My wife and I spent a month last summer driving around Utah. Some fun things to do were around Turquoise Mountain. Around there you'll find the Old Pony Express Trail, digging for your own Turquoise, and digging for Geodes. The Pony Express Trail is mostly gravel road in good condition with some black-top sections. There are other routes that branch off of the trail, so you can enter/exit from multiple locations. I did about 300 miles of gravel road and had 1 flat. There were signs on trail for the geobeds, however finding where to dig is best to do research before hand and the road/trail to the geobed off main road is not good, we did see cars there so it is possible. We had interment cell and were able to look some stuff up while out there. For the Turquoise, there is a public and a payed section. After spending a few hours clueless in the public, we went to the paid. They blast the rock and it's a lot easier to break the smaller rocks to find them, or just laying around. I would bring your own tools and containers for them and gloves. There was another place in the same general area where you can mine for Trilobites/Fossils. It's a paid family run site. They were very nice, had tools and buckets for you, we walked out with about 100' lbs of rocks with Trilobites in just an hour or two. When visiting Moab, Hwy 128 is a great drive around sunset or just to see. Not to mention Arches and Deadhorse are right there. We took the Klondike Trail with our jeep and did fine, at the end if you get out and walk to the end you will be on-top of Arches National Park with an awesome view. For camping/backpacking in Zion, backpacking/camping permits are easier to get for the east rim then the west rim. Capital Reef is a great place for Dark Sky observation, and no park fees. If you are jumping from Park to Park, the annual pass pays for it's self quickly. There was also a fun trail ride on the Stansbury Mountains, opposite side of the valley from Salt Lake. They will bring you to the top of the Copper Mine overlooking Salt Lake. Antelope Island is an interesting place, but black flys can get real bad. They have Bison and good views. Another cool place is Saltair. It's in the Salt Lake region, it used to be on the lake a hundred years ago and now it's a quarter mile inland. In the Salt Lake area as well is Sky Line Drive, we found a sweet little lake to camp by. There is tons more, we googled a lot on the fly. We did all of this in a stock GMC k1500, save for the Klondike trail. Btw, there are also ghost towns to visit, but we didn't get the chance. Yall will have a great time.
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