22.04 - Bryce Canyon to Arches
Monday 22nd April - Bryce Canyon, Utah - Arches / Moab, Utah (Day 98)
Alarms ring at 5:50am and at 6am in our room at Bryce View Lodge heralding the start of the day to catch a sunrise view. The kids begrudgingly stir and wrapped up - it’s one degree outside - are bundled into the car as we drive 10 minutes into Bryce Canyon Park to Bryce Point where a lookout we’d visited yesterday looks out across the amphitheatre of hoodoos and cliff sandstone overlooking the valley in front as the sun starts it’s slow but consistent rise to our right.
8-10 other people and one family have also woken early and we’re all joined by a tour bus of older Americans - that said there’s still plenty of space to witness and enjoy the daily ritual of the sunrise and the ever changing lights and shadows being cast by the thousands of hoodoos rising up from the valley floor below us.
It’s straight to breakfast afterwards for 7:30am and suddenly we seem ahead of the game. By 9am we’re fed, packed and pulling away from Bryce Canyon, 4.5 hours to drive to our last (planned) National Park Arches, outside Moab.
The early start at least causes the kids to sleep on the first 90 minute leg to a charging station in Richfield (like some others, right off the freeway, in a mid level hotel chain car park). Kate and the kids get out 500 metres away at a playpark, but it’s only 20 minutes charge time from 60% to 90% to give us enough juice to go 175 miles (with 30% buffer) direct to Moab.
The landscape either side of the near empty dual carriageway varies from flat lush valleys before gushing rivers to weaving emerging giant rock formations that litter the landscape. There are almost always some snow capped mountains off in the distance.
A quick lunch at a viewpoint to break up the second leg overlooking Devils Canyon and soon enough as the temperature is noticeably rising we pull into Arches National Park, 3 miles shy of Moab, to get to the Visitor Centre and learn the lay of the land.
From April to September, Arches does timed ticketed entry. Almost four months ago, on January 2nd whilst walking the dogs at 6:30am in Callan Park, I’d jumped on the Arches website, a few hours after tickets for April had gone on sale. I’m not sure what happens if you turn up without a ticket, but thankfully we didn’t have to worry as I’d got spots for today, tomorrow and Wednesday for 7-8am entry. The Ranger lets us in even though we’re not in our time slot, I think because the queue is short.
Stepping out the air conditioned car the day 32 degrees hits us and we instantly rule out any unprepared walks this afternoon. Instead we collect the Junior Park Ranger booklets, watch a short movie on the formation of the Arches we’re soon to see and take advice from a friendly ranger on walks and lookouts in the park with the kids tomorrow.
We saunter the last few miles into Moab to Field Station, a clean and crisp hotel hipster would approve of with storage equipment in each of the rooms for your bike (plus bikes on display in the lobby and a deconstructed bike on the wall behind reception).
For dinner we drive through the town, dotted with hotels and motels, outdoor shops and restaurants. Our dinner is at Mills Stop & Eat, churning out burgers and milkshakes for 70 years; after a few mouthfuls there’s already talk of coming back a second night.
After a small stock up for picnic food tomorrow and a charge of the car 200 metres away, I sit down to write the last few days by the fire pit at Field Station with an oversized, of course, Unita Beer (Kate’s going to add a comment here about trying to get the kids to sleep in my absence). Amen to that - Kate.