Road Trip 2008: Scenic Byway 12

Scenic Byway 12 leads all the way from Capitol Reef NP to Bryce NP (map). I have not seen many of the other byways, but among the ones I have seen, this one is the most spectacular. What makes it also very special is that there are not that many other people traveling on it, so you can take your time and experience it in the speed that most suits you. You can easily spend a full day traveling on the highway, as there are many points of interests along the route that you might wish to explore.

Beautiful scenery becomes even more spectacular during autumn:


Driving along the Hogback is an amazing experience. It is difficult to capture it on the photo, but the road is very narrow here and goes along a ridge with steep drop-offs on both sides:




Head of the Rocks / Escalante Canyons:


Red Rock Canyon, UH, on the way from Bryce to Cedar Breaks:

Road Trip 2008: Red Rock Canyon, NV

As our flight back to San Francisco was late in the evening and we did not want to spend a whole day in Las Vegas, we drove to the nearby Red Rock Canyon NCA. After spending past two weeks visiting major national parks of the Southwest US, we were not that impressed with this particular park. It was definitely a nice alternative to spending a day in Las Vegas, but I am not sure if I would recommend it as a destination in itself.

In the park, we stopped at several vista points along its 13-mile scenic drive and we also went for one short (around 2h long) hike. We decided to hike into Ice Box Canyon, as both its name and trail description promised a bit of shade. That was true, the further we went, the colder it got. It was not a spectacular hike, but we liked it. It was very different than everything else we did till then as it involved a fair bit of boulder hopping and rock scrambling.

Agnieszka and I outside the visitors center:


Red Rock canyon owns its name to the beautiful red color of rocks forming it:






On the Ice Box Canyon trail:


To get to the end of the trail we needed to do fair bit of bouldering:


Aga at the the end of the Ice Box Canyon: