Bryce National Park

Today we drove from SLC to Bryce National Park. And when I say "we" I mean Matthias; I slept for at least half of the trip, if not longer. But when I woke up we were driving down a highway with mountains on both sides of us and not much else in between other than open road.

We arrived at Bryce and quickly bought our National Parks pass and hoped on the bus to head into the park. We stopped at the visitors center and watched a video about how Bryce Canyon was formed. Then we took the bus to Bryce Point for some amazing views of the canyon, hoodoos, and "windows". We decided to hike the Rim Trail from Bryce Point to Inspiration Point. It was a nice walk (~1.5 miles). We wished we could have been healthy enough to hike some of the trails into the canyon but it was not to be. The rim hike was nice though. We saw some deer along the way and watched the hoodoos as they changed shape before our eyes. We named many of them by their shapes - a chameleon, two guys playing chess, a woman carrying a child on her back. It was fun and beautiful. Inspiration Point was also a very nice view. We had planned to hop on the bus from there but figured out that the next stop was just another .5 mile on the rim trail so we set out to walk again, this time to Sunset Point. Sunset Point had a hiking trail that led down into the canyon and we followed that for a short distance just to experience it. We then took the bus to Sunrise Point and stopped in the lodge shop there for a cold beer and some ice cream.

After that we headed out of the park to our hotel. I will say that there were more German tourists at Bryce than there were Americans. It was hysterical. At every stop we were surrounded by German-speaking hikers. It was bizarre to be in the US but feel like we were in Germany, with me not able to understand anything. Even at the restaurant in town this was true!

Since we had hiked so much that day and I wasn't feeling to well we went to bed fairly early. We decided to take advantage of it and get up before sunrise and head back to the park. We went to Sunrise Point to watch the sun rise and cast shadows on the canyon.