Another day, another canyon

Friday, 7^th June – We left Moab at 9 am (an extra hour in bed after a very long day yesterday).  On a cliff by the Colorado River we saw some petroglyphs, or prehistoric Indian drawings. 

We retraced our steps back up the I91 past huge cliffs of red sandstone with some green layers. Then we turned west along Interstate 70 and across the San Rafael Swell, a domed structure with sharp ridges of rock on the south edge. The rock was Navajo Sandstone, 190 million years old. 

Another 100 miles brought us to Richfield and down on to a green plain of farms, with mountains all around. We passed through Big Rock Candy Mountain (yes, a real place) and Circleville, birthplace of Butch Cassidy. We were still quite high up with great escarpments visible from the roadside. We passed through Red Canyon, with its ‘hoodoos’ in red sandstone, and at 4 pm reached Bryce Canyon National Park.

This is not strictly speaking a canyon, rather a receding plateau rim of rocks in shades of pink, red, orange and grey. The park is 18 miles long and the rim can be accessed by car or shuttle bus in several places. Special to this park are ‘hoodoos’, innumerable pillars of rock of fantastic shapes, left by erosion. 

The area is wooded with pines and lends itself to recreational activities – cycling, trail walking, riding and camping. There was an astronomy festival in progress. We stayed at Ruby’s Inn Hotel, a complex of visitor facilities based on the first lodge for visitors built in 1919 by Reuben (Ruby) Syrett.