Last night was another very windy night and I didn’t get much sleep.  Fortunately the modifications that I made to the rain fly during the day yesterday did go a long way in keeping additional sand out of the tent – so at least I didn’t have that flying in my face all night.

Today I had planned to be just a hiking day, but I realized that I had missed two of the viewpoints during my visit yesterday – Yovimpa Point and Piracy Point.  So on returning to the park this morning I ran out to those two viewpoints and got some pictures.  Then headed down to Sunset Point to start my hike.

While yesterday was a more or less cloudy day with less than optimal lighting conditions, today was absolutely perfect.  The sky was clear with just an occasional lazy cloud and the most stunning shade of blue.

The hike I chose was actually a combination of three trails; Queen’s Garden, Peek-a-Boo Loop and Navajo loop.  These take you down into the Bryce Amphitheater so that you are down in and amongst the hoodoos.  The lower section takes you through a nice conifer forest.  The total length is somewhere around 6 miles.  The Navajo loop is the steepest section as far as I can tell and is completely uphill/downhill with no flat sections.  After making it up one side of the loop I had the option of going down the other side and back up again (1 mile total) – or just taking the remaining half mile back to the car – I chose the car.  I’m planning to do the rest of Navajo loop tomorrow morning as from the top it does look very interesting.

The rest of tomorrow will be getting ready to view the eclipse which starts at about 6:20 MT and lasts about 2 hours.  I already have my snazzy eclipse viewing glasses!