There was a lot of  hemming and hawing at this point in our trip about what to do with Day 2: Zion National Park, or Bryce Canyon?  Zion National Park was our original plan: it was a more reasonable drive from St. George, and we’d bought dry bags in preparation for hiking the Narrows, through the Virgin River.  But on Day 2, following the reading of guidebooks, the advice of several others, and a stubborn curiosity about these things they call “hoodoos,” I announced that I wanted to head for Bryce, and then stop at Zion if we had time on our way back south.

We took the highway up to Cedar City, and then drove along Utah 14 and then U.S. 89.  It was a beautiful day and we were still awed by the scenery, so we stopped several times to walk around riverbeds, gape at red cliffs, and photograph scenic views:

Shortly before we reached Bryce, along Utah 12, we got an unexpected treat: Red Canyon.  Red Canyon, in fact, had the reddest red rocks we saw in Utah.

So, in short, we were already overdosing on beautiful scenery before we got into Bryce Canyon.

Since we went to Bryce relatively spur-of-the-moment, we didn’t really plan out our time well.  Instead, we followed the advice of our Lonely Planet Southwest USA Guide and drove the length of the scenic road through Bryce Canyon, out to Rainbow Point, and worked our way back (if you’re interested, there’s a large .pdf map of the route here).  It took longer than we expected, and aside from a brief jaunt along the rim trail between Ponderosa Point and Agua Canyon, we mostly followed the fairly unsatisfying strategy many other tourists were using: drive to scenic overlook, park, take photos, repeat, repeat, repeat.  Our favorites were the Natural Bridge and the views of the amphitheater from around Bryce Point, but the photos from Rainbow Point are also gorgeous.  See a slideshow of nine of my favorite photos, including this one:

We saw a few other random but interesting things in Bryce: this little guy (no more than a couple of inches), a sign warning us that a bear has been frequenting the trail we were on, and controlled burns, part of the ongoing “prescribed fire” at Bryce.

By the time we left Bryce, it was getting relatively late, we hadn’t eaten anything since the unsatisfying breakfast, and we had another goal for the day that had been discovered that morning in the aforementioned Lonely Planet book:  Kanab, Utah’s “Little Hollywood.” For Andy, who is generally fascinated with Westerns and cowboy-hat American culture, Frontier Movie Town’s advertised dinner avec movie gunfight re-enactment on old Western movie sets was pretty exciting.  But times had changed at Frontier Movie Town since our guide was written, and now the dinner and re-enactment is primarily for busloads of tourists.  So we had dinner at Nedra’s Too; as the guidebook claimed, the salsa was delicious, but we found the rest of the food and the service less fantastic.  Then we headed back to Frontier Movie Town to wander the old movie sets and await the impending arrival of a tour bus (you can see Andy’s pictures of the old sets at Frontier Movie Town on Flickr).

And then, this is what happened: a bus full of French tourists arrived and descended upon Frontier Movie Town.  Staffers came out with their cowboy hats and fake guns, and then ushered the tourists out onto the set, dressed them up as cowboys and Indians, and helped them re-enact a brief scene from a Western movie.  And so there we are, in Southern Utah at sunset, watching a bunch of French tourists run around an old movie set doing some extremely politically incorrect impersonations of Native Americans and clambering around on hobby horses.  Talk about a sentence you never expect to write.

Once the show was over and the requisite tacky souvenirs purchased, we got back on the road for a miserably long drive from Kanab to our hotel in Tusayan, south of the Grand Canyon.  The thing is, it would have been a gorgeous drive…if it had been light out.  Instead, we drove through Marble Canyon, across the Navajo Bridge, and along the eastern section of the South Rim of the Grand Canyon with views of nothing but the inky black night.  The moon was starting to rise over the Grand Canyon when we drove through, which probably would have been beautiful had we stopped; but not knowing when it would fully rise, where to view it from, or how much longer I could keep driving before falling asleep and inadvertently driving us over the Canyon edge…it didn’t seem quite worth it.  I got stopped by a park ranger and told to drive slowly because of lots of wildlife in the area; it wasn’t until we were out of the park and almost in Tusayan that an enormous elk walked into the road right in front of us.

Since it was well after midnight at this point, I’ll write about our stay in Tusayan tomorrow, as part of Day Three!