Day 16 – Bryce to Natural Bridge

Another day of travel. Up at 7, grab breakfast, say goodbye to Bob and Daphne. Great to see them.

We are going to retrace part of our route getting to Bryce, back through Escalante and to Boulder. From there we do something radically different. We take off on the Burr Trail, known to be scenic and a bit rough. It is about 70 miles: the first 25 is paved. It then enters Capital Reef NP and the road is graded for about 20 miles. When it leaves the NP it becomes paved again. The first 25 miles is wonderful. We go through areas of great color: greens, browns, blues and reds. Canyons with high walls, with slot canyons off to the side. It is very nice.



After it enters the NP, it gets a little scarier. The switchbacks that take us down 1000’ are the worst I have experienced. Narrow, sharp turns, no guard rail. Bonnie is petrified and my fear of heights comes through when I look straight down. We slow to a crawl and make it down.

But then the graded road hits areas of flash floods and is so washboard it makes our teeth rattle at 20 miles per hour. We cross the geologic fold in the park and see all kinds of tilted land forms.



Not so much pretty as it is awesome.
We first see Bullfrog Landing on Lake Powell while still 10 miles away. (See the little spot of blue in the center?
We find the ferry we will take to cross the lake (no bridge here) and discover that it leaves in 1.5 hours. So we go to a mini-mart and get drinks to go with our Subway sandwiches we purchased in Escalante. Bullfrog Marina is busy. This is the closest place for people who live in Salt Lake City to get to the lake. So they come. The temperature hits 101 while we are here. The ferry comes and we load to leave at 3:00 PM.

The ferry ride is 25 minutes and the water is lovely. There are houseboats all over the place. Lots of other kinds of boats too.




We get to the other side, Hall’s Crossing and head up the road. The rest of the trip is uneventful.
Well, except for a minor detour near the end. We go to a big rock called Atomic Rock, that is filled with petroglyphs, (stone writing done by chipping away the top layer of rock. It is near Natural Bridges, but not on the park property.

There is a small brush/forest fire east of us that we can see but find out that it burns out over night.


I went out to see Atomic Rock for a bit and on the way back saw an absolutely awesome sunset, pulled over and proceeded to take way too many pictures.