Utah Day 5

What a day for the Barths!  We started with sunrise at Sunrise Point in Bryce Canyon National Park.  This was very cold (21 degrees!), but so worth it!  To give you some perspective, the first picture posted is before the sun rose up over a mountain behind where this picture was taken.  The second picture is what it looked like when the sun hit the hoodoos.  While we were waiting for the sun to come up, there was quite a crowd at the point and most were chatting and laughing.  As soon as that sun peeked over the mountain and started to make the hoodoos glow, everyone was so quiet and everything felt very serene.  National Park Moment.  Steve's National Park Moment was the warm shower after getting back to our room after sunrise.  :-)

Before sunrise

During sunrise - isn't that glow awesome!?

Unfortunately, a lot of the trails are still closed for the season in Bryce (or at least parts of them are), which is a huge disadvantage to going to parks in the winter.  However, we made the most of it.  We did the entire scenic drive.  Natural Bridge, Bryce Point, and Inspiration Point were pretty awesome!

Natural Bridge

Bryce Point

Us at Inspiration Point

Inspiration Point

We did manage to get in a hike on the Mossy Cave Trail in Bryce.  I picked this trail out when we were planning this trip because the pictures I saw of it had a pretty cool waterfall.  Guess what...that waterfall wasn't running.  But, we did hike to the cave which had some really cool icicles that hadn't melted yet.

On the Mossy Cave Trail

The "waterfall"

Mossy Cave

On the agenda for this trip was to do something in Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument.  Oddly, this isn't a site run by the National Park Service (it's run by the Bureau of Land Management), so don't let the name fool you.  But, it has some really cool things to see in it!  One of which was our 6-mile round trip hike to the Lower Calf Creek Falls.  The hike itself goes through a canyon and you travel along the Calf Creek pretty much the whole time, even though you may not see it all the time.  It's a beautiful hike; it reminded us a lot of Zion National Park.  Be prepared for quite the workout though if you do this hike, because it's 6 miles of sand!  My hips are already angry with me.

The falls were a great reward to our hard work.  They are 126 feet high!  On the way back from the falls, we met someone who moved from Frederick, MD, to Utah and we met a couple from Grand Haven, MI!  It was fun chatting with these very nice people and it made the 3 miles back go pretty fast.

Lower Calf Creek Falls in Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument

We ended the evening checking into our Bed & Breakfast in Escalante, UT, where I'm watching Steve play with the B & B kitties.  :-)

Playing with Steve's shoelaces