The State Route 12, or Utah’s Scenic Byway US-12 takes you to a beautiful 124mile journey from Panguitch/ Hatch to Torrey taking you to some of the most beautiful places in Utah: Bryce Canyon and Capitol Reef National Park, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the Dixie National Forest.
Bryce Canyon and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area (with Lake Powell) got their own blogposts. So I’m focusing on the rest of the Scenic Byway that we drove through.
Cottonwood Canyon Road
After nearly killing ourselves for a picture of the horeshoe bend (:-)), we took the Cottonwood Canyon Road to go to Tropic. The Cottonwood Canyon Road is part of the Scenic Byway.
The Cottonwood Canyon Road is a dirt road (yes, again) which you preferably only take when the weather is dry. Lucky for us the moment we were on the road, it didn’t rain. I think it started raining (a tiny bit) the moment we left the scenic backway and got back on the main road. The Cottonwood Canyon Road is 46 miles long and takes you through the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It gives you access to Kodachrome Basin State Park, Grosvenor Arch, the Cottonwood Narrows and Hackberry Canyon. We only took the 1mile detour to see the Grosvenor Arch. This is a double arch named in honor of a former National Geographic Society president… but I’ve never heard of him. Sorry for that. Except for a brief moment where the car lost its grip on a steep inclination, everything kind of went great. We passed 2 maybe 3 cars, but other than that, we had the road to ourselves. Except when we drove to the Grosvenor Arch. There we saw two cars more :-).
We slept in the Bryce Pioneer Village in Tropic. We had a wooden cabin, that wasn’t completely noise free or dark enough to have a good night’s rest. But! The restaurant made up for that. We had the best steak and burger ever! But the negative point is that they serve breakfast too late. We had a tour in the morning, so we had to leave around 7 A.M. and that’s when breakfast just started. If you know that most people that stay in your rooms are going to Bryce Canyon… the least you can do is adjust the hours of breakfast and so on…
From Tropic to Torrey
We left Tropic to go Salt Lake City and stayed on the Scenic Byway US-12 until Torrey, thus passing by a few overlooks. I have to be honest, they didn’t stay with me – or at least, most of them didn’t stay with me … But I’m going to write them down anyway, because I am sure we did them… or at least passed them by. It could be that we didn’t stop at every overlook, because it was a drive to get to Salt Lake City, let along taking the byway :-). But at least we had something to look at. The ones I do remember, have a little bit more information.
The overlooks we passed are: Powell Point Overlook, that overlooks the delicate pink limestone ledges of Powell Point, Upper Valley Graneries, the Escalante Petrified Forest State Park, the Head of the Rocks Overlook, which gives you expansive views over the Escalante Canons, where colorful slickrock stretches almost as far as the eye can see, Boynton Overlook, that gives a birds’s-eye view of the area along the twisting Escalante River, the Escalante River Trailhead, the Calf Creek Recreation Area, the Hogback, Boulder Town, an isolated little town where nothing happens… ever (but that’s my humble opinion), Anasazi State Park, Homestead Overlook, where you can see panoramic views over the five peaks of the henry Mountains to the east, the magenta wedge of the Waterpocket Fold below and the streated face of the Kaiparowits Plateau to the west, the Wildcat Guard Station and Torrey.
Around the world in a lifetime 