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White Sands NP 2024 - Day 08
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Start Location: Panguitch, NM
Ending Location: Panguitch, NM
Miles Today: 72
Trip Miles: 2568
States Visited: 7
National Parks Visited: 2
Low Temp: 54.1° F
High Temp: 86.9° F
Min Elevation: 6704'
Max Elevation: 7956'
As you can see there's no map today and the graph isn't much. This is
because we only drove 72 miles today and 20 of those were going to
dinner tonight and back. The remainder of the miles were going to the
park and back from our hotel. Putting that on a map would be pretty
meaningless especially since we only took one or two pictures from the
bike. We also took a ton of pictures today and, over the next week or
so, we will post them in a web album format with a link to the album
here.
Bryce Canyon was amazing as always. We arrived around 10:00 and parked
in the extended parking lot where there were lots of spaces. There were
also a lot of space in the Visitor Center lot but they ask that you
only use those for a maximum of one hour although I'm sure a lot of
people abuse that. After a quick pass through the Visitor Center to see
if there was anything we needed to know, we hopped on the shuttle to
Sunrise Point. From there we started the hike through Queen's Garden
and connecting to Navajo Loop. There were a fair number of hikers but
not enough that there were traffic jams on the trail. The views were
incredible, it was really cool to be actually hiking through the
hoodoos. The only real difficult section was Navajo Loop since it 0.6
miles of steep switchbacks. The trick was just to go slow and keep
moving, also drink lots of liquids. There was some scattered shade
along the way but most of the hike was in direct sun. The guide said it
should take 2 to 3 hours and we finished a little under two hours so we
felt pretty good about that.
At the end of the hike we stopped at the General Store at Sunset Point
where we got some lunch and enjoyed it sitting on the store porch in
the shade. After lunch we went back to the Visitor Center where we
watched the half hour movie about the park.
We finished our day at the park with another shuttle trip to Bryce
Point at the end of the road and Inspiration Point for a few last
photos before heading back to our room.
Our pizza place from last night was closed but we found another
restaurant between our hotel and the park and had a very nice dinner.
We extended our stay at the hotel for another night and tomorrow we are
going to visit Zion. It's about a 60 mile drive so it shouldn't be too
bad. We decide since we were so close we had to visit Zion again.
Tuesday we will leave here and start the trek back to home which should
take around 3 or 3 1/2 days.
