Click any of the photos for a bigger version. It’s worth it.

They call it “Castle Valley” because the round, lone mountain in the middle has rock formations on top that makes it look like a castle on a hill. You’d think that mountain would be named Castle Mountain, but no, it’s named Round Mountain. However, before we knew it’s name, as we were driving and driving and wondering where in the world our campsite was (we still had 40 minutes to go with lots of STEEP windy roads up the mountains), we dubbed it Lonely Mountain, because it was all alone in the middle of the valley.

Lonely Mountain, as one drives through the valley.

Even closer:

The valley wall also held this nifty rock formation:

We finally left the valley floor and began climbing the mountains. We were driving my sisters old Nissan Sentra, and boy, it had to work VERY hard.

Just barely climbing, lonely/round mountain on the left:

And then up a bit more…

And then we were winding around through the mountains so much, there wasn’t really a vantage point for any more photos.

This is up the road even further from our campsite:

You can just barely see lonely mountain peeping up there behind a slope in the middle.

It took a long time to climb the La Sal mountains to get to our campsite. And we drove back down them again every day to go to Arches or go into Moab, so we saw this valley a lot.

And it took my breath away every time.