The Road Trip - Bryce Canyon

Another day, another National Park...  Oh no, wait, this was the very last one.  Still had loads of red rocks though...  Anywho, for our last foray into the National Parks we hit Bryce Canyon, which has loads of cool wee rock formations called hoodoos, which are kind of a cross between a pinnacle and a big lump of rock.  Hang on, what am I talking about, they're ALL big lumps of rock, this whole trip has been about big lumps of rock for crying out loud!

So here's a bit of a look at the landscape without too many hoodoos in, but lots of pretty layered colours:

And here's a bunch of hoodoos:

Apparently just walking round the rim of the canyon wasn't enough though, we had to go down this path for a 3 1/2 mile hike into the depths of hell... (a slight exaggeration, there - LT)  I was going for dramatic effect, and it is all red after all!

This was as we started down looking round the main amphitheatre:

And then looking back up when we were part way down.  They were straighter than this in real life, but apparently LT couldn't be bothered to use the straightening tool in Photoshop...

This was at the very bottom looking up one of the gulleys:

And here I am back at the top, just hanging around on one of the signs, proving I was there:

We were going to have a picnic lunch, but then we found our carpark didn't have picnic tables, and the nearest ones we could see on the map were nearly 20 miles away and we had too much of a rumbly in our tumblies to be waiting that long!  So we had salad, to feel all virtuous, and then polished off some of the frozen yoghurt in the freezer...

We decided that we wanted to come back to the spot we were in for sunset, since it was called Sunset Point, but in the meantime, having an hour or two to spare, we drove right to the very end of the road - weren't we high up?

Then on that building you can see behind me in the photo above we found this sign warning people not to feed the bears or to try and play with them, how mean!

Still, we had a bit of a walk about, decided that it was all starting to look the same looking out from the tops of these plateaus, and had a bit more frozen yoghurt to help us ponder.

Finally, it was back down the road for sunset.  It's probably perfect for sunset at certain times of the year, but October is apparently not it.  Oh well, we got some photos of the glow effect at least:

Then we toddled on back to the campground for dinner, not wanting to risk that Cowboy Smokehouse Cafe again ;o)