Great action shot of Rick
The old goat photo was priceless and is now the "official RTA photo" of Rick Quinn on the Advisor's Page.
(You will need to scroll down the page to Rick's entry to see it)
From a Bryce Canyon Sunrise to the end of the road!
Day 57: Tuesday, August 18th
I got up at dawn and drove straight to Bryce Canyon National Park, sailing right past the gate, which wasn’t manned at that early hour. That didn’t really matter for me, since I have my lifetime Senior Pass, but I wondered how many tourists who SHOULD be paying an entry fee use that early arrival trick to sneak in for free? I knew nothing about the layout of that park, or where I should go first. My normal routine at a new National Park was simple: I always pick up a park brochure and map at the entry station, and then I stop by the Visitor’s Center to ask my standard question: what’s the best thing to see and do when you have limited time? Unfortunately, I was too early for any of that, and with the sky already lightening in the east, I had no time to waste. I perused the park signs, and chose the road to Sunset Overlook; as it turned out, that was also the perfect spot to watch the sunrise!
Click here for this RTA Library Map
Hoodoos are irregular columns of weathered rock, and they’re fairly common, as geological curiosities go, in the sense that they can be found on every continent. Bryce Canyon National Park is the top step of the Grand Staircase, and it consists of a high plateau with a series of bowl-shaped valleys scooped out along its eastern, step-like face. Inside those valleys, weathered by the millennia, can be found the largest, most vibrant, most extraordinary concentration of hoodoos on the entire planet! It’s an astonishing sight at any time of day. At dawn, when the rising sun sets those rocky spires ablaze with golden light, it’s a sight that will take your breath away. Sunset Overlook gave me a fabulous view of those blazing hoodoos, and--this was so cool--I had the place entirely to myself. There was no sound but the wind, and scattered birdsong from the trees along the rim; it was like witnessing the dawn of creation, and I was so wide-eyed with wonder that I (almost) forgot to pull out my camera!
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The first rays of the rising sun ignite the hoodoos at Bryce Canyon, setting the rocky spires aglow
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Like rows of soldiers standing sentinel, the formations at Bryce greet each new dawn
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The valley of the hoodoos starts out in deep shadow; sunlight kisses the tops of the spires, and spreads downward like a slow burning flame
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Multi-colored stone and fantastic weathered formations add a unique texture to the landscape
This was the just-right cherry on the top of my journey, and it seemed entirely fitting that the final extraordinary event in such a wonderful series of extraordinary events should be a sunrise, a beginning, and oh, so perfect, in light of my personal circumstances. A whole new phase of my life was about to begin. In fact, it was already in progress. Before I left on this trip, my new status as a retired person hadn’t really sunk in yet; after 57 days on the road and 24 National Parks there could no longer be any doubt in my mind. This RoadTrip really HAD transformed me (into an old goat? Ha!); at any rate, after this one, my life would never, ever be the same.
I stayed out there at the overlooks for several hours, taking close to 300 photos from Sunset Point, Inspiration Point, and Bryce Point, working my way higher up the line, finding every vantage point a little bit different.
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As the angle of the sunlight shifts, the spires take on an other-worldly hue
People started arriving after the first hour or so. One or two cars at a time pulled into the lot, hikers, mostly, and random tourists. It didn’t really get crowded until after 9 AM, when the tour buses started arriving. There are a number of tour companies that take visitors to some, if not all of the National Parks in southern Utah; Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, and Arches are all within less than 400 miles of one another. Some tour groups do all of the Utah parks, and then they keep going down to Monument Valley, Lake Powell, and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. That’s actually a very cool itinerary known as the Grand Circle, a trip that’s particularly popular with visitors from overseas. Sure enough, three buses arrived all at once, and disgorged something on the order of 200 Chinese tourists, who descended on that overlook like it was a ride at Disneyland. I was about done taking my pictures at that point, so I quietly took my leave, stopping for one last photo on the way out:
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The hoodoos are the big draw at Bryce, but the surrounding countryside has a beauty all its own
From Bryce, it was a bit more than 420 miles to Phoenix by the most direct route: US 89 to Flagstaff (via Kanab and Page), followed by a speed run down to the big city on Interstate 17. Three hours into that drive I crossed the Colorado River on the bridge near Glen Canyon Dam, and at that point, I was back in ultra-familiar territory, on roads that I’d driven many, many times before. There was a section of US 89 south of Page that had just reopened after a lengthy closure. At least 20 miles of the roadway had been completely rebuilt, and the brand new asphalt surface was smooth as could be. I was driving pretty fast, humming right along, but there was a guy behind me in a BMW who was very determined to go even faster. He floored that thing, and whipped around me on my left doing at least 100 miles an hour. When he cut back into my lane, he hit a patch of loose gravel left over from the construction, and fish-tailed. He was able to hold it on the road—just barely—but in the process, his tires spun off a big piece of that gravel that hit my windshield square in the middle, KA-POW! Almost like a rifle shot:
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I’d just driven 13,000 miles, all the way to Alaska and back on roads that are famous for destroying windshields, and I’d come through it all without a scratch. Now, here I was, just three hours from my house, driving on a brand new road, and this happens? That star, maybe half an inch across, remained a battle scar on the windshield of my Jeep for a very long time after that, not so much a reminder of my trip to Alaska as it was a reminder to watch out for idiots in little Beemers!
When I arrived in Flagstaff, sooo close to the end of my route, I got stuck in a horrible traffic jam. All of the traffic on Hwy 89 was stopped dead for some poorly organized road construction; I waited 20 minutes to move no more than 20 feet, so I bailed down a side street, and promptly got lost in a part of Flagstaff I’d never seen before. I let Siri guide me back to the highway—but that required some serious resolve on my part. For the first ten blocks she kept trying to lead me straight back to the traffic jam—“Make a U-turn”, she’d say. “No way!” I’d reply, until I finally circumvented the blockage and found my way to the freeway.
For the last two hours of the drive I was on auto pilot (and cruise control) arriving in Phoenix in what seemed like no time at all. I was born and raised in Phoenix, and watched it grow from a sleepy little town in the desert into the 5th largest city in the U.S. Since I lived and worked away from home for most of the last 10 years of my career, first in St. Louis, and then in Washington D.C., I’d completely lost track of the sprawling growth. When I drove into town from the north, I passed several exits off the Interstate named for major streets I’d never even heard of. My old home town has changed so much from the place where I grew up, there were whole huge parts of the city that I scarcely recognized. I took the Glendale Avenue exit off I-17, and drove east toward the mountain that dominates my part of town. They’d changed the name of it from ‘Squaw Peak’ to ‘Piestewa Peak,’ after it was determined that the word “squaw” was offensive. Fortunately for me, the mountain itself hadn’t changed a bit, and its distinctive profile was reassuringly familiar. When I pulled into the driveway of my house (which was also reassuringly familiar), I shut off the engine, and just sat there for a bit, savoring the somewhat anticlimactic moment. My own personal Grand Circle was complete! My wife had a pot of my favorite “welcome home” chili simmering on the stove, and I was just in time for dinner.
