Traveling to Bryce through the Navajo Nation

This morning, we left Williams, AZ and traveled 312 miles north-west to Bryce Canyon, UT which is a total of about 3200 miles since we left Pennsylvania. This is totally new country for us. Neither of us has ever been in the state of Utah (except for a brief layover at the airport for Jim).

The drive took us up through the Navajo Nation which is 17,000,000 acres of land in Arizona, Utah and New Mexico. It is an Indian reservation given to the Navajo people after they signed an agreement with the US Army. We were driving in northern Arizona. I am a person who usually finds the unique beauty in any area, but this land just made me sad. The area is so depressed, mostly barren desert with an occasional small grouping of run-down houses or mobile homes. Billboards warn of the dangers of alcohol and meth abuse. Instead of the beautiful desert rock formations we had been seeing, this area is relatively flat except for large gray and tan sand dunes, their sides rutted from the wheels of ATVs. There seems to be no water, no wildlife, and little to attract anyone to want to stay here. The two hours we spent driving in this area was the low-light of this entire trip.

However, as we continued driving we began to see some big mountains. Many of the cars that passed us on the road were pulling boats. Soon we came to the beautiful area known as Lake Powell. This man-made lake was caused by the creation of the Glen Canyon dam. The dam is on the Colorado River and is smaller than the Hoover dam, but looks quite a bit like it.

From there we drove on up into Utah and continued to climb in elevation. At the summit, we reached 7700 feet above sea level. The views were spectacular and rather reminiscent of the rocks around Sedona. Here, too, there is a high concentration of the bright red color in the soil and mountains. We turned onto State Highway 12 and viewed some spectacular natural arches just a few miles from our campground.

We set up camp, took advantage of finally having some wifi to update blogs, then grilled some hamburgers for dinner. While waiting on the burgers to cook, Jim had been reading about things to do around Bryce and we decided to go watch the sunset over the canyon. The canyon ranges in elevation from 7400 feet to over 9000 feet. It was cool and windy but the views were amazing. We watched the huge shadows form over the rock formations and saw a beautiful three-quarter moon rising above it all. While driving back we saw some deer grazing and stopped to take a picture – they came so close to the car we could have touched them.

Bryce is a beautiful park, very rustic with well-defined walking trails and of course the spectacular canyon. We’ll explore it in more depth tomorrow because tonight we are sleepy and our heads are full of the experiences of the day..