Bryce

After spending the night at the delightful Ruby’s Inn in Bryce City, we set out to explore the park.  Upon stopping at our first overlook, our guides Darrell and Paula, in addition to our bus driver Tam treated us to a geology lecture by portraying 3 of the original explorers of the area.

Here are some of the eye popping vistas that we were treated to before embarking on our hike.

The hike of the day involved going down a fairly steep trail called “Wall Street”.  Aptly named.  As you can see, we used a series of switchbacks to descend into a deep chasm. 

At the bottom are several Douglas Fir trees that have grown very tall and skinny with the foliage only at the top where the trees poke out into the sunshine.

Meandering around a bit at the bottom of the trail before starting the climb back up.

This is the Navajo trail, with the corresponding switchbacks!

The last bit of this trail is out in the open. 

The trail goes right past Thor’s Hammer, which is featured in a lot of the advertising of the park.

Upon leaving the park, we were on to our next stop in Escalante, where we had a great lunch at the Wild West Retreat and a tour of this historic town.  Then on to Boulder and the Anasazi State Park.

The vistas as we drove over Boulder Mountain were quite different from what we had seen so far.  The high point of the mountain is over 11,000’, but I am not sure if were near that peak.  Here is a video with Darrell’s voice in the background. You can tell that it was very windy up there, too.

We spent the next 2 nights in Torrey at the Red Sands hotel.