125.7 RV miles today, 6,353.7 total

We went back into Zion this morning to hike the middle & lower Emerald Pool Trails near the Lodge.After lunch, we left Zion passing Checkerboard Mesa (named by the geologic marks scratched across its surface that resembles a checkerboard) & headed over to Bryce Canyon via Red Rock Canyon to drive through the park and stop at Natural Bridge Point, Bryce Point, & Sunset Point. We then headed to The Pines Restaurant for a home-cooked meal. The Paiute Indian history says the colorful, wildly-shaped hoodoos of Bryce Canyon were “Legend People” who were turned into stone by the trickster god Coyote. Bryce Canyon is situated along the southeastern rim of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. The word paunsaugunt come from the Palute Indian language. It means place or home of the beavers. Bryce Canyon isn’t actually a canyon. It’s actually a natural amphitheater. Marmots, a high-elevation mammal found here, are often called “rockchucks” by the local population. From Bryce Canyon, m, b, s & t

“Lovely and majestic beyond the cunning of human thought, the mighty Zion monuments rise to the sun as lightly as clouds that pass. And forever florious and forever immutable, they must rebuke human pride with the vision of ultimante beauty, and fulfill earth’s dream of rest after her work is done.” — Harriet Monroe, 1899

“It’s a heck of a place to lose a cow.” — Brother Ebenezer Bryce (Morman pioneer cattleman and the first permanent settler in the Bryce Canyon area)
“Before there were any Indians, the Legend People, To-when-an-ung-wa, lived in that place. There were many of them. They were of many kinds–birds, animals, lizards and such things–but they looked like people…For some reason the Legend People in that place were bad. Because they were bad, Coyote turned them all into rocks. You can see them in that place now; all turned into rocks; some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding on to others. you can see their faces, with paiint on them just as they were before they became rocks…” –Palute Indian legend describing rock formations in Bryce Canyon