Great American Road Trip: Journey into the Wild West...

After recharging the batteries for a couple of days in Mammoth Lakes, a couple of hours out of Yosemite, we set off for the bright lights of Las Vegas, taking a scenic, and rather hot detour through Death Valley.

Death Valley was incredible! Incredible scenery and incredibly hot! At Badwater Basin, which is the lowest elevation point in the park (and in North America at -282ft below sea level) it was 47 degrees C! Needless to say, it was out of the car for a quick photo and then back in again! However, after the mishap with the engine overheating in Yosemite, we were keen to play it safe, so turned off the air con for some of the hilly bits, which was not entirely pleasant!

Devil's Golf Course

Badwater Basin - 86.5m below SL

Badwater Basin

Dante's View

Artist's Palette

We arrived in Las Vegas in the evening and it was still like 36 degrees outside. Thankfully our cheap motel room had air-con, even if it did sound like a tractor (thankfully I had ear plugs!). I can't complain too much about our motel (even if the best I had was an almost luke warm shower), as it was basically right on the strip. We spent the evening and the next day walking the strip, incredulous at the sheer extravagance! From the amazing themed hotels with their own casino's and shopping malls, to the giant fountains, to the shopping mall with the roof painted as the sky where they even had a fake rain storm into a pond every half hour! You almost need to see it to believe it. It is like a giant amusement park for adults where you can drink, gamble, shop and eat until your heart is content (or your wallet is empty). I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Las Vegas to be honest, I don't really think it is my cup-of-tea. However, we did make it to a show (albeit the cheapest one we could find), and I'm glad we did! Going in with fairly low expectations, I was pleasantly surprised! There were some amazing acts, from a scarily flexible girl with hoola hoops from the Ukraine, tap dancers from America's Got Talent, two trapeze artists, and two roller skaters that left my jaw open (i.e. skating in a circle where the girl was airborne, attached to the guy by a brace around their necks!).

I should also mention that Shaun wore his Sonics singlet out and got countless compliments and "Shaun Kemp" and "Rain man"comments, several basketball conversations struck up, and even an offer to buy it!

Anyway, we were kind of glad to be getting out of Las Vegas and into the wilderness again. Our next stop was Zion National Park. It really is spectacular! The bright red canyon walls looked amazing against the bright blue sky. We got a camping spot inside the park for four nights, then set off to do some (and by some I mean a lot of) hiking. In the four days we covered the Emerald Pools (that were murky brown), did the famous Angels Landing hike (where six people have fallen to their deaths since 2004), hiked up to Hidden Canyon, and spent 8 hours hiking out and back along The Narrows (which is a river canyon) where we spent about 60% of the time in the stream trying not to fall over. This was mostly because the water was like chocolate milk, only (crunchy) with with slippery boulders on the bottom that you couldn't' see thanks to the rain and flash flooding that occurred a couple of days earlier on the day we arrived. We later found out that on our first day when we saw the river flash flooding, a few people got stuck in The Narrows and spent a rather nerve wracking night out there waiting for the water to go down!

Views around Zion:

Behind our campground

Cactus flowers

Storm clouds + sunset = amazing!

View from behind the museum

Court of Patriarch's

Flash flood

Angel's Landing:

Walter's Wiggles

Precarious climb up chains to the top

More climbing up chains!

Cheeky chipmunk who really wanted my scroggin!

Hidden Canyon:

Walking along a cliff edge to hidden canyon

An archway along the hidden canyon

The Narrows:

The "Big Spring" that we hiked all day to find!

Our next national park was Bryce Canyon. After watching sun rise at Zion, we took a scenic drive through the 2km long Mt Carmel tunnel (built in 1930 no less!) to see the Checkerboard Mesa. This is an area where spectacular cross bedding is preserved in the sandstone (from when it was once a giant sand dune) which has been cross cut by surface fractures, making a checkerboard pattern.

Sunrise at Zion NP behind the Museum

Alter of Sacrifice

Checkerboard Mesa

Bryce Canyon is out of this world! And as Ebenezer Bryce said, "a hell of a place to lose a cow". An interesting fact for you, this whole area was first settled (apart from the indigenous people), by Mormon homesteaders seeking refuge from religious persecution.
The canyon is filled with strikingly coloured hoodoos, which are these bizarre tall rock structures, almost like statues! They occur in Bryce because there are two main fault/fracture orientations in opposite directions, and these planes of weakness preferentially weather and erode leaving rock 'fins' that eventually weather even further until just hoodoos remain (google it).
On the first day we spent the afternoon hiking amongst the amazing hoodoos down in the canyon. Bryce Canyon is also famous for it's night sky, apparently being the darkest night sky in the lower 48 states. We went along to a Ranger talk on looking for life on other planets, which was quite interesting, and then we along to take a closer look at the night sky through some telescopes that were set up. It was worth queueing up for - we got to see Saturn, and also a planetary nebular (which is a dead star)! It was AWESOME! I have to say, the night sky is pretty impressive, we got a clear view of the milky way, and we saw a really bright shooting star (which the staff said was remnants of a comet or something). I did kind of think to myself that I remember seeing some impressive night sky's sitting in the spa pool at home in Tokoroa on a winters night! You forget what you miss out on living in a city!
The next day we took a hike to Hat Shop, where the cap rocks on the hoodoos look like hats on a hat stand.... After that, we were pretty tired from a week of hiking, so spent the afternoon chilling out around camp at had some pizza at Bryce Canyon Lodge.

View from Inspiration Point

Crazy looking hoodoos

Spectacular storm clouds

Thor's Hammer

Hat Shop

Hoodoos

Prairie Dogs

Shaun's beard progress

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This morning we got up early to watch sunrise at Bryce Point, then we set off up Scenic Byway 12 through Capitol Reef National Park, to Moab (where we are now). Capitol Reef was pretty spectacular also, and I especially enjoyed the stop off at the Gifford House for some homemade pie. Another highlight was seeing petroglyphs from the ancient people who lived in the area.