Day 17

Today was a long travel and began with getting up before dawn to make the long drive from San Diego to Long Beach for my Jet Blue flight. Having made this drive a couple of days ago and dealing with the brutal traffic I didn't want to take any chances of missing the one flight to Salt Lake City that morning. The drive was smooth and arrived in Long Beach with plenty of time for my flight which ended up being delayed anyway.

After landing in Salt Lake City, I had to swing by a camera store to pick up a graduated nuetral density filter since I sadly sat on mine and cracked it a couple of days ago in Portland. A quality GND is an absolute requirement for great landscape shots and which I hoped to get lots of over my next few days in Utah and Arizona hitting some of the most beautiful places in North America.

My first destination on the Salt Lake City leg of my trip was Bryce National Park which is about three hundred miles away so I began the long drive through Utah. The drive through Utah at some points reminded me of west Texas in that it was very dry with few cities and cars in site. Beautiful scenery was all around with spectacular mountains and views in nearly every direction. Late that afternoon I arrived in Tropic, Utah where I checked into my motel for the night. Driving through Tropic, Utah reminded me of the fictional city of Radiator Springs in the Pixar movie CARS. Especially the dozens of old motels from the 1950's with the pitched roofs, old school neon, and single story L shaped building containing maybe 20 rooms. After checking into my room and dumping my suitcase, I grabbed my camera and made the 30 minute drive to Bryce Canyon where I hoped to get some decent pictures before the sun went down.

First, some background information on Bryce National Park courtesy of Wikipedia.

“The major feature of the park is Bryce Canyon which, despite its name, is not actually a canyon but a giant natural amphitheater created by erosion along the eastern side of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. Bryce is distinctive due to geological structures called hoodoos, formed by wind, water and ice erosion of the river and lake bed sedimentary rocks. The red, orange and white colors of the rocks provide spectacular vistas for park visitors. Bryce is at a much higher elevation than nearby Zion National Park. The rim at Bryce varies from 8,000 to 9,000 feet (2,400 to 2,700 m).”

I got to Bryce National Park shortly before sunset and headed to Bryce point which has a great view of of the amphitheater and hoodoos in every direction you could look. A few of my favorite pictures from this evening are below:

Approaching the viewpoint at Bryce Point.

View down into the Canyon, the green patches are large groves of trees for a sense of scale.

View looking west with the cliffs in the background and the hoodoos in the foreground.

Full moon rising over the canyon, notice the purple haze / light surrounding the moon above the horizon. Bryce is very dark with little artificial light or clouds. As a result it is considered one of the premier stargazing / astronomy sites in North America.

With the sun gone for the day and the moon quickly rising in the sky, I decided to head back to Tropic and made a quick stop at the grocery store for supplies. I knew for the next several days I would be spending almost all my time in the various national parks so quick and easy food was paramount. After stocking up on beef jerky, granola, and fruit I headed back to my motel with an early and cold morning planned for Day 18. Stay tuned to my blog for the next update, tomorrow proves to be a very interesting day.