Utah Just Keeps Getting More Amazing!!!

After my Moab farming adventure ended, I headed out to explore the rest of southern Utah.  I drove through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.  It is rugged, wild and stunning!  It was one of last places in the continental United Sates to be mapped and the vast majority remains remote and undeveloped.  (I would very much like to explore the canyons in this area and see the stunning beauty hidden in the cracks in the earth!  That being said, I’m hoping the next good friend I make has extensive canyoneering skills. . .should you know someone with these skills, send them my way!)

I continued on to Bryce Canyon National Park.  I got some quick advice about good hikes at the visitor center, then headed straight for the trails.  Just when I thought that Utah couldn’t get any more fantastically beautiful, I started hiking past the bright orange hoodoos of Bryce Canyon!  These rock formations are unlike any others I have seen.  They tend to be thin and stick straight up towards the sky. Unlike the rock formations in the Needles section of Canyonlands, these rock pinnacles seem to be a more sculptured.  It’s easy to look at the hoodoos and see forms that are familiar (just as you can gaze at clouds and see dogs or ice cream sundaes).  In fact, there is one section called the Queen’s Garden.  It looks so much like a magical palace and surrounding courtyard, that there was really no need to build Disneyland!   Just add a costumed Cinderella and the effect would be complete! 

I hiked a figure eight shaped loop through the canyon.  It was fantastic to get to start out above the hoodoos, hike down through them, walk along the canyon floor with them towering over me, and getting up  on a ridge that allowed an up close view of some and a bird’s eye view of others.  I was amazed by just how varied the rock formations were in the relatively small area that I covered!  The hoodoos at the beginning of the hike were bright orange, the formations in the Queen’s Garden had a lot of light pink and white, and windows section had a combination of white and orange.  I had the added bonus of getting to see many of these formations frosted with a layer of snow!  That fact made for some interesting hiking though.  Since I got there at the transition between winter and spring, the snow was in the process of melting, but had not completely melted yet.  This meant that half of the hike was spent hiking in a very wet mud that was the consistency of pudding and the other half hiking through snow that occasionally gave away beneath me and plugged me kneed deep into snow.  It certainly made an already captivating hike all that much more interesting!