Yes, it really IS that blue
We took a really cool road trip this past spring. We visited Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, and drove part of Route 66 in northwest Arizona.
One of the most memorable experiences for me was hiking the Navajo Trail and Queen’s Garden Trail at Bryce Canyon. The Navajo Trail is only about 2.25 miles long, and drops about 500 feet in elevation. It meets up with the Queen’s Garden trail to form a loop at the parking lot at Sunset Point.
We hiked into the canyon along the Navajo Trail. It was cold and windy at the top, but after we moved down in elevation a few hundred feet, the temperature was actually quite pleasant. Along the way we saw a lot of amazing scenery. The most incredible part, though is shown in the photograph below.
As we climbed back toward the rim along the Queen’s Garden Trail, we came to a series of switchbacks that allowed part of the clear blue sky to be framed by the towering red limestone. The color of the sky was absolutely surreal. It was the bluest blue I had ever seen. For a time I thought that maybe I was hallucinating, that perhaps a lack of oxygen to my brain due to hiking at an elevation of nearly 8,000 feet was causing me to see the sky as something it was not. That’s when I stopped and shot this photo - if for no other reason than to prove to myself that the nearly cobalt blue sky that I was seeing really was there.
All I can say is that I’m still amazed at what I saw. It was almost like a scene from CS Lewis’ “The Great Divorce” - so real that I’m nothing more than a shadow.
