National Parks and Recreation

Bryce Canyon National Park! Our fifth park of the trip and our penultimate Utah park. And probably the most photogenic of any of the parks we went to, so I apologize in advance for all the pictures, I couldn’t possibly narrow them down.

Quick story about our hotel: we had to book it last minute because the storm was not allowing us to even access Bryce Canyon, let alone camp there like we had originally intended. So I saw this cheap Quality Inn that was just 20 minutes from the park and jumped on it. When we arrived at about 3pm after our beautiful morning in Capitol Reef National Park, we were the only ones there and it was an actual ghost town. Literally. This Quality Inn was a converted old timey western town attraction or something, with different buildings and saloons. And we were the only people there. The snow had started coming down, blanketing the ground so we truly had no idea where we were supposed to go. Eventually I saw another car parked under an overhang and followed the footsteps to the lobby (in an alternate universe, this is definitely the start to a bad horror movie). In the end, the people there were really nice and we basically had an entire saloon to ourselves. A few other people “moved into the town” as the day wore on, but there were only a few of us there, it seemed everyone else had deserted the storm. I’m glad we stayed.

The snow made everything truly magical. And with some ingenuitive thinking on my part, I dug my car out the next morning using the tray that comes under the ice bucket in the room (a move that the other guests also clearing off their cars praised me for, you’re welcome..you’re welcome).

So off we went!

The drive from Capitol Reef to Bryce Canyon officially brings you into the Grand Staircase. A fascinating area that stretches from Bryce Canyon to Zion Canyon and then all the way down to the Grand Canyon. It’s layer after layer of exposed sedimentary rock that creates several different shelves or “stairs” of different colored rocks and cliffs. You can read more about it here if you’re as fascinated by it as me, but it’s just so cool! Unfortunately, you can’t really see all these layers from the ground because of just how big the area is and the curvature of the Earth, but you can see just how drastically different the landscapes are from place to place.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument spans nearly 3,000 square miles and encompasses this entire area that isn’t already a national park, including everything you see along Utah Scenic Byway 12 (which you probably remember we had to miss because of the snow). But we’ll definitely be back to do so much more in Grand Staircase-Escalante! You just need a lot of time and patience, because like I said…3,000 square miles! And very little of it as accessible by main roads.

Back to Bryce Canyon! Starting at the other end of Route 12 and knowing we weren’t actually going to get to drive the entire thing broke my heart a little bit, but we still got to see some pretty cool parts of it on the 14 miles stretch before the entrance to Bryce Canyon.

And huge shoutout to Utah for being WAY better at clearing their roads than New Mexico, even though the bar was literally on the ground.

It wasn’t all good news though. We knew going into the trip that some of the roads were already closed for the winter, like the road to Fairytale Point. And we knew it was a 50/50 shot that the main park road past Bryce Point would be accessible, which eliminated a lot of cool things we had wanted to see. But this most recent storm had severely limited access even further. By the time we arrived at 9am, the only roads that were open were to the visitor center and the main canyon entrance at Sunset Point (less than a mile of the 18 mile park road), with access to Inspiration and Bryce Points expected later in the day as they worked tirelessly to plow it out. I can’t even begin to imagine what all that entails.

Luckily, the main hike we wanted to do took off from the already plowed-out area, so we headed straight there to try to avoid the crowds that were all limited to the same area.

But, as I said, most people had completely fled the area with the storm, so we had it mostly to ourselves.

The wind chill was in the 10s and it was obviously very snowy, so we bundled up in lots of layers, put on our spikes, and I literally ran/skipped to the canyon edge. It’s one of those things that you’ve seen in pictures so many times that you just can’t wait to actually experience in person. And it certainly did not disappoint!

I could have stood in this one spot and stared out at the snow-capped hoodoos for hours. It’s truly awe-inspiring. Nature is the freaking coolest. Bryce Canyon holds the largest collection of hoodoos in the world. The rock that formed these hoodoos were deposited roughly 50 million years ago at sea level. As the tectonic plates shifted and the lower Farallon Plate began to break apart and release heat up into the upper North American Plate (within the last couple million years), these rocks were forced up to the nearly 9,000 feet in elevation that they sit today. Then weather and erosion took over.

Bryce Canyon is located in the sweet spot where, for more than half the year, the temperature fluctuates both above and below freezing in a single day. Water continuously melts into the cracks in the rocks and then freezes and breaks them apart, over time creating the hoodoos we see today.

The different widths and shapes of the hoodoos is created by the different levels of calcium carbonate in the different layers of rock. The rain erodes away the rock at different speeds depending on how much calcium carbonate that layer contains. Pretty cool stuff!

But anyhoo, it was time for us to begin our descent down into the canyon. I was still dancing with excitement.

Even though I think my pictures turned out the best from this park, it still doesn’t do it justice. You really have to see them for yourselves. And not that you’d want to brave a blizzard or deal with the headache, but it is SO MUCH better in the snow.

We hiked down the Navajo Loop Trail from Sunset Point. The Wall Street side of the loop is closed during the winter (I honestly don’t know why that’s the only section that is) so if you want a short trip down into the canyon during the winter, you have to do an out and back. Knowing this was really the only thing we were going to get to do in this park, we decided to extend the hike to do some of Peekaboo Canyon and come back up Queens Garden Trail to Sunrise Point.

I couldn’t get over how beautiful the switchbacks down into the canyon were.

Once we got down to the canyon floor, the crowds really thinned out. Which also meant the snow became less packed down and more difficult to traverse.

We reached a point on the Peekaboo Loop where there was just one other hiker ahead of us who had been there since the snow fall. We were very grateful for the footprints to follow. It wasn’t too bad except in a couple of spots where the wind had created some pretty intense snow drifts. We were up to our thighs at one point.

I thought it was a blast!

We noticed these little benchmark signs below (most of which we had to clear several inches of snow and ice off before we could read them) and read that if you collected pictures with three different benchmarks among the hoodoos, you’d get a special sticker from the rangers at the visitor center.

So of course we did! And bless that ranger who made us feel completely normal for being childless 30 year olds rushing up to him to claim our special stickers.

I had decided ahead of time that we would hike to this tunnel on the Peekaboo Loop and then turn around. I didn’t think we had the time or energy to do the entire 8 mile Peekaboo Loop. Plus, I really wanted to go up Queens Garden so we could see Sunrise Point as well as Sunset Point and compare the two.

So we had a little photo shoot in this tunnel and carried on our merry way. I’m not going to lie, I don’t have a whole lot to say about this hike, the pictures honestly just speak for themselves. And these are all after I did extensive cuts on which pictures I would actually include in this post. So enjoy this rare opportunity to check out some pretty pictures without me typing your ears off!

I think, in the end, I liked the views from Sunset Point the best. I might be biased because that’s where I first saw the hoodoos and honestly nothing can compare to that, but I thought that was the best viewpoint. James did not agree. But more on that soon.

After returning to the car, thawing out a little bit, and shoving some lunch in our faces, we decided to head over to the visitor center, noting that the park road was still closed at Sunset Point on our way. The rangers didn’t really have any concrete answer for us as to when the road would open up, except to tell us that it would only be Inspiration Point and Bryce Point that would be accessible today. Which was kinda a bummer, but we already expected it. We’ll be back to explore more in warmer weather!

Unsure of when we’d be able to do anything else in the park, we sat in the sun for a little bit and read through the park brochures and edited some pictures and just generally tried to kill time before heading back down to the closed off part of the road to see what we could see. And guess what?! It had just opened!

We decided to go to Bryce Point first because that was the furthest you could get and we figured we’d beat the crowds there.

Sure enough, we were one of only a handful of cars there. And let me tell you, after driving those 2.5 miles to Bryce Point, I was even more impressed with the snowplowing effort. Especially because all the sidewalks and boardwalks were also shoveled and cleared. The National Park System is amazing!

I think I was less impressed with the Bryce Point lookout because a sort of snow fog had kind of settled in as we were there. But also, I don’t know, I think the hoodoos look cooler when you’re among them, not just staring out at thousands of them blending together almost like a fake backdrop.

I did, however, love these little cliffside caves that had formed near Bryce Point. So many different forms of erosion in such a little park!

From there we traveled back to Inspiration Point and found that parking area even less crowded! There was only one other couple there by the time we arrived. We decided since we were there, we might as well hike up to Lower, Middle and Upper Inspiration Points, even though we were the first people to make it past the lower viewpoint so we had to trudge through the snow to make it. It’s only .3 miles and 140 feet of elevation, but with how cold it was and how much snow we had to fight, it was no easy feat.

I wish I had taken pictures of the trail, or just us struggling up here in general, but my mind was clearly elsewhere and we were pretty freezing at this point, having thawed out and then refrozen our now damp footwear/clothes. The non-glamorous side of these trips!

And these were James’ favorite viewpoints:

And don’t get me wrong, I also thought it was cool. I just liked the other ones we saw better. I would also LOVE to experience either sunrise or sunset at any one of these viewpoints, but unfortunately it just wasn’t in the cards for us on this trip.

Okay, okay. I guess James does kind of have a point.

It’s pretty hard to beat that.

Next up: Everyone(but mine)’s favorite Utah National Park! Zion’s coming your way next!