Grandma Frye flew in late Wednesday night. We got up on Thursday and loaded the car up and headed to Bryce. We stopped in Panguitch at the Cowboy Smokehouse Cafe for lunch, it was a cute little diner.
We reached Bryce and checked out the visitors center. We decided to do a 4 mile loop (Navajo Loop) to the base of Bryce and then took Wallstreet back to the top. Bryce is really breathtaking!!!
There were 3 of these tunnel passages that were really cool!
pretty dirty!
A lady in front of us had a 1 year old on her back and then she was carrying her 3 year old on the front (because he had fallen). I offered to carry the one year old up the steps. It made it a good challenge for me.
After we hiked in Bryce we drove about an hour to Orderville where I had rented a AirBandB. It was this charming 100 year old home right on the main stretch. It had a really convenient location because Grandma Frye could walk across the street to get her coffee and the grocery store was about 3 blocks away. The home was clean and super charming and their was all this history of the home and its residents on the wall. We made dinner at the home Thursday night. Friday morning we decided to do all these little- off the beaten path- hikes in Zion.
This first hike was to some pools and a waterfall-very pretty and we only saw a couple other tourists on the hike.
It was perfect hiking weather, about 65 degrees but a little chilly to want to get into the water :).
Shawn knew of another hike that got you to some petragliphs.
The leaves were just beautiful in certain areas of Zion.
Then Shawn knew of another hike we could go onto of large hoodos.
Cruz is scared in this picture because it was pretty tall.
The most amazing thing about all these little hikes is that we barely saw other tourists, and I felt like we got a great feel for Zion. We never boarded the shuttle to go to any of the main hikes, but I love what we did.
Had to get a picture in front of the sign before we exited Zion for the day. Such a fun day. We went home to have some farm fresh eggs that I had picked up that morning from the neighbor.
Saturday we did a larger hike. A 7 mile hike that started outside of Zion up by the Ponderosa area and the got to this amazing overlook that we looked down on Angels Landing.
I wouldn't let the kids get close to the edge because it was a straight drop off WAY down. It made my hands and feet sweat we were so high up....the weird thing is that we didn't gain too much elevation on our hike to the lookout.
After this hike we went to the front entrance of the park. We hadn't been to the visitors center yet. I was SHOCKED by how many people were at Zion. We just never felt like there were all those people at the park, even on the hike we did that morning.
We drove out of the park about 1/2 a mile and found this cool Mexican restaurant for dinner-Whiptale. It was an old converted gas station. We had some yummy food.
joksters!
After dinner on the way back through the park to get to the back entrance (which is closer to Orderville) we decided to do the slot canyon hike we couldn't find earlier in the day. Shawn had asked in the visitors center, so he knew how to find it. This was one of the coolest hikes. Claustrophobic, but cool. Grandma Frye stayed in the car for this one.
Such a fun day. We loved our time in Bryce and Zion. We had a great fall break!!!
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