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My best friend, Rebecca, and I have been collecting experiences since high school. We’ve been roadtripping since I got my license: drives over the Colorado border into Wyoming to smuggle back fireworks and to Denver for burritos and shopping malls Rebecca and I decided to bring 2018 in together in Moab, Utah. Everyone knows Arches. Even in the winter, hoards of tourists flock to Delicate Arch, Utah’s most popular destination for tourists from around the globe looking to get that perfect Instagram snap.This may be ideal for many, but it was missing the magic I had craved from the desert. We decided to make the icy trek to Delicate Arch. We raced twenty tourists to the top, greeting fifty more who appeared from thin air. Had they been here all night? After we got our photos, we turned around and gave up on solitude in Moab. We drove through crowded streets to a crowded diner, and searched for a room in a crowded town. On our second day, we chose the less popular Canyonlands National Park. The hike for the day was in the Needles District. Once in Needles, we started on the trail, Squaw Canyon, and the trail was empty. The park was empty. The whole world could have been empty. Together, we realized the boundaries of Canyonlands paired with isolation of the Needles would provide us with the solitary wilderness we sought. The sun beat down on our heads and faces, and, even though it was January, we were able to hike without our jackets and beanies. We trekked along a snowy path until we reached a seemingly endless wall of exposed slick rock. Only cairns led the way up and over. We walked for half a mile, then came to the edge of a canyon. Typically chatty hikers, we were silenced by the endless seclusion and blue sky against red sandstone. We spent the rest of the day exploring, dissatisfied with our lack of time to see it all. We arrived at Confluence Point, where the Colorado and Green Rivers collide. We hiked down to the bottom. We gleefully played in the dry riverbed, remarking our favorite refrain from the day, "Canyonlands! It feels like we’re cheating!" We were less than two miles from a road, in the middle of a canyon, surrounded by astounding geological formations. Canyonlands awakened an infantile sense of wonder in both of us. And for so much of the day, we enjoyed it as the only inhabitants. As we danced our way back up the canyon, I realized that the last thing I’d expected was to fall in love with a National Park I had never heard of before.