Day 3 – Red Canyon, Bryce Canyon
[This post is part of The Accidental Photo Adventure]
Leaving Zion National Park
We slept in a little, then hit the visitor’s center on our way out. Our route was back out the North-East entrance of the park, through Kanab, Utah. Clouds had rolled in, so we stopped strategically to take a handful of retakes, killing about an hour along the way. What a difference it made to have clouds in the sky!
This is looking in the opposite direction, toward the tunnel entrance:
Red Canyon
Along the route from Zion to Bryce Canyon is Red Canyon, part of Dixie National Forest. It’s a small place, but colorful. Red Canyon’s soil is a dark red like Sedona, AZ, which makes for a very picturesque contrast with the green foliage and blue skies – especially if it’s lightly cloudy.
Just inside the entrance to Red Canyon is a feature with short trails to photo vantage points and great panoramic vistas.
Bryce Canyon National Park
We arrived at Bryce Canyon around 2:00, stopped by the visitor’s center for some guidance and souvenirs, then went straight out to start shooting. We worked our way down all of the observation points and trails, managing to hit the last one well before sunset. But where it had been around 70 degrees in Zion, it was closer to 40 in Bryce – when the sun was behind the clouds, I really felt it!
The weather was lightly cloudy, transitioning to mostly cloudy as the day wore on; at times we’d lose our light, but within a few minutes we’d have a handful of seconds to shoot with hard light. So, it took some observation, patience, and preparedness to get the shots in. There was still enough light to shoot when the sun was behind clouds, but the light became so soft that a lot of the definition in the rocks was lost.
Here’s a view into one area of the Bryce Amphitheater and its army of “hoodoo”, or stone towers. There were hints of the hoodoo in Red Canyon, but they’re super-concentrated here in Bryce Canyon.
Bryce Canyon has several viewing areas, with various angles on the amphitheater and surrounding valleys. It also has several hiking trails that take you down amongst the hoodoo, but then you can’t see the forest for the trees.
At the end of the day we checked into Bryce Canyon Inn, a little motel with individual cabins. It was quite a pleasant surprise! For under $100 a night, the accommodations were very nice, with excellent woodwork – wood walls, exposed rafters, nicely constructed and furnished. (You can tell I’m a woodworker.)
Because we hit all the points in Bryce so quickly, and the conditions were so ideal, we decided to cut a day off our schedule and head to Canyonlands / Arches day early. The motel was very accommodating, and we were able to move our reservation up in Moab as well. Depending on how much time we need in Arches and Canyonlands, we thought we might make it to Glacier National Park in Montana as well. Little did we realize…
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Intro | Day 1: Getting Started, Zion | Day 2: Zion
Day 3: Red Canyon, Bryce Canyon | Day 4: Capitol Reef, Canyonlands
Day 5: Dead Horse Point | Day 6: Monument Valley | Day 7: Grand Mesa
Day 8: McClure Pass, Aspen, Garden of the Gods | Day 9: Wolf Creek Pass
Day 10: Durango & Silverton Railroad, Albuquerque Balloon Festival
Day 11: Pre-dawn Balloon Launch, The End | Trip Prep | The Gear
FotoMomenti – My Comrade’s Portfolio
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Bit Twiddler's Rant 
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