Travel Blog

Our third National Park this trip was Bryce Canyon, which, as so happens, is not technically a canyon because it wasn’t formed by a river, or doesn’t have a river flowing through it, or something like that. Whatever it’s called, this park is AWESOME. And Phil and I earned our doughnuts this day…we hiked all over that place.

Our original plan was to make it to Bryce Amphitheater (not to see a show or movie or anything…that’s what the overlook is called) at sunrise because the guidebook said it wasn’t to be beaten. But sunrise comes awfully early, and we didn’t quite make it. But the view post-sunrise was still ok in my book.

We were so knocked out by the view that we decided to forget what the guidebook was telling us and started to hike right then and there. We took what is called the Rim Trail, and we hiked from overlook to overlook to overlook, and we met only the occasional other hiker along the way.

From the Amphitheater Overlook, our first stop was Inspiration Point (every park has one of these).

The trail was nice and even, and not so hard for us, so we kept on walking to Sunset Point.

It was at Sunset Point that we got to see Thor’s Hammer (with pink UFO).

And then it was time to start heading down, and we had planned on doing the Navajo Loop Trail, but because of falling rock, that trail was closed off. It was kind of a bummer because if you go down that way, you go through a section called Wall Street, which the guidebook described as just sheer rock walls that surround you and all you can do is look up. It sounds great, and we’ll be sure to do that next trip. But we went the other way, and headed down another trail called the Queen’s Garden Trail, which shimmied off to the Horse Trail which turned into the Peek-a-boo Trail. We took them all, and here are some pictures, some looking up, some coming up even with the peaks, and some looking down again:

All in all, we figured we hiked about eight miles, up and down and all around. We were pretty proud of ourselves, and we ended pretty strong, but we both kissed the pickup truck when we got back to it.

And since our legs refused to work anymore, we took a little drive for the rest of our Bryce experience, and stopped at a few more overlooks, one of which was the Natural Bridge.

One last cool factoid about Bryce Canyon National Park – acoustic studios have found that the natural silence in Bryce equals the quality of a sound studio. I don’t know for sound studios, but I was certainly able to hear my labored breathing pretty darn well, so maybe there’s something to that.

We loved Bryce, though, and we’ll certainly come back and hike around some more.