Day 5 Part II (zion, bryce canyon)

When we finally got onto pavement in the Grand Canyon, we hit up the first diner we could find and laid out all our stuff in the parking lot (pic below) to dry it out. I cannot express enough, how much mud was packed into these bikes and our gear. Had come up with this brilliant idea to bring a powerstrip and have all our chargers already plugged into it. That way we could just walk up to any one outlet and plug in our powerstrip. Unbenounced to the restraunt, we were actually charging like 10 different things, lol. This is the only way we could keep our bluetooth communicators, laptop, camera, helmet cam and cell phones charged; and thank God we did, because the footage that we got from these things was amazing.

Anyways, so after we dryed everything we had, we got back on the road and headed toward Zion. Stopping at the nearest gas station to thoroughly wash the bikes off.


When The park was extremely well maintained and preserved. It had nice roads and they were in the right places to give you amazing views. Several roads had tunnels that cut right into the mountian.

The super informal history of this place that I remember is that the early mormon settlers found it and declared it to be a holy place where a person could personally veiw Gods wonders. I am not mormon but they were right. It literally looks photoshopped right in front of you.

The mountain peaks are so gorgeous and they transcend down to large rocky bottoms with enormous striations that curve diagonally down to the ground. Almost as if the mountains had just twisted right up from the earth only shortly before you got there.

After a good while in Zion, we got back on the road towards Bryce Canyon. But not before some dumb girl almost killed us both by driving with her knees, while on the cellphone, while changing a station, while driving uphill on the side of a cliff. This influenced me to take a more relaxed pace to Bryce because I literally thought I was about to have to lay the bike down just to avoid impact. Luckily she missed me and hopefully learned something (probably not).

So we plug away on the road and get to a tiny town called Hatch, and got some beef jerky and gatorade. We talked to the lady and ended up changing our plans from camping at Bryce Canyon, to staying in a cabin right outside of it. (Cabin $30, Camping $35) Plus the next day was going to be a long one (almost 300 miles), so we thought charging everything and sleeping in a bed would be a good idea.

It was only early afternoon, so we dropped off everything at the cabin and headed towards Bryce Canyon...

This was the only place that I feel like we skimmed over. We stopped at all the stops but we did not hike into the canyon. If we make another trip out there, further exploring Zion and Bryce will be on the top of our list of things to do.

So we make it into Bryce Canyon at dawn. We ride though and it was beautiful, but not nearly as breathtaking as Zion or certainly not as much as Sublime Point. I have heard that it is a great hiking area, and that is probably true. 

Our way back to the Canyon was a little scary because it had become dark and the wildlife was quite active in Bryce. We had a couple close encounters with deer and some mountain goats.  I got stopped by a park ranger who was more interested in hearing about our motorcycle trip then giving me a speeding ticket, so he just let us go.  lol

Afterwards, we just head back to the Cabin because the next day we had to travel to Red Canyon, Capital Reef, up the legenday route 12 and then do a super boring long highway trip (triple digit speeds made it go by alot faster), and then end up in Moab, UT at Arches National Park.