Day 10, Saturday, June 27, 2026
What day is it? I really had to think hard to even know what day of the week it is. A vacation is good when you have lost track of the days.
Today Jaci, Halli, Macy, Noah and I started out our day with an early morning 3-mile hike in Bryce Canyon. I would put this hike at one of my favorites of this trip, definitely in my top 5 of all time. Johnny, Scott and Logan opted to sit this one out but we’ll give them a pass this time. We started down the Queen’s Garden Trail around 7:30 am. It was a cool, sunny morning. The perfect weather to start our day. This trail tooks us down into the canyon and around the hoodoos (tall, think spires of rock formed by erosion). We walked down narrow switchbacks and through several rock arches to get to the bottom of the canyon. The landscape then turned to more trees and rock as we looped around to the Navajo Trail to start ascending the canyon. Yep, we went almost 700 feet down so we had to hike 700 feet back up. This landscape reminded us more of home with the rocks and trees. However, as we started going up the landscape turned back into large sandstone formations. The hike up was a challenge. We worked our way up many switchbacks before finally arriving at the top. A hint for when you are hiking in the parks, GO EARLY! We had the trail almost to ourselves until the very end. When we arrived at the top the trailhead was getting busy with both sightseers and other hikers.
We finished our hike by 9:30 and made our way back to camp. We had seen everything we wanted to see in Bryce Canyon since we’d arrived so early the day before. So, we packed up camp and decided to head on to Zion National Park. It was a 3 hour drive, not too bad at all. We arrived at our campground by 2pm and got everything set up for the next 3-4 nights. So far we’ve done a little driving to get a lay of the land and made a trip to the visitor center. Oh, and Macy had a close encounter with a deer grazing next to a store we were going to (see pic). Tomorrow we plan on getting in a few hikes and taking the shuttle through the park. In the meantime, its time to rest up for the last leg of this awesome adventure!
