Start: Hotel in Tropic
Finish: Willis Creek headwaters near Bryce National Park
Daily Mileage: 20.8
Trip Mileage: 516.5
Elevation gain/loss: 4864/3437ft
I hit the trail early this morning not too long after I got light enough. I was not going to hitch hike back to where I got off the trail because I was going to instead do an alternate where I would do a lot more hiking through Bryce Canyon. The Hayduke Trail only hits the bottom part of the park, and I’ve heard that the top of it is way more scenic. This will put a gap in my hike but in reality I’m hiking at least 10 more miles by doing this alternate and the official trail is mostly road walking until where I’ll join back up again. Seems like a pretty obvious choice to me.
I walked straight out of town down a road where it was about 3 miles to a trailhead. From there I was on national park trail for the entire day! Quite a change from the normal make it up as you go. It was quick and easy to climb up into the park and I joined the Peekaboo loop where I took the half of it closer to the rim.
The northern area of the park was incredibly scenic with arches, tons of hoodoos, and lots of very intricate rock formations. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it was hard to make progress due to taking pictures all the time. But the trail was super easy and very beaten down since this is a very popular loop.
The trail then went through a couple valleys and there was running water in a stream. I had debated where I should get my water for today and ultimately decided to get it from the stream. I didn’t really want to since I still had about 8 miles left for the day and a decent amount of climbing, but I really had no idea if there was water up ahead. There was another semi reliable stream up ahead but I just didn’t have any information on it and I decided that I didn’t want to pass up a flowing stream. I learned my lesson earlier on the Hayduke.
For a while the trail wound around at lower elevations, but it was never far from the cliffs of Bryce to the right with their pink various rock formations. It was nice, but it just did not compare to the morning’s show pieces. The day started to heat up. I’m basically generally going to be walking south now for the next week to get to the Grand Canyon so the sun was in my eyes and it was a clear day. It got pretty warm and I felt my energy levels dropping. I did have a good lunch of tortilla, sausage, and cheese since I had a shorter resupply this time and I carried some heavier food.
The Under the Rim Trail I’m using is obviously a lesser used trail and got a fraction of the maintenance of the main popular trails that I was at earlier today. A couple places I had to look around to figure out where the trail went and there was footsteps leading off in different directions which showed that other people were similarly confused.
Continuing along just below the rim of Bryce, I entered a big burn area which was unfortunate. I could see more around me but I would rather not see all the burned trees. It also made the trail a little bit of a mess. At this point I was just driving to be finished for the day since nothing could really compare to the morning. I got to the second stream where I was thinking about getting water at and it was bone dry. So glad I made the right choice to get water when I saw it. I climbed up to 8200 ft. for my high point today and actually found a small flowing stream near the top. I topped off my water there since it was there and I wasn’t far from where I was going to camp.
Late in the day, I thought I saw something moving in the woods and stopped to look to see what it was. At that moment some sort of bird decide to have a screeching fit and the combination of the two events startled me pretty good.
I started a gradual downhill from the high point. The trail passed through a corner of National Forest where I could legally camp so that was my target for the day since I didn’t have a back country permit for Bryce. It didn’t take long for me to find a decent camp site in the National Forest. I decided to hang a bear bag tonight for the first time since the back country campsites that I passed in the National Park made it very evident that they were very concerned about bear activity, and it could have been a bear I saw in the woods just up the trail. It wasn’t hard to do the hang, so I figured why not.
I’m at 7800 ft. at my campsite tonight. I think it will be a cold night, especially since I saw some snow and ice on along the way today. The weather report claims it will only get down to 38 or so even at this elevation, but I don’t believe that. I’m expecting some frost on my tent tomorrow morning.
