The southeastern quadrant of Utah is a place of endless variety, magnificent scenery and fascination around every turn of the road. The national parks and tribal parks, Mesa Verde (in Colorado), Monument Valley (mostly in Arizona although the tribal visitor center is in Utah), Glen Canyon/Lake Powell, Zion, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands and Arches form what is called the Great Circle of National Parks. Everything inside the circle is Escalante/Grand Staircase. The rides between one and another is worth the trip, even if there were no national parks. For example, here's where we had al fresco breakfast this morning:
My kind of town...
A bit more than half way between Zion and Bryce is a little town that seems to mostly be owned by one deep space dining and lodging company, with a great name. Yes, I did have forbears who traveled west with the Brigham Young and company, but whether any of them were responsible for this I really don't know:
Dixie National Forest...
When you make the turn off Route 89 onto Route 12, the road doesn't challenge its reputation as one of the top scenic byways in America. Well before the entrance to Bryce Canyon, you enter the Dixie National Forest, with its Red Canyon, a busy assembly of red Navajo sandstone buttes and hoodoos. Viewing turn-offs occur every quarter mile for a while, and you can't resist stopping and snapping pictures at every one of them.
Mary Frances in the heart of Dixie
Three objects trying to maintain their balance.
Cars race through one of the "natural bridges" at Red Canyon.
Mary Frances examines a common desert pine.
Escalante/Grand Staircase...
We elected to visit areas adjacent to Bryce Canyon today, and save the national park for our full day here tomorrow. So we drove past the park entrance, to register at our cabin at the Bryce Pioneer Motel early. Unfortunately, the place had never heard of us. It seems the registration agency didn't bother to tell us the confirmation number they sent us only confirmed our request, not our room. Fortunately, we were not the first this had happened to, and the folks found us a reasonable alternative at the Grand Staircase Inn five miles farther down the road. That name is a bit overblown for a combination gas station/convenience store/motel, but we can manage for two nights here. After checking in, we decided to go a few miles south to the aptly-named Kodachrome Basin, a Utah state park in the Grand Staircase area:
A picnic lunch at Kodachrome Basin.
A hoodoo we named "The Wedding Couple" at Kodachrome Basin.
Mary Frances finds the ancient raggedy-bark trees interesting.
A large hoodoo at Kodachrome Basin. The small white object is Mary Frances.
Vegetation struggles to survive in the Escalante/Grand Staircase region.
After a pleasant walk through the Kodachrome Basin nature trail, we pulled up stakes and headed farther south to visit the Grosvenor Arch, which was promised to be eight miles south. It turned out to be eleven miles south, by way of the roughest, most poorly maintained stretch of unpaved road in the United States. We managed the 22 miles there and back in just over three hours with loose teeth and a permanent twitch.
Some fat guy blocking part of the shot of the Vermillion Cliffs of the Grand Staircase.
A beaut and a mesa.
Fording the Paria River, near the end of our boneshattering excursion to Grosvenor Arch.
Later on, we found a pleasant place to dine in Tropic next door to a market where we found beer (this is Utah and tomorrow's Sunday so you have to plan ahead) and breakfast food. Another great day in a great place.
Road kill...
Back in New England, we tend to run over small animals like skunks and porcupines, because they aren't afraid of anything; opossum, because they're so dumb; squirrels occasionally, and the neighbor's cat or dog, by accident, mostly. When we hit a deer it's news in the local coffee shop for a week. Rarely you read about somebody hitting a moose, usually on the obituary page. As you drive west and south through New York, Pennsylvania and the Virginias, there seems to be a species of suicidal deer who hurl themselves at onrushing automobiles. The carnage slows down in Kentucky, and by western Tennessee there's a new favorite: Armadillos. Like our skunks and porcupines, Armadillos don't fear much because they know they have this really groovy armor plate system that drives coyotes crazy when they curl into a ball. Unfortunately, they can't calculate what the 300,000 foot pounds of force of a Dodge Ram Club Cab at 60 miles an hour can do to that tough little carapace. Armadillos are still the most common roadside dinner for crows until somewhere in New Mexico, where the carnage seems to subside a lot, perhaps because there is less traffic, or less wildlife, or maybe drivers or animals or both there are smarter than other places. All across the desert, it seems the amount of road kill is modest, until you drive far enough north into Utah to find a fair population of trees. Trees mean deer, and we witnessed quite a few of them post-mortem as we approached Bryce Canyon. We wonder if as a species they suffer the same neuroses as their suicidal eastern brethren.
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