Cal.

I would love some ideas on what to do with ten days that are completely wide open. I love the idea of visiting National Parks and hiking, but our boys would probably only want to hike 3-4 days total - so, what would you do? North or South? East or West? Must see or do? Hoping to go back west for future vacations but for the first one what should we do?

Thanks in Advance!

My first choice would be to head for Grand Teton NP and Yellowstone. You are way late to make reservations for lodging in the park, but call and keep calling as they get cancellations all the time and they often don't show up on the web. In the mean time make a reservation you can cancel in Jackson Hole for GT and West Yellowstone for Yellowstone.

If you want something else on the way back to SLC, head to Dinosaur NM and hit the museum in Price

My second choice would be to head to Moab for a few days in Arches NP and Canyonlands NP and then loop over to Bryce and Zion then back to SLC. This will probably be much hotter than the Yellowstone area, but also a great trip; Just get lodging with a pool and do the outdoor stuff early or late in the day and soak in the pool mid day.

Moab, Utah might be ideal for you but it will be hot. There are two national parks, Arches & Canyonlands. Lots of hiking, river rafting, dirt biking, and you can rent 4x4 jeeps to go on off road adventures. There are miles of 4x4 trails. There are petroglyphs and dinosaur tracks in the area. Beautiful scenic drives like Hwy 128 and the Potash Road. The La Sal Mountains are near by if you need a place to go cool off and they do have fishing in the lakes.

Once your boys start hiking in these parks they might change their minds on how many days they want to do hiking. Arches is only 5 miles from the town of Moab so you can do a hike in the morning and do a swim in the pool during the hot part of the day and do another hike or something else in the late afternoon. You could easily spend 7 days in Moab and not run out of things to do.

With 10 days you could combine either Dinosaur National Monument which also has river rafting in the area and the dinosaur quarry or Capitol Reef National Park where it would pretty much be hiking.

Utahtea

emalloy,

I was just thinking Utah, but you are right, Yellowstone and Grand Tetons would be a great choice!

Utahtea

Oh, definitely head north to GT and Yellowstone. There is hiking, rafting, fly fishing, horseback riding. You could probably even go through the park into Montana a bit.
You could introduce them (if not already) to fly fishing--and it is something that you can continue in MA.

I agree with emalloy and the others. The perfect choices!

Thank you all so much! Starting the Teton/yellowstone search for places to stay! I will see if i can work that out and, if not, start looking at going South.