Hiking the Hoodoos

Today we had a full day dedicated to hiking Bryce Canyon. We woke up around 7:15am which was sleeping in for us thus far. Our cabin lacked coffee, so we walked across the street to a great little local coffee shop. They also had reliable wifi, which is a rarity in the valley, so I was able to finish up yesterday's blog.

We packed up our hiking bags and lunches then headed for Bryce Canyon. Since we didn't get a picture at the sign yesterday, we stopped off on our way into the park. There we ran into a couple wearing some U of M gear. Turns out they graduated from U of M, so we bonded over how awesome Ann Arbor is.

So our plan was to hike the "Figure 8 Trail" which consists of three smaller hikes: Queens Garden, Peek-a-Boo Loop, and Navajo Loop. We started at Sunrise Point and headed down the Queens Garden to start.

It was a pretty steep descent since we were going from the rim to the bottom of the canyon. We got about a 1 mile in and we were presented with this sign.

We knew we were trying to make it to the Peek-a-Boo trail, so naturally we followed that. We probably hiked for another mile and were a little concerned we hadn't seen any other hikers, just people on horseback. Turns out we somehow ended up on the horse trails. Which explains why everything smelled like horse poop. We quickly double-backed and made it back to the hiking trails.

We ended up going back to the sign that pointed us to the "Peek-a-Boo Loop". You would think this would actually be the Peek-a-Boo Loop. Nope. It is a horse trail that is a cut off to the Peek-a-Boo. When you get to the bottom there is a fork in the road. One path has a sign with a picture of a horse, the other has nothing. Well we knew we didn't want to end up on horse trail so we figured we should take the one without the horse. Wrong again. Apparently they were both horse trails, and we should have picked the other path to hit our cut off. Funny thing was we were not the only people to do this today. We ran into two other hiking groups who made this same mistake.

We finally got on course, but had already hiked 2 miles more than we had planned for the day. The Peek-a-Book trail was actually really cool. You got to get up close and personal with the Hoodoos. One of the majors features of the "Wall of Windows".

Hiking so close to the Hoodoos we got to see how interesting these formations really are. They are almost like totem poles, but just made out of rock. You wonder how some of them are still standing.

After we were done hiking the loop we had to make the difficult trek up the Navajo Trail to Sunset Point. At that point we felt like we pretty much hiked all of Bryce Canyon. We caught a bus back to our car and headed into town for dinner to replenish our calories.