Bryce Canyon – Tue 23 & Wed 24

Bryce Canyon is very, very cool. One of my favourite spots we have visited (well, along with Alaska and Crater Lake and Yosemite and Grand Canyon and Zion and a bunch of others!). I had seen lots of photos of it, and it was every bit as good as I expected!

In the morning we stopped at Red Canyon, which is on the road into Bryce Canyon, and Justin did some mountain biking. I had stumbled across some information about it along the line and discovered that there are 34 miles of single track mountain biking, or something along that line, and he wasn’t disappointed. Gorgeous scenery to go with it as well, with red rock formations everywhere.

While Justin was biking I went to book our campsite for the night. That was fine, until I had to write the check-in date on the self-registration slip. For the life of me I couldn’t work out what the date was! After some thought I managed to work out that it was Tuesday (and that was hard enough!), but that was as far as I could get. My phone was completely flat so I couldn’t check that as I normally would, and I ended up having to pull out our itinerary to see what the date was supposed to be on Tuesday! Ahh, the joys of being on holidays!! ;-)





The main view of Bryce Canyon that you see in pictures is of the amphitheatre filled with all the little rock hoodoos. It really is very spectacular. What I hadn’t seen many pictures of was the tracks that go beneath the rim of the canyon and down amongst the hoodoos. We did a short but steep 1.3 mile loop walk on the Navajo Loop Trail down under the rim, and it is definitely among the best walks I have ever done. I won’t write too much about it since the photos should speak for themselves!








My least favourite Bryce Canyon memory was somewhere along that trail... I had just stopped to take a photo, had it all lined up and was about to press the shutter when I heard a rattling noise. For some reason it sounded exactly like what I had imagined a rattlesnake to sound like, so I looked down and sure enough, there was one in a bush about 50cm from my feet! That is about as close as I ever wish to come to one!! So of course for the rest of the day every stick looked like a snake and every noise sounded like a rattle!







We got up early the next morning to see the sunrise over the canyon, although you don't actually see the sunrise so much as the early morning light starting to hit the hoodoos. With a bit of mist floating around, it was really pretty.

More photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/canadianmport/BryceCanyon?authkey=Gv1sRgCMWQupfL-drLLw#