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April 20th, 2013: Bryce NP, Utah.
We said good-bye to Chris the next morning as he turned his Goldwing back West to get back to Long Beach, and we turned our Prius around to head back North and East to Bryce National Park. Chris had told us about the short walk to some of those weird hoodoo formations in Red Canyon just outside Bryce, so our first stop was to take a close look at those curiously and often monstrously eroded sandstone pinnacles.
Continuing on to Bryce National Park, we stopped briefly at the Visitor’s Center before driving all the way to the end of the drive and taking in the magnificent views along the way. The road in Bryce National Park meanders mostly North and South along a promontory that overlooks some of the most bizarrely carved rock formations I have every seen. Those formations cover the bottom of Bryce Canyon, which lies just to the East of the promontory.
Overlooks located at intervals along the drive afforded us a series of scenic vistas down into various sections of the huge canyon. The view at each overlook was slightly different. I particularly enjoyed the one that had a natural bridge eroded out of a fin of rock not too far down in the canyon. Very pretty!
We stopped at every overlook along the road while driving back to the park entrance, and we were almost overloaded with oddly-colored, weirdly-shaped, and panoramically magnificent vistas by the time we got back out of the park.
Then I had to face a couple hours of driving up Utah 12 to Torrey, Utah, where we planned to spend the night. That was a fantastically scenic, but occasionally scary drive with a high point of 9600 feet, which our Prius would only very grudgingly do. One part of the road is along a fin of rock somewhat like a knife’s edge, so you have sheer drop-offs into the canyon on both sides of the road as you drive along, which is a visually unsettling experience! But we arrived in Torrey unscathed and found a nice motel room for the night.
Copyright 2013 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
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