We leave Pocatello and head south on I-15, push into Utah past Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake then get off the interstate onto State Highway 28, which our trusty Rand & McNally road map shows as a scenic route. Indeed it is, and we soon stop for a picnic lunch at Levan Town park. We have our little shelter all to ourselves, although across the park there’s a big multigenerational family reunion going on.
And with the help of a few carrots I make friends with one of the locals right next door.
Mom's...I neglected to take a photo, this is from the web.
It’s not too far to the city of Salina (pronounced “Sal-eye-na”) where we stop for the night and have a great dinner at Mom’s Cafe (liver and onions, yeah!). It’s actually at the corner of State and Main, and a local hot spot for over eighty years.
The next morning we continue south on Highway 24, an even smaller scenic road, and we get our first taste of the dramatic iron-laden rock formations that we’ll see a lot more of in Bryce Canyon.
Hay, look at that!
We turn off onto Highway 12 and enter the Escalante wilderness, past the towns of Lyman and Bicknell, and into beautiful mountain aspen forests.
Aspen clones
The white trunks you see are aspens, each cluster is a clone of dozens or scores of genetically identical trees.
We’ve been climbing pretty steadily up Boulder Mountain, and at the top we’re warned of the pretty steep drop in elevation heading down to Boulder Town.
The edge of the world...that's a 3000 foot drop
I’d visited Boulder with a friend in 1969, it looks very different now with not so many abandoned homes and everything in much better repair, no doubt helped by the tourists who come through here in large numbers. In 1969 the road wasn’t paved and we couldn’t have negotiated it at all without George Johnson’s four-wheel drive Nissan Patrol that he had kindly let us borrow.
We drive past Boulder on the way to the town of Escalante and stop for lunch at Calf Creek campground.
It’s a gorgeous spot and a beautiful sunny day, but the water is quite chilly!
Brrrrr!
We go through Escalante and Tropic and cross into the northern end of Bryce Canyon National Park; we’ll leave it again before we get to our hotel which is just outside the park, but we follow a tempting signpost and turn off the road to get a preview of what’s in store for us.
This is not actually a natural river, it comes from the Tropic Ditch, a channel hand-carved by Mormon pioneers in the 1890s to bring irrigation water from the Sevier River some fifteen miles away.
We’ve been feeling sunset-deprived since leaving behind our Pine Island cocktail hour on the dock, but after we check into the Bryce View Lodge we’re treated to a pretty reasonable facsimile from our front porch.
One more sunset...