Utah Part 3: Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks

The next day, we headed over to the highlight of the trip - Bryce Canyon and Zion National parks.  

Bryce Canyon is actually not a canyon at all, but a series of ampitheatres on the side of a plateau (thanks Wikipedia).  It's famous because it's full of these strange rock formations called "hoodoos", which are caused by natural erosion of the sandstone.   

Hoodoos!

More hoodoos!

The pictures don't really do it justice, it was pretty impressive though.

Snow-covered hoodoos.

This hoodoo is called Thor's Hammer, for obvious reasons.

On our way out of the park we saw some deer.  Their huge ears look almost rabbit-like!

After leaving Bryce, it was on to Zion National Park.

The road in.  Zion Park contains a huge canyon that you can drive into and along the bottom of, surrounded by huge canyon walls that look like mountains from the bottom.  The walls are 800m high.

Like the rest of the area, it was formed by erosion of the sandstone.  Here's Stephen standing next to a huge rock called Checkerboard Mesa, again, for obvious reasons.

While we were there, we decided to do some hiking - we thought we'd go to the top of this canyon wall.  It's called Observation Point, and it's 700m above the canyon floor.  It's a 13km round trip.  It was a pretty difficult hike.

This is from the start of the hike.  In the bottom-right of the picture, you can see our car!  It looks tiny already, and we were only about 30 mins into a 4 hour hike.

Climbing a bit higher!

We got up by walking up a series of switchbacks cut into the rock.  We were walking uphill nearly the entire way, which was pretty tiring.  Walking back down afterwards was actually just as bad, as it's bad for your knees and also if your toes hit the front of your shoes.

6.5km horizontally and 700m vertically later, we'd reached the top!  It was a pretty amazing view, even if we were a bit scared of the edge :)

Amazingly, we were on the trail that was for people who were scared of heights - and it was still a 2m wide trail with a sheer drop-off on one side.  The walk we didn't do was called Angel's Landing, which is a lot shorter and about half as far up, but the last half a km of the hike is on a path that's about 1.5m wide with a 300m drop on both sides - neither of us is particularly fond of heights, so we opted to give this one a miss (the hike we went on was scary enough!).  You can see the little people climbing on top of Angel's Landing in the picture here - this is the rock that's in the center right-hand side of the above picture.

Observation Point was home to a bunch of very tame chipmunks, who had absolutely no fear of people and would run right up to you and steal your nuts and muesli bars.  Cute!

Part of the trail goes through a slot canyon in the rock.  On the way back down, Stephen decided that his feet were hot and that he wanted to dip them in the sluggish river that runs through the canyon.  Apparently no one told him that the river is fed by snowmelt.

We stayed overnight in the park, and the next day went for a few shorter hikes (sore legs!).  A famous hike in Zion is called "The Narrows", which essentially hikes through a canyon for 26km.  The catch is that the river that carved the canyon is still there, for you're hiking up the river for most of the route, and swimming some parts.  This is the start.  We saw some people starting the hike while we were there - as I mentioned above, the water's not warm!  They were in dry-suits (sealed outfits that don't let the water in) so that they didn't get hypothermia.  It sounds like a pretty crazy hike, although I think I'd much prefer to do it at the end of summer when the water is a bit warmer!

On our way back to Las Vegas airport, we stopped off in the Valley of Fire State Park for a bit of a nap and to check out the rocks - because apparently you can never see enough rocks on a vacation!  After Zion and Bryce it was fairly unspectacular, but the interesting part is that it's often been used as a backdrop for Star Trek - particularly the original series.  You can see how it looks vaguely alien.

And with that, we headed back to Vegas to catch the red eye back to Toronto.

This is Part 3, the last post from our trip to Utah - you can go back and read Part 1 and Part 2 if you like.