"Bryce Canyon - The color of rocks " a Bryce Canyon National Park Travel Page by gubbi1

Already to say this at the beginning: A day at Bryce Canyon is hard to beat. This place is so colorful and with the rocks in such a strange shape you will feel like you are on some other strange planet. Partly I was reminded of some fairytale landscape... but it was real!

Ok, let's start at the beginning...
My day started at Zion National Park which ist pretty close to Bryce Canyon. With a limited time for my trip and a huge amount of things and places I wanted to see, I decided to combine Zion and Bryce at one day. So after an excellent visit with a small hike at Zion (sure you can spend much more time at Zion as I did) I came here to Bryce Canyon. With some investigations on the internet (pages of the National and State Parks are really well done) I knew that I wanted to hike the rim of the canyon to have the best views over the landscape. The first thing I did after arriving was to contact the ranger at the Visitor Center to ask about the best access to the rim trail. She suggested to park the car just opposite of the Visitor Center on the parking close to the camping. From there it was just a short walk through the camping to reach the rim trail. Already here you can see the strange rock formations. What I did not know at that moment was that it gets better and better as further you go. So I stepped slowly along the rim hardly able to realize what I saw. It is so beautiful and as I said, as further you go, you have more and more colors.
I was surprised that the distances were not that large as I expected, so I was pretty fast. Also the rim trail is in a very good condition, no hiking boots needed at all. I passed a couple of trail heads leading down into the canyon. With each I passed, I felt more and more like going down there as well. So at Sunset Point, one of the viewing points, I could not resist and made my way down into this wonderland. The path is a loop, which returns to the rim trail at Sunrise Point. It is spectecular.

Here some links for your plannings:

Official page of the Bryce Canyon NP, the first resource you should look at!
Utah about Bryce Canyon NP.
Helpful Bryce Canyon page.
Wikipedia knows something about Bryce Canyon NP.
Travelwest, some more page with infos about Bryce Canyon NP.