Today's drive is a whopping 111 miles down the road, but oh! so much stuff to do! We pulled out of our hotel in Page and headed to the Marble Canyon, where the Navajo Bridge crosses the Colorado River. The Marble Canyon is along 89A, which will take you to Kanab via the Vermillion Cliffs, past Jacob's Lake (the last place to eat before going to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. There are amazing cookies there!), past the viewpoint for the Grand Staircase from north to south, and into Kanab, Utah. We had driven 89A from Kanab to the western end of the Vermillion Cliffs. We had not driven 89, which runs from Glen Canyon to Kanab, through Utah, but I still wanted to see a couple of sites on the eastern side of 89A, so we did some backtracking. We passed Horseshoe Bend, starting with the Navajo Bridge and Marble Canyon.
The scenery is amazing. I just love when we would pop out of an area where the canyon walls closed in and the scenery changes as you get through it!
The Vermillion Cliffs are some of my favorites! Again, pardon the blurry foreground. We were driving, and pull-outs aren't always at the best sites!
Lee's Ferry was the only place to cross from Arizona to Utah in the area in the very early days. With the invention and popularization of automobiles (and the sinking of the ferry), the Grand Canyon Bridge was built just a few miles down from Lee's Ferry, opening to traffic in 1929. A few years later, the name was changed to the Navajo Bridge. As cars and trucks became heavier, this bridge was deemed to not be sturdy enough to handle the demands on it, so a new, stronger bridge was built in 1995, and the old bridge was converted to a pedestrian bridge. The bridges span the Marble Canyon in the area of the Vermillion Cliffs.
Marble Canyon is often considered the beginning of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, and people often raft the Colorado River, through the Marble Canyon, to the Grand Canyon. I would love to do that sometime, but I hear there are some rapids, and I'm not really confident in my ability to white water raft at this time.
We decided that I would walk across the pedestrian bridge, and Bruce would drive across and meet me on the other side. If you look closely, you can see Big Red (our red Mitsubishi Outlander Sport) crossing the Navajo Bridge.
Soon after Bruce got to the western parking lot, I saw this California Condor perched on one of the trusses under the bridge. I got a few pix and decided to go get The Baby (the 150-600 lens) out of the car to get better shots.
It was about this time that I realized I did not have time to get another camera!
Most of my shots were of the condor going away, but I did get a few good ones of him flying toward me!
Since I had a good view of his tag, I decided to look this guy up. The California Condor was almost extinct. In 1987, there were only 22 birds left in the wild, and they were all captured to start a breeding program. That program was a success, and the population has been growing since then. This particular bird was hatched on May 10, 2017, in the Oregon Zoo as part of that breeding program. He was released in the Arizona/Utah area at some point after becoming an adult. The wild population is now estimated to be around 561. Our first stop, and my day is already made!
Our next stop was Horseshoe Bend. The site is located on public lands in the Glen Canyons Recreation Area, but the parking lot and beginning of the trail to the site is on property belonging to the City of Page. The city now charges $10 per car to park and use their portion of the trail. According to my watch, the hike down from where we parked and back was just over 3 miles, but I thought it was worth it!
The view coming from Navajo Bridge to Horseshoe Bend.
A boat docked on the island in the center of the bend
Horseshoe Bend
On the east side of Page, we stopped for a quick shot of the bridge over the Glen Canyon Dam. Please ignore the yellow reflection on the lower left corner. I shot this one through the windshield instead of an open window!
After crossing the bridge, I wanted a picture of the lake from a vantage point in Glen Canyon Recreational Area. Once we got in, the map showed that we could just drive through the Recreational Area and hook up with Hwy 89 long before the Toadstool Trail, which was our next stop.
This is the dam from just before bridge.
The Waheep area of Lake Powell has a marina.
The scenery past Glen Canyon toward the Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument (on the southeast side) was still amazing!
Along Hwy 89, in the area of the Grand Staircase/Escalante National Monument, is the Toadstools Trailhead. I wanted to hike this trail. It's listed as an easy hike of just under two miles round trip, in and out. They say it has a total gain of 100 feet. They don't tell you that you have to gain that 100 feet multiple times! It was a beautiful trail, but all the up and down was hard on me!
This is an early view of a small hoodoo on the top of a cliff. This may become a toadstool later or it may fall off before then.
A group of toadstools on a distant cliff. I did not reach these, and I don't believe others on the trail did, either. In fact, it seemed like some of them didn't even notice they were there.
A beautiful flower that I had the energy to stoop down to photograph. This was taken on the way in. I thought about taking another on the way out, but didn't have the spoons to stoop down again!
A view of the trail (pay no attention to the wash bed - it wasn't the trail). If you look closely, there are 4 people on that ledge that I haven't made it to yet. They have stopped and taken lots of pictures, but they didn't take pictures of the earlier toadstools. I don't think they saw them.
The ledge those people were on once I got up there.
This is the primary toadstool formation. Some of them have fallen.
The toadstool formation to the right. I just zoomed and cropped into this shot. I didn't go down the canyon and back up to that platform for those formations.
A natural, heart-shaped cutout in the distant cliff beside the closer toadstool formation
A wider angle shot of the first set of toadstools. The canyon was beautiful even if you didn't notice the toadstools on top. This was taken on my way back, when I needed to stop to breathe, and point the formation out to a couple on their way in.
This was taken when we were almost in Kanab. I just liked the rusty water tower against the red sandstone cliff.
We got into Kanab and I crashed for the night. The hikes kicked my butt, but they were worth every bit of it! We had eaten left-over pizza for lunch, so I just made balogna sandwiches in the room before I died!
