Heading to Bryce Canyon

This morning (Monday) we left Jacob Lake in Arizona and rode through Fredonia. Yesterday we were told this was a very small community - with the implication being we would be beter staying in Jacob Lake Well, Fredonia was a lot bigger than Jacob Lake and there were several motels we could have chosen from. We're pretty sure that would have been a better option. Never mind...

From Fredonia we crossed the border into Utah and continued to Kanab. "Utah's Little Hollywood" they call themselves, because the film and spin-off TV series "The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams" was filmed here.

We stopped at a diner for luinch,. It took nearly an hour to get our meal. If Adams had eaten here, that would explain why he was Grizzly.

We continued up US 88 through a number of small towns. The landscape continued to intrigue us with its wildly sculpted forms.



Good weather prevailed until we reached Hatch, but we had been watching the dark clouds roll in for some time and it eventually started to rain. We stopped and donned our wet weather gear in the nick of time before it started pouring down.
We turned east on Utah 12 to take us to Bryce Canyon. Along the way the road passes through the aptly named Red Canyon and two arches cut through sandstone walls that cross the road.



We stopped at the turnoff to Bryce Canyon to have a cup of coffee and see if the weather might improve. There we met three Swiss bikers who had come in from the other direction and caught the worst of the weather. Only one spoke any English, so we never really got a conversation going. We also met some heavily armed National Park Rangers, carrying pistols, Tasers and goodness knows what else on their utility belts. (Maybe they have a problem with squirrels in the park?). However, they were very friendly and when asked about the weather at Bryce Canyon told us it was much higher in altitude there and it was probably worse than where we were.
Our options were to ride up Bryce Canyon and take a chance with the weather, stop overnight in the nearby town of Tropic and hope for better weather tomorrow morning, or ride on as far as we could get around the scenic loop we are on, returning to Bryce Canyon later.

We took the second option and rode into Tropic. The road there led through more amazing rock formations.

Once there we quickly found a good motel in the early afternoon and settled in with the thermostat turned up.