7.5.2012 – 7.5.2012  14 °C

Nice early start today as we went horseback riding at 8am! Waking up was fine, walking out the door was not!! CHILLY.. Wind was blowing, temp was just above freezing.. all the hallmarks for a chilly horseback ride. We drove out to the corral only to find no horses! It was very cold so rather than stand around waiting we sat waiting in the car… It was so cold this morning that I wore; t-shirt, long sleeved shirt, jumper, rain jacket, gloves and scarf and I was still shivering waiting to jump on!

My horse was named Lucky Strike, D and M had mules; Lisa and Pumpkin respectively. Getting on wasn’t too bad and the first hour or so was heaven.. The last hour was just plain painful! Our rangler’s name was Swannie and the trip into the canyon was definitely worth the 80 dollars we all paid.

The formations in Bryce must be seen to be believed.. Huge pink limestone rock pinnacles that just claw their way to the sky.. On a backdrop of a bright blue sky.. pretty spectacular. The good thing about horseback riding is we could actually get into the canyon to see the formations.. You can see them from the top of the mesa (like we did yesterday) but really you can’t get a good look at the pinnacles unless you get down into the canyon. We could have hiked in (well D and I could have) but horses you can’t beat em!

Lucky did a good job and got me to our rest stop.. Getting off the horse was pure torture.. my knees just did not want to work!! We had a quick drink, a muesli bar and then back on the torture machine for another 90 mins!! The way back was more dramatic than the way down to the canyon.. natural arches, pinnacles, plenty of juniper and pines. Swannie explained to us why so many of the juniper appear to be dead and have funny twisted shapes (we’ve been wondering for a while because all of the parks have similar trees).. Apparently, this part of the US has terrific summer thunderstorms. When the lightening hits one of the trees it more often than not kills the tree. It also scars the tree, creating these spiral shapes to appear on to the bark, and can cause the tree to be bent into weird shapes!

By the time we had returned to the corral, M was threatening to kill me and my knees were in pretty ordinary shape! My bum and thighs were feeling surprisingly well! We headed back down to the hotel where we had stayed the previous evening and hit the hot tub and the showers before continuing our journey down to Zion NP.

The trip to Zion was both short and fairly uneventful. Prior to leaving Bryce we had been concerned that accom was hard to come by in Zion so knew that this arvo we would need to spend some time hunting up somewhere to sleep (that is at a decent price). First place we came to (Zion East BW) was vacant and was relatively cheap!! WIN, WIN! Only prob was that the hotel was about 20miles out of the park but we knew we may not get somewhere in Zion so booked it anyhow.

For the remainder of the arvo we drove into and around part of the park. We finally saw some long horned sheep (tick another animal off the list)! A small herd was standing up on a cliff face eating some shrub.. I’ve decided the name ‘Long horned sheep’ is a misnomer. These ‘sheep’ are a lot more like goats.. they live on cliff faces, they eat shrubs, they have horns, they look like goats…. Either way I was pretty happy to see one as we had been trying for most of the trip and had ‘too hard basket-ed’ the long horned sheep!

The eastern side of the park is a nice long drive where you can see these interesting rock formations. The rocks look like sand bars that have been frozen in time.. lots of wavy sand patterns and beautiful colours- whites, pale yellows and pinks.. Awesome! The drive continues with us passing thru two tunnels (one of which is 1.1 miles long). The tunnels were built back in the 30s and so most large sized vehicles (RVs, buses, trucks etc) all have to go thru one lane at a time.. This was fine on our way in but on our way out we were stopped for almost half an hour waiting for buses to be escorted thru!

We arrived in the main canyon and stopped at the visitor centre. The main canyon is dominated by these huge sandstone cliffs. The cliffs must stretch 8-9000 ft above the canyon floor. The canyon is also quite narrow so the old neck gets sore pretty quick just from looking up at the towering monoliths! We had a squiz in the centre before deciding to go into the small town of Springdale to pick up some groceries before heading back to our digs (the same way we came in) for a yummy pork stirfry. Speaking of which, D created another form of motel camping cooking tonight.. cooking ‘ironing board style’!

Song of the Day– Blues Brothers, Rawhide!