Bryce Canyon

Cedar City, Utah

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 main feature of the day was the Queen's Garden trail. We stopped at the visitor's center when we came in and debated whether or not to use the optional shuttle to get to our trail head. We were even in line for the shuttle when Liam noticed a sign telling us to move our car from the main parking lot before boarding a shuttle as the visitor's center parking was restricted to one hour only. So we walked back to our car, intending to move it, but decided instead to drive on to the trail and just see if maybe there was enough parking. There was. Our trail began at Sunrise Point and there were (luckily) signs leading us there from the parking lot, so off we went. There is a fabulous canyon view from Sunrise Point, they call it the amphitheater though and say 'canyon' is wrong. I thought amphitheater was 'outdoor theater,' I guess that isn't all it is. It is also a canyon full of cool stuff to look at, in this case hoodoos, a word I love. The view from above, though, was quickly overshadowed as we descended on the trail down into the canyon and actually walked among the rock formations. The queen of Queen's Garden, by the way, is a pink formation named Queen Victoria. I am still unsure why she gets a garden in southern Utah.

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.