I want to start this post with a bit of an overview of the three national parks we visited on our America’s Canyonland tour. Each of these parks are part of the “Grand Staircase,” an area beginning at the Grand Canyon, going on to Zion and ending at Bryce. Our itinerary was a bit out of order as we ended our trip in Zion. The Grand Staircase is a sequence of sedimentary rocks that ascend from the Grand Canyon to…
We traveled next to Bryce Canyon National Park, another highlight of our trip. On our way, we made a quick photo stop to see Balanced Rock. It is near Lee’s Ferry in Marble Canyon. The National Park Service explains how it came to be: Thousands of years ago a huge rock boulder broke from the cliff above and tumbled to a stop here. The hard conglomerate boulder compressed the softer dirt directly beneath, making it resistant to erosion. The boulder…
After leaving the Grand Canyon, we drove to the Glen Canyon and Lake Powell area, where we had a half hour flightseeing experience. We were on a small plane holding about 12 passengers, each of us with a window seat. The afternoon before, we had visited the Carl Hayden Visitor Center adjacent to the Glen Canyon Dam. The Visitors’ Center was named for Senator Carl Hayden who at the time was the longest serving member of Congress – in fact,…
We left Scottsdale and began driving to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. On the way, we made a lunch stop in Sedona, Arizona. Sedona is famous for its red rocks. I found this explanation of how these beautiful formations came to be. Before the red rock was turned into rock, it was all soft mud and sand. Over a 320 million year period changes in nature helped transform the sand and mud into something more beautiful than we…
We took Tauck’s America’s Canyonlands tour in October of 2022. On this tour we would visit the Grand Canyon, Glen Canyon, Lake Powell, and both Bryce and Zion National Parks. We arrived a day early for our tour and booked an independent, half-day tour that introduced us to the Scottsdale/Tempe/Phoenix area. We first visited Papago Park and the Sonoran Desert where we saw the iconic Saguaro Cactus. The Saguaro is a tree-like cactus that can grow up to 40 feet…