Doggin'
Goblin Valley: The Next Best Thing To Taking Your Dog to the
Moon
If there were a perverse award for Best
Place To Hike Where Your Dog Can't Go, Utah might win the prize.
Its national parks are world renowned as a hiking mecca but dog
owners have to work a bit harder to get a taste of the fantastic
rock formations and trails the state has to offer. The remote
Goblin Valley is one of those places.
Those national parks were already drawing
visitors before word of this otherworldly place leaked out from
cowboys searching for lost cattle who were the first to report
on the bizarre gnome-like rock formations. You may have already
seen the "goblins" yourself if you saw the movie "Galaxy
Quest." The park was used to create the hostile planet Thermia
as Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver starred in as actors in a popular
space travel television series who are kidnapped by real aliens
to fight on real war - albeit in Goblin Valley.
The goblins are formed by uneven weathering
of varying hardness. Water erosion and the smoothing action of
windblown desert dust conspire to shape the hoodoos and spires
in the valley. The State of Utah acquired 3,000 acres to create
the park in 1964.
The park does not maintain many formal
trails but you are free to drop into the Valley of the Goblins
and explore the intricately balanced rock formations with your
dog close-up. The valley is flat and any level of canine hiker
can enjoy weaving in and out of the goblins.
More spirited canine hiking lies just outside the park on the
vast lands of the Bureau of Land Management. The Bell Canyon/Behind
the Reef Road/Little Wild Horse Canyon trails can be welded to
form an eight-mile loop into dry wahses and slot canyons. The
walls of these canyons constrict to barely the body width of
a Golden Retriever at times.
Goblin Valley is deep in the interior
of Utah. The park is 36 miles southwest of Green Valley, the
nearest town. From I-70 take 24 south to Temple Mountain Road
and follow signs into the park.
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