Drove 331 miles yesterday.
Got up and went to a local cafe for a wonderful homemade breakfast of eggs, toast, bacon, hash browns. Delicious. When we got up we could smell the smoke from the fire that we saw last night. Waitress said that it was the Twitchell Mountain fire and authorities were going to do a controlled burn but Mother Nature had other ideas - lightening strike.
Drove to Bryce Canyon National Park from Beaver this morning. We begin our adventures with a stop at the visitor center and we watch an orientation film about the Bryce.
At Bryce they suggest that you take the shuttle buses as there is little parking at the overlook areas and they are frequent and on-time.
We decided to take a hike - just a short one (2.5 miles) uphill most of the way. The good thing about this hike was that we begin at Sunrise Point and hike to Bryce Canyon Overlook and then take the shuttle bus back to Sunrise Point. The overlooks were again amazing. The beautiful rock formations were again sculpted by erosion into pillars called "hoodoos". The brochure states that "Bryce is not a true canyon but a series of horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters carved in the edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau by tributaries of the Paria River. An American Indian name for the area translates as "red rocks standing like men in a bowl-shaped canyon." We began the hike, which was good. We stopped at the overlooks and my first impression was that they look like huge sand castles on the beach with a trail that goes down to the canyon floor. We came to a sign that said "Bryce Canyon Overlook 1.3 miles. Dave was pooped by that point but finished it anyway. Way to go Dave! We packed a lunch and ate it while overlooking Bryce Canyon. We caught the shuttle and back to the car. It was suggested that we go all the way to the southern point and work our way back up as all the overlooks are on the east side. That would be good as we wouldn't have to cross traffic. There was an overlook called Natural Bridge. It is just amazing to see how Mother Nature works.
Out of Bryce by 2 and took the route that took us through Zion National Park. We were going to stay in St. George, UT. Going through the Park was the longer/slower way around. We got stuck behind slow traffic and construction. We went through a couple of tunnels - one was probably 1 mile long. We decided to get a room in Hurricane, UT for the night as we were tired and it's 20 miles closer for us to go back into the Park tomorrow.
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