8–10 April 2026 · Nevada · Utah · Arizona
Vegas, Bryce
& Antelope Canyon
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8–10 April 2026 · Nevada · Utah · Arizona
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Seven stops, three days, one loop — jump to any of them.
Wednesday night · Las Vegas
The trip opened indoors. The Wizard of Oz at Sphere — a Kansas sky wrapped 160 feet over your head, close enough that the whole row leans back without meaning to. Outside, the exosphere had become the Moon, counting down NASA’s Artemis II lunar flyby.
Nobody watched the film so much as sat inside it. Cyclone, poppy field, Emerald City — the picture doesn’t stop at the edge of a screen because there isn’t one, so the field of flowers simply keeps going past your shoulder.
By the time we came out it was 9:45 and the building had turned into the Moon: NASA branding, crater shadows, Artemis II. Three kids, one enormous satellite, one photograph.
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Thursday · Bryce Canyon National Park
Nine in the morning out of Las Vegas, north through the Virgin River Gorge, over UT-20 and down into Red Canyon. Five hours later the road tops out at 8,000 feet and the ground simply falls away into a bowl of orange spires.
You can see the whole amphitheatre in about four seconds from Sunset Point, which is the trap. Bryce isn’t a view; it’s a room. The hoodoos only get their scale when there’s a person standing at the bottom of one.
Navajo Loop · Two Bridges
1.3 miles, 550 feet of switchbacks, and a floor of pink dust between walls that lean in over your head. Somewhere on the way down a chimney in the limestone turned into a climbing problem and everybody had a go.
Thursday evening · Page, Arizona
Two and a half hours south to Page, drop the bags, then three quarters of a mile across open sandstone to a rail with nothing behind it — and the Colorado a thousand feet straight down, going the long way round.
The overlook sits at 4,200 feet; the river sits at 3,000. In between is a wall of Navajo sandstone that the water has been cutting for five million years, and it still hasn’t finished the turn.
We got there with an hour of light to spare, which is the entire trick. Everyone else arrives at 7:05.
Friday morning · 8:17 AM, Arizona time
A crack in a wash you would drive past without seeing. Then six flights of steel stairs down through a gap barely wider than your shoulders, and a hundred feet of sandstone closes over your head.
Page keeps Arizona time — no daylight saving — so in April it runs an hour behind the Utah we’d driven out of the night before. It is exactly the sort of detail that decides whether you make an 8:00 AM tour.
Lower is the narrow one. You go down into it rather than in, the walls are close enough to touch on both sides for most of its length, and the light arrives second-hand — bounced off one wall, onto another, and down. Reds turn to lavender in the space of a step. Nothing here is photographed so much as inferred.
Two canyons in one morning leaves an awkward gap in the middle, so we spent it on the slickrock below Glen Canyon Dam, looking down at the same river we’d watched go round the bend the evening before — green here, and a long way down.
Friday midday · 11:51 AM
The other canyon runs the other way: you walk in at ground level, the floor is flat sand, and the ceiling lifts into something closer to a cathedral. Around noon in spring the sun gets high enough to drop straight in.
Upper is the famous one, and for once the famous one earns it. The beams aren’t a trick of the camera; they are genuinely there, a column of lit dust standing on the floor of the canyon like something structural, and they last about as long as it takes to walk past them.
Our guide threw sand into the light. Everyone does. It works.
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Out of the canyon and straight into brisket at Big John’s, then south on 89A to stand in the middle of Navajo Bridge and look 470 feet down at the Colorado for the third time in two days.
After that it was just the drive: back up over the Kaibab, west through Kanab and Fredonia, a last scramble up Dixie Rock in St. George for the whole red valley at once, and down I-15 into Las Vegas for an eight o’clock flight. Fifty-three hours, end to end.
Wingspan, wall to wall.
