Cedar Breaks to Brcye Canyon

Bill and I have been in Southern Utah for a couple of days now. We’ve seen several of the parks and I’m going to post about Cedar Breaks National Monument and Bryce Canyon National Park.

The day we arrived we spent setting down, setting up, and generally recovering from our drive through the state of Utah from Montana. The following day we drove into Cedar Breaks National Monument. The hardest part of posting about these parks is picking which pictures to show, there is SO much to see in all of these places that there is no way I’ll be able to post it all, so I’ve picked just a couple, it was hard to do. Cedar Breaks NM is a pretty cool place, a little windy too. The temperature at our park when we left was over 70 degrees, as we climbed in elevation it dropped to 50 with wind. Not horrible, but I was dressed for 70's. Cedar Breaks averages 10,000', most of the overlooks were 10,300+. The colors and shapes of the rocks in incredible, they seem to go on and on. The depth of view is also something hard to depict in the photos I chose. Southern Utah is a weird mix of a bunch of different places we’ve been while still being wholly unique at the same time. There are many pull-offs in this park and several trails. We didn’t take the time to walk trails, as we wanted to see Bryce Canyon on this same day.

On our way through the backcountry roads to Bryce Canyon from Cedar breaks, we hit a wild-life-jam, but not the type we are used to. Normally when we hit a wild-life-jam it’s behind lot’s of cars stopped to see something like Elk, Bison, Bear, etc,etc. This was truly just Wildlife jammed up in the road. I laughed so hard at this I almost cried. The funniest part was driving through them, I should have kept shooting, and seeing some them get uppity about us trying to drive through. Also when you rev the engine a little, this is apparently a signal to the males to mount, it was funny. Mostly they just ran along with us for a while and it took us about 5 minutes to drive through them all. And when I say they ran with us, I really mean they kind of pranced, sheep don’t really run. The hardest part was keeping an eye of them to make sure they didn't walk into the truck, or in the case of the one that was peeing while it tried to get out of our way, making sure they didn't mess on the truck. We might have ended up with lamb dinner and wool for my mom to spin if one them peed on the truck. Those of you who know my husband and how much he loves his truck will understand.

Just before you drive into Bryce Canyon, you have to drive through Red Canyon. This is a beautiful place that is listed as a less traveled area, I’m not sure why. If we ever make it back to this area I would love to take the time to walk some of the trails through Red Canyon, what a beautiful place. My pictures really don’t do it justice. The reds, greens, and blues are intense and I just couldn’t get my camera to see it the way I was.

Bryce Canyon National Park, Wow! I have so many pictures I want to post and I’ve narrowed it down to still too many. Gorgeous absolutely gorgeous. Bryce has similar rock and color structures as some other places, but the scale of it is what hits you in the face. When you stand on the rim and look into miles and miles of these rock formations, and it looks like it goes forever, it really puts things into perspective. These rocks are hundreds of thousands of years in the making, what’s my 32 years compared to that?

I particularly enjoyed the Natural Bridge (actually an arch by definition) ,

The Grotto,

and what I call the Tulips. We also had to take a picture of Thors Hammer since it’s a big enough attraction to make it onto the National Parks Map.

I’m going to finish this blog by posting two of my favorite pictures so far. The last stop we made coming out of the park had the sunlight hitting some of the formations just right to get great color and depth. Then I turned around and saw the rock glowing like fire, these pictures come close to showing the reality of it, if anything reality is again more intense, it was really something.

We went to Zion and Kolob today, but I’ll be posting about that another time. It’s almost 9pm and I need to finish this up.

Cheers~
;-)K