Bryce Canyon Country

If one road defines this region, it is Scenic Byway 12 — the All-American Road that climbs and winds for 124 miles across the high plateaus of south-central Utah, and which much of Bryce Canyon Country is simply strung along. This is high country, cooler and greener than the deserts below, where the elevation runs from seven to over nine thousand feet and the landscape shifts from pink hoodoos to white slickrock to alpine forest in the space of an afternoon's drive.

The anchor is Bryce Canyon National Park — not a canyon at all, but a series of amphitheaters eroded into the edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, holding the largest concentration of hoodoos, those thin spires of stone, found anywhere on Earth. It sits high enough that it snows on the rim and far enough from city light that its night skies are among the darkest in the country. West of the park, Red Canyon frames the highway in vermilion arches; the brick pioneer town of Panguitch guards the western gateway on US-89, with the trout water of Panguitch Lake up the mountain beyond it.

East of Bryce, the byway runs through a chain of small Mormon towns — Tropic, Cannonville, Henrieville — and past the spires of Kodachrome Basin and the improbable double span of Grosvenor Arch, out a dirt road toward the Grand Staircase. Then it enters the slickrock heart of the Grand Staircase–Escalante country, where the trail to Lower Calf Creek Falls ends at a 126-foot waterfall in a desert canyon, and the highway itself narrows to the Hogback, a knife-edge of pavement with the land falling away on both sides.

It ends, more or less, at Boulder — one of the most isolated towns in the country, which got its mail by mule into the 1940s — home to Anasazi State Park and the farm-to-table Hells Backbone Grill, with the Burr Trail dropping east into the canyons and Boulder Mountain lifting the road to 9,600 feet of aspen before it falls toward Capitol Reef.

Come in late spring through fall, give the byway a full day even though you could drive it in three hours, and plan to stop more than you think. Bryce Canyon Country is less a destination than a 124-mile sequence of them.

What to See in Bryce Canyon Country

25 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Bryce Canyon Country rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.