bryce canyon hikes.
queens garden, navajo, wall street.

i took two pretty epic hikes whilst visiting bryce canyon. on sunday, just after we arrived, the entire fam took a stroll along the queens garden trail and then connected to the wall street trail to make our way back out.

the first bit is a nice, flat, paved walk along the rim.

then, down we went.

descending into the hoodoos.

they are so cool up close.

when the sun hits just right and makes the rock extra orangey red is my favorite.

we got to go through a few tunnels. hazel loves tunnels.

and it’s always fun to see what is on the other side.

the big kids were lagging behind because anna was taking a millionty pictures.

at the queens garden, we obtained our first benchmark rubbing. we couldn’t find the actual queen rock formation, but whatevs.

the next stretch of the hike was boring and the kids were sooooo whiny and grumpy.

the views weren’t too bad though.

then we started up wall street. it was the last 2/3 mile of the trail and it was amazing and hard. first, you happen upon a narrow little canyon, with a giant tree growing up out of it.

the view straight overhead.

then the insane ascent began, first up these stairs through the narrow part of the canyon.

stopping to take soooo many pictures.

then it was switchback mania. i didn’t take many pics until we were a little way up, so here’s a view looking back down into the narrow canyon we were just in. in the bottom of the picture, you can see the switchbacks going down and the tiny people at the bottom.

we trudged along and made it to the top, where we rewarded with a pretty cool eye level view of the tops of the hoodoos.

when we got to the top, hazel proclaimed, “we survived!!” and bolted for the car.

so, that was sunday. on thursday, anna and i returned to the scene of the crime, this time to hike down the navajo loop trail and then back up the wall street side again.

with no other lidkids to drag along, anna had all the time she needed to devote to photography.

heading down navajo trail. it was only slightly less street than wall street.

we got to view thor’s hammer, which is sort of the official rock formation of the park. at least it seems to be on all of the merch. (it’s that bit sticking out above all the rest).

down down down.

cave dweller.

so this part is hard to make out. up in the canyon on the left side of the pic, there are two natural bridges. we couldn’t get close enough to take a decent pic and it wasn’t all that exciting, but we wanted to document it, nonetheless.

when we stopped at a trail intersection, we had a little snack. there were several opportunistic wildlife creatures, hoping for an easy snack. we used anna’s camera to get some zoomed in shots of these birds. this guy is called a stellers jay.

anna tells me that this one is a violet green swallow.

back into wall street. with a little more energy to take better pics this time.

there were also far fewer hikers on a thursday compared to sunday, so we were able to get some great shots, with the background all to ourselves. 🙂

a fellow hiker offered to take this pic for us.

aspiring photographer.

we survived the switchbacks a second time, although i was definitely more winded this time. i think we were keeping a faster pace, without hazel the straggler. at the top, i was more comfortable with letting anna go out to get this photo, with less people and less urgency to get to the car.

one last parting shot of my little hiker/photographer/bird enthusiast.