Tuesday's trip was to Bryce Canyon National Park. It was amaaaazing! We made sure to wear long pants and real shoes and even brought light weight jackets this time so we would have no need to abort the whole trip. For at least part of the day we were glad to be better prepared. It wasn't super cold or particularly windy, but it is plainly not summer anymore and there was still a chill in the air.
The trail winds back and forth and loops around and through the hoodoos and cliffs below. In some places the ground drops a bit dramatically off the side of the trail. At one point, we were stopped at a drop off where the ground beside the trail was just a lot of loose sand cascading between giant rock formations. We could see that our trail went around a curve ahead of us and continued way below us. Liam, gazing at the steep landscape between us and that trail far below jokingly asked; "Is that the trail down there? Why don't we just walk that way then?" An older woman nearby overheard him and said firmly "Because you would die!" Then, perhaps deciding she was being a bit extreme, added; "Because your Grandma wouldn't want you to!" Haha. We stayed on the trail, for grandmas everywhere.
So we wandered along the Queen's Garden trail and then took the Navajo Loop off of it that took us to see a couple land bridges and through a few tunnels and then back up a steep, back and forth, trail reminiscent of San Francisco's 'crookedest street in the world,' (only we were going up... and walking) and up to Sunset Point. But there was construction at the view point and we were asked to wait 10 minutes before we could pass, in that 10 minutes we noticed that another trail was ending here also, and looking down that trail we could see that it went through a slot canyon way below us. So after climbing all the way up, we climbed back down the other trail so we could go through the canyon at what was, I think, the end of the Under the Rim Trail. It was awesome! We didn't continue on the trail but came back up the way we went down, giving us a chance to walk through the narrow canyon twice.
We finished our day in the park by driving the road up to Rainbow viewpoint and then coming back down stopping at most of the viewpoints along the way. The highlight of the viewpoints was probably the Land Bridge, but seeing things from up above was nothing in comparison to walking down among them.