Day one ended in Sedona. Day two started early, because we had a long way to go and two of the biggest stops on the whole trip waiting at the end of the drive.
The thing about Arizona that still gets me, even now, is how much of it there is. Not the size, the variety. You can start your morning in red rock desert, climb up through pine forest, and drop back out into open high country before lunch. Top to bottom the state never looks like itself for very long. We watched it change through the windshield the whole way north, desert to forest and everything in between, until we crossed into Utah and it started changing all over again.
It rained most of the morning. Not a storm, just that steady gray drizzle that settles in and follows you down the highway. I will be honest, it shaped the day more than we wanted it to. We had big plans for Zion and Bryce and the weather had other ideas.
Zion National Park
Zion came first. You come at it through tunnels and switchbacks and then the canyon just opens up around you, walls going straight up on both sides, the Virgin River cutting through the bottom of it. Even in the rain, maybe especially in the rain, with the clouds hanging low and snagging on the tops of the cliffs, it was something. The rock goes from cream to deep red depending on where you look, and the whole place feels closed in and wide open at the same time.
The drive from Zion to Bryce takes you up. Way up. Bryce sits a couple thousand feet higher than Zion, and you feel the country change as you climb toward it, the air cooler, the trees coming back, the red rock taking on a different character entirely.
Bryce Canyon
Bryce is not really a canyon at all, and that is the first thing that surprises you. It is a series of natural amphitheaters carved into the edge of a plateau, filled with thousands of hoodoos, those tall thin spires of rock standing up out of the ground like something out of a dream. You come to the rim and the whole thing drops away in front of you, orange and pink and white, spire after spire as far as you can see. It barely looks real.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to, twenty years later. We barely scratched the surface of either place. Both parks have miles and miles of trails, whole backcountries to disappear into, and we dipped our toes in and moved on. I wish we would have had several days at each, time to actually walk into them instead of standing at the edge looking in. We saw them the way you see a lot of things on a road trip with somewhere to be the next morning. A taste. Enough to know what you are missing.
Maybe that is its own kind of gift though. I left Zion and Bryce knowing I had to come back, and that pull has never really gone away. Some trips give you the whole thing. Others just show you the door and trust you to walk through it later.
The time-lapse video below covers day two of the trip.
We made camp in the Bryce area that night. After a long day of driving and weather and two parks that deserved far more than we gave them, there was something right about sleeping out there in the high country, cold air settling in, the road still ahead of us in the morning.
Next in the series: day three and the road to Moab. Sometimes the driving between the destinations turns out to be the part you remember. That one publishes July 10.
