Bryce Canyon

Travel Day - Bryce Canyon City, UT

On Saturday I made the almost five hour, 245 mile drive from Moab to Bryce Canyon City, Utah. A lot of the drive was on an interstate again, which is not ideal when you are towing in a 80 MPH speed limit area, but otherwise was a pretty nice drive. The campground was pretty cramped, but it was right outside the door of Bryce Canyon National Park: It was also nice because the campground was on the shuttle route that went in to town and also through some of the more popular areas of the park, so we didn’t have to drive into the park and worry about parking.

That night was the last rodeo night in Bryce Canyon City of the year, so I went to check it out: It was very much a small town rodeo, but still entertaining enough to get me to stay through the few rain showers that came through that evening.

Since Amber and Bruce were coming in on Thursday, I didn’t want to spend too much time in Bryce Canyon ahead of them getting there so it would be fresh for me too. So Sunday I just went to the visitor center and got my stamp, got my picture in front of the park sign, and my other normal park stuff, to get the easy stuff out of the way. Monday and Tuesday I didn’t do much during the day other than read some books. The weather was so nice, back in the low 80s during the day and the 50s at night, which made it really nice to just be able to relax outside. The campground also had these beautiful Stellar’s Jays: At night I went in to Bryce Canyon to look at the stars because it is another International Dark Sky Park, and I think it had an even darker sky than I saw from Arches.

Red Canyon

On Wednesday I finally got back out to hike some more in Red Canyon, which was only about 15 minutes away. It was a pretty canyon, although the Golden Wall trail I was on had tons of loose rock which made a lot of the descents slippery, I ended up sliding several times and falling down completely once, but the five miles was still worth it:

Bryce Canyon

On Thursday I did my normal visitor prep (laundry/grocery shopping/cleaning) and Amber and Bruce arrived that evening. We went into Bryce Canyon again that evening so they could see the night sky, but we went to bed pretty early to get an early start on the next day. On Friday, we started the day with the Queens Garden Trail and Navajo Loop so that we could go down in to Bryce Canyon: It was a really pretty trail getting down into the canyon and able to see the hoodoos up close. The ascent coming up the Navajo Loop was pretty brutal though, lots of switchbacks while climbing out:

On Friday afternoon we drove the whole scenic drive through the park and stopped at all the overlooks. It was a pretty short drive and would be easy to do in less than a couple hours. On the way back we hiked the rim trail from Bryce Point to Sunset Point, where we finished right before sunset. The views on this whole trail were amazing, but Bryce Point is competing for my single favorite view on this whole trip so far: