Spring Break: Bryce Canyon

We left Thursday late morning-ish. We couldn't check into our hotel until around 4, so we figured we might as well take our time leaving. The trip down was mostly uneventful. We stopped by the Subway outside of the park for lunch. Ethan sat in a high chair there for the first time. He's still a bit too small for it but he was pretty cute sitting in it.

First time siting in a restaurant high chair!

Our hotel was called Grand Staircase Inn. It was clean and fairly big for just being a normal cheap hotel. They had a store on the main level, which was nice. That way we could easily get snacks and things we needed. The owners are members of the church and he served in the Bishopric. They were very nice people. Breakfast each morning was just toast and hot chocolate but that worked for us. We just supplemented with yogurt and had packed lunches on our hikes and big dinners out at night.

We spent most of Friday hiking. In the morning we hiked in Bryce Amphitheater. We did the Queen's Garden trail. It was a pretty fun hike and the kids did pretty well considering it was fairly long for them and at times it could be a little steep. By the end though Nate had to carry Kylie.

 I'm not exactly sure why we have so many pictures of our kids holding things in their hands?

 

Someone volunteered to take our family picture,
which was nice since Nate and I are both shy and don't like
to ask people to do things like that for us.

Friday afternoon we did the Mossy Cave Trail. It was a shorter trail, but Kylie had to stop often to look at rocks and things. The kids have "collections" at home which are shoe boxes under their beds filled with nature things. Along with the mossy cave there was a pretty cool/muddy waterfall. The cave was neat because not only was there a bunch of moss, hence the name, but there was also still some ice there despite the weather being in the 60s. The cave kept the temperatures pretty cool. It wasn't really one you can go into it, just get close to. We ate at a Rustlers Restaurant in Tropic that night. The food was good and had big portions. Of course, it was quite embarrassing when Kylie screamed at the top of her lungs because she was mad at Logan about something (I can't remember what).

It still had a little ice

Saturday, Ethan woke up with diarrhea and would spit out his formula while eating and didn't eat very much. Not much fun to be sick on vacation, but at least we could just pack him around and he could just rest in the baby carrier. We mostly drove around to different viewpoints Saturday because of all the hiking we did the day before. We needed to rest the tired, little hiking legs a little more. We drove all through the park and stopped at the different viewpoints. At the end of the road, we did a little hike called Bristle Cone Loop trail. Of course even little hikes take us awhile with the little kids. It was a fun little hike and pretty flat so it was easy for the kids, especially considering the one we did the day before. It had some beautiful views and lots of trees. It was pretty. At the end of the day, we finished our Bryce Canyon adventures at Bryce Point (very crowded) and Paria Viewpoint (practically empty). At Paria Viewpoint, Ethan had a diarrhea diaper so bad that we just ended up throwing his pants away. Luckily we had an extra change of clothes. After the hiking was over, we bought some souvenirs: a shot glass for Mandy and I, a mini-telescope for Logan, a little park ranger doll for Kylie (another "baby"), and a little stuffed chipmunk for Ethan. We ate at Subway again and called it a day.

I believe this was a Bristlecone tree? At least, I know there was some significance to this tree, I just can't remember what!

So cute!

Poor sick baby

The famous Bryce Canyon Picture

Sunday we went to the local Cannondale Ward. The ward members were very friendly. It seemed like they may have had more youth than our ward (at least young men). It had a fun, small town feel. Church was a little later than we were expecting (I think 10:30) so we ended up getting on our way home later than we thought we would. We thought we would be home in time to go to Nate's parents for dinner, but our trip home turned into an unexpected adventure. We decided to go home through Escalante because we wanted to try the Hell's Backbone Bridge. Nate had heard about this bridge from a friend at work and we saw a picture of it on a wall in our hotel so we decided to try it. We should have done more research on it though because that is where our nightmare began. After picnicking at Calf Creek Falls, we made the turn towards Hell's Backbone. We had no idea that the road was an extremely long, gravel road. It was certainly not made for a minivan. Nate almost immediately felt like we should turn around and continue on our journey, but I kept thinking we had to get there soon. An hourish later, we finally made it to the bridge and it turned out that it was a small, one lane bridge. The view was pretty spectacular, but it wasn't worth all the time it took to get there. After the bridge, there was another extremely long gravel road trip. When we got out to a fork in the road, arrows pointed south to Escalante or North to Loa. Loa is by Capital Reef so that was a long drive on the gravel road up that way, but we really didn't want to go back to Escalante. That would have meant that we spent the last hour plus driving in a circle. So we started north. Well, the elevation got higher the farther north we went and we started having to drive through snow at times, which was scary when you have a cliff on one side of you. After doing this for awhile, Mandy and I decided that we really needed to turn around and go back to Escalante for the safety of our family. After going through the snowy road a second time, we finally felt better because we felt like we were going to be safe after listening to that prompting.

The rest of our trip was long but uneventful other than a crying baby. We did stop at the Dairy Queen in Scipio that we almost always seem to stop at on our trips down south. I think it may have been after 9 when we finally got home. Way past the kids bed time. We had a really fun trip, though. The kids were troopers and it was great spending so much time together!