Bryce Canyon NP

Bryce Canyon as seen from Sunset Point

Descending into the canyon on the Navajo Loop trail

Us on the Peek-a-Boo trail

Bryce Canyon NP is just a couple hours down the road from Zion NP.  But the landscape is totally different.  Bryce doesn’t look real, or natural.  And it’s not even really a canyon, at least not an identifiable one.  It’s more like a giant bowl filled with red-and-white banded hoodoos (rock spires) and rock fins.  Some rare combination of odd geological structure and weather created the place, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were seeing something temporary.  The spires and fins are so delicate, it seems like we happen right now to be in the right place at the right geological time.  How long until it’s all eaten away?  It made us feel incredibly lucky to see it.

And, as we found out, you can hike down into the “canyon.”  We chose to descend the famous Navajo trail, which switchbacks through a narrow crease in the rock wall, and then catch the less-traveled Peek-a-Boo trail to get a good feel for the place.  The weather started to turn when we were more or less at the halfway point of the hike – about 3 or 4 miles from our car.  We watched the sky and hurried along, praying that the rain would hold off and we would not get caught in a flash flood in one of the endless narrow canyons we were walking through.  We got lucky.  It drizzled but the heavy stuff never came down.

Exhausted that night, we collapsed in our tent on what would prove to be the first of many frigid nights on the Colorado Plateau.