Bryce Canyon - hiking the Fairyland Loop Trail

Bryce Canyon National Park was our first stop on a 7 day road trip around Southern Utah and Arizona. My previous visit 15 years ago was far too brief, so I was excited to go back.

On October 31, the weather forecast was showing possible lows in the 20’s and the sun was setting at 6:30 pm, so we passed on the opportunity to camp in the cold and dark and stayed in a hotel in Bryce. The location was fabulous and the entrance to the National Park was just a couple miles down the road.

One good thing about late October travel and the shorter days that go along with that, was that the sunrise was about 8am. This made it pretty easy to get up in time to watch the sunrise over the Canyon, which I did at Fairyland Point.

Hiking is one of the main activities at Bryce, and we decided to hike the 8 mile Fairyland Loop. There is a small parking lot at Fairyland Point, but by the time we headed out at 10:30am, the lot was full, and so we continued on to the larger lot at Sunrise Point and started from there.

The Fairyland Loop trail starts at 8,000’ elevation and proceeds down, up, around, and through the canyon for about 5 miles and then goes back up to the rim trail and follows that for about 3 miles to complete the loop.

We started down into the canyon first towards tower bridge. Tower bridge is at about 1.5 miles into the loop from Sunrise Point. If you didn’t want to commit to the loop, you could turn around at this point, but we continued on.

The trail has wide open views over the canyon and is pretty spectacular. Although it is up and down quite a bit and at a high elevation, I found it generally manageable and not too steep.