Day 16: Bryce Canyon and into Arizona

Threatening skies on the road

Wednesday, August 18

Not sure why it took so long, but I finally realized last night that I had not reserved any lodging for my final two nights of solo travel, and that probably wasn’t a good idea.  The Grand Canyon campground for tonight had been sold out for a long time, and the other ones in the area were first come first serve, so I had been planning on just winging it.  I had also been debating if I wanted to camp at Zion on Thursday night because the website kinda warned against lack of shade and hot temperatures at the campground.  I came to realize that the shade shouldn’t really be a problem since I’m only at the campsites late at night and early in the morning, so I checked online using Bryceway Motel’s free Wifi (living in luxury over here) but it had since been sold out.  Rather than winging my lodging two nights in a row, I decided to forego my last night of camping and book a night at a pretty reasonable fare at the Rodeway Inn near Zion.  I looked up similar options near Grand Canyon, but no hotels were available online anywhere in the vicinity and campsites nearby didn’t take reservations and said they typically sell out early in the day.  This uncertainly kinda hung over my head for much of the day as I wondered when and where I would find lodging for the night.

Hoodoos at Bryce Canyon

Not wanting to let that ruin my entire day, I still headed off to Bryce Canyon in the morning.  It was only around 20 minutes away from the hotel and I got there a little after 9.  I headed to the visitor’s center, picked up some hiking information, and watched an uninteresting video about the park.  Their recommendation for a hike if you had time for only one was to do a combination of the Queens/Navajo Trails, which they proclaimed was the “World’s Best 3 Mile Hike.”  I would have been kicking myself for years if I turned down an opportunity this great, so I decided to head for the trail.

When I first got to the outside of the rim of the canyon, or what they called the amphitheater, I was treated to another one of these wacky landscapes that each park I’ve visited seems to have.  Bryce Canyon is mostly known for their collections of “hoodoos,” which creates a pretty interesting scene when a lot of them are together, and kinda looks like a bunch of red/orange castles.  The Queens Trail was a pretty easy going walk through to the bottom of the amphitheater, and featured a lot of great views of the rock formations from different angles.  The Navajo Trail which connected to the first path was similar, although the views weren’t as good, and had a very steep upward climb at the very end.

Bryce Canyon

It took me a little under 2 hours to finish the walk, and as I got back to the top the sky’s looking threatening to pour again (so much for there being no rain in the desert).  There didn’t seem to be any other interesting hiking trails to try out that weren’t really long or really far away, and I wasn’t really in the mood for doing their version of the scenic drive, so I decided to head out of the park around noon.  I enjoyed my short stay there, but it seemed like there was less to explore there than the other parks I had been to.  One thing I had really liked about Arches was that they had a ton of specific monuments that were worth seeking out.  Bryce had a couple of named rock formations, but they weren’t really labeled nor were they that different than the rest of the landscape, so it didn’t make trying to find them as interesting.

I headed out toward the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, which was around 3.5 hours from Bryce.  I knew there were only a couple of towns on the way there, so I was hoping there were some vacancies or campgrounds where I could spend the night.  But before that, my first stop was at the Thunderbird Restaurant (“Home of the Ho-Made Pies”) for a fantastic hot turkey platter and a ho-made apple pie with ice cream.  After lunch, the first town I wanted to check out for lodging was Kanab, which to my relief did seem to be advertising vacancies outside of some of the sketchier looking motels.  It was still over an hour and a half from the Grand Canyon which would have made a long early morning drive and since it was still early enough in the day I decided to keep driving to see if I could find something closer.  Immediately after passing through the Arizona border (my 13^th state entered so far this trip), I was in Fredonia which was way tinier than I imagined and didn’t seem to have any motels at all.  I kept driving without hitting any other towns, almost all the way to the Grand Canyon entrance, when I discovered the DeMotte Campgrounds.  Online they had said they are always sold out by early afternoon, but the fact that it had been raining most of the afternoon was probably keeping away the crowds because there were still several sites available.  It seemed like I only had two options at this point: either camp there (with the possibility that thunderstorms would continue all night), or drive another hour in the opposite direction back to Kanab. There was some risk involved with each, but I was relieved that at least I had an option, after stressing out about it for much of the day.

Camping in Kanab

Being the indecisive person that I am, I decided to postpone the decision even longer.  I drove a little further down the highway and took a sideroad that was supposed to lead to a lookout point of part of the canyon.  I’m pretty sure the road was meant for off-road vehicles, because it wasn’t paved and was really rocky, so it took me a really long time to make it the 4 miles down the road to the lookout point.  The weather really wasn’t good enough to see much at the lookout, but on a bright note, by the time I made it back to the highway, the sky had cleared up a bit, so I decided to go with the campground.  I liked this campground since it was in a forest, rather than a desert, but it seemed like each site I stayed at was a little more primitive than the last.  This one had vault toilets instead of flush ones (meaning very stinky trips to the bathroom), no sinks in the batroom, and certainly no showers (meaning very stinky trips everywhere else).  I didn’t really care about that too much actually, the only major negative was that the fire pit and all the wood were pretty wet, so it was hard to get much of a flame going.  My rice side dish wouldn’t cook because of this, so I ended up eating 3 mildly warm hot dogs for dinner.  Yum.

Miles traveled today: 187

Miles traveled total: 4,005

States traveled through: 13