Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah.
I thank my son Matt for his gorgeous photos and his contribution to The Intrepid Tourist about his family trip to southern Utah in June 2024. He writes:
Over the last few years, I have made several trips to St. George, Utah, as a chaperone for my daughter's swim team, to the beautiful pool at Dixie State University (now Utah Tech University). Impressed by the remarkable scenery and grandeur of the red rocks of Southern Utah, I endeavored to return for non-swim purposes. This summer we returned as a family and stayed in Ivins, Utah (essentially a suburb of St. George), using it as a jumping off spot for day trips in southern Utah.
St. George markets itself as the "gateway to Zion" and it is certainly an easy ~1 hour drive to the Zion National Park entryway. St. George is also close enough for day trips to both Bryce National Park and the Grand Canyon, each about 2.5 hours away (northwest, and southwest respectively.) Even closer is a hidden gem of a state park called Snow Canyon, that is equally impressive and not as impacted and with multiple small hikes to choose from.
Just driving through Southern Utah, the surrounding scenery and vistas are awe inspiring. If you travel as we did via Las Vegas, as you leave the lights behind driving toward St. George, you are met by the starkness of the Nevada desert, with Joshua trees dotting the landscape. This ends abruptly as you reach a fracture in the mountains and I-15 freeway plunges into the Virgin River Gorge and into the bottom geologic layer of what is called the grand staircase- and ascend up through various striations and "steps" measuring millions of years of geologic epochs starting with the chocolate layer of Kaibab limestone (which I believe also forms the top rim of the Grand Canyon as well.)
From there you can eventually step up and ascend through further strata to the Navajo sandstone of Zion and then the Claron formation of Bryce-- spanning from ~225 to 50 million years ago. All in all, geology is what makes southern Utah tick, from red rocks, to sandstone mesas, to slot canyons, to the various angles of fractures and faults or blobs of rock sticking up from the landscape.
To explore the geology, over the course of a week, we started locally with several small hikes at Snow Canyon State Park, within walking distance of our rented home in Ivins. We followed this with a day trip to Zion National Park and hiked the Narrows (the path is the Virgin river) and would recommend renting a walking stick (at Zion entrance) and bring good shoes you don't mind getting wet (old running shoes worked fine.)
Zion has many other impressive hikes we will have to go back for. There is a bus system in Zion Valley, cut by the upper reaches of the Virgin river, where no cars are allowed. It takes about an hour to make it up the canyon and again an hour to get back (you can hop on or off at various stops), with great views of the canyon the whole time. Another day was a trip to Bryce (2.5 hour drive), for a walk among the hoodoos, making a big loop so as to drive back through the West side of Zion via Route 9 to see Checkerboard Mesa among other impressive formations.
Dinosaur footprint.
While we were on a geology roll, we decided to check out both the St. George Dinosaur Discovery Center- a small museum housing a impressively large set of dinosaur footprints discovered by a local alfalfa farmer while clearing a field. This is a small but impressive little outing. Though not affiliated with the museum, within a 15 minute drive is a site where there are dinosaur footprints "in the wild" with a small trail called the Dino Cliffs Dinosaur tracks, which takes a bit of internet searching and slight off-road/dirt road car adventuring to get to, but was also a short fun little outing.
The St. George area, besides hosting a large university, is itself an adventure and vacation destination. The area is surrounded by housing and condo developments that have popped up on fairly recent (geologically speaking) lava beds, which in contrast to the red rock of much of the landscape, reminds me of the Big Island of Hawaii (both for the condo's and the lava fields). The area is surrounded by mountain bike trails, hiking trails, camping and miles of paved roads and trails for biking. In some ways the community is a desert version of Lake Tahoe, or Bend Oregon, marketing itself to those seeking active vacation and outdoor recreation time.
The one thing we didn't quite account for was the heat in early June. It was well over 100 degrees much of our visit during the day in St. George. Spring, fall or even winter may be better for some of the more athletic outdoor pursuits (though timing hikes in the morning or evening worked well- and several trips were made to the pool at our housing complex). Both Zion and Bryce are at higher elevations, so our trips on these days helped take down the temperature a notch at higher elevations (Zion ~4000-5000, and Bryce 6000 feet above sea level.).
As in much of the west, Southern Utah is full of landscapes that seem endless, and you can't help but feel that there is so much that is left to be explored. There are additional parks, monuments, trails, and wilderness areas that invite a return at some point in the future.