Rather than heading north towards Salt Lake City immediately, I thought I'd spend a few days seeing some of the National Parks Utah has to offer, so I was looking forward to getting out into the middle of nowhere and finding out what everybody was talking about when they banged on about the Midwestern states being full of stunning scenery. Bryce Canyon is certainly distinctive and can always be recognised in photographs by it's hoodoos - curious rock formations which have been carved out by a mixture of water and wind erosion to form hundreds of thousands of upright pillars standing in rows across the landscape, many of them over two hundred foot high. Bryce Canyon National Park really is the most improbable place - it's not enough to simply look at it on a photograph, you have to come here and stand by the side of the road on top of a high cliff and gaze out at it in stunned silence. The view is simply breathtaking - I simply can't get my head around the idea that some parts of the rock out here are so much softer than others that great chunks of land can just be washed away by wind and rain and yet leave behind such a piece of natural artwork. In fact, because the rocks are a curious combination of colours to start with, the pillars haven't even ended up as a uniform collection of needles, which in itself would've been quite impressive - instead, nature has provided us with a landscape of colour, the pillars being ringed by reds and often topped with white patches as though covered in snow.

To me, the fact that any of this has happened as a result of pure co-incidence seems just as improbable as if you threw a glass of water over a solid canvas of paint and ended up with a Renoir, and yet that is precisely what has happened - unless, of course, you talk to any of the millions of religious types in Utah, in which case you'll probably be told that it's God working in a mysterious way. There are a few places in the States where it boggles the mind that no human hands have had anything to do with creating the landscape - sometimes, nature can be far more original than any artist. The only thing I really want to know now is who the hell thought that "hoodoos" would be a cool sounding name.

The rim of the canyon (which isn't technically a canyon, but lets not confuse matters too much here) is actually a thousand feet higher than the Grand Canyon at eight thousand feet, which means that you have a unique vantage point above everything and can stand anywhere along the edge and take it all in without having to drive around looking for the perfect view. There certainly aren't many places where you can say that - finding the perfect view of the Grand Canyon, for example, is very much a personal thing and people tend to try to avoid the standard shot from the observation point in favour of somewhere slightly less photographed. At Bryce Canyon you can just pull the car over anywhere, snap a photograph and know that you haven't missed anything from the shot - which isn't to say that the place is tedious to look at, by any means, but simply that nature has rather conveniently provided somewhere which gives you the same Kodak moment wherever you choose to set your camera. I am not by any means suggesting that there aren't specific places you can go where taking a short drive off the beaten track will take you to a particular geological formation which you'll want to visit and photograph - it's just that, if you're not looking for a specific landmark, one shot from the rim is as impressive as any other. In fact, the park is full of hidden arches, land bridges and strangely shaped statues of rock which somebody with an active imagination will tell you look like an elephant holding a penguin, but you'd probably need a lot more time than I had to explore the park properly and see them all. Interestingly, Bryce Canyon is probably the least visited of the three National Parks in the area - Bryce, Zion and the Grand Canyon. This puts me in something of a quandary - on the one hand, part of me wants to stand up and shout out to everyone that there's a fantastic place nearby that everybody is missing, but then there's the more sensible part of me which says I should just shut the hell up and ensure that Bryce remains a peaceful remote place which isn't overrun with tourists.

We didn't have as much time in Zion National Park, the coach basically heading straight through on it's way to my overnight stop. In Bryce Canyon, we had at least been able to get out and walk around, taking in the sights, but this didn't leave us a lot of time to see Zion. To be honest, I don't think I missed an awful lot though - it's not that there isn't plenty of stunning scenery within the park, it's just that what there is to do seems to be either seasonal or to require a long drive off the beaten track. In the end, I had to make do with pressing my face up against the window and straining to see distant landmarks as they shot by, the coach driver being nice enough to let us know about all the most interesting sights just a fraction of a second after we'd passed them.

Most of the activities for which Zion is known were not the sort of thing anyone would undertake in a day - in fact, as one of the centres for rock climbing in the States, many people come here specifically to spend days on end hanging off of sheer rock faces just for the thrill of it.

For people staying at one of the park lodges and with time on their hands, there are plenty of opportunities to go horse riding or canyoneering during your stay, but these options were just dangled in front of our faces as things we might have done had we decided to stay here for a couple of days. The main attraction in the park, the temple of Sinaweva, gets you all excited until you realise that it isn't a real temple, the National Park shuttle buses which run along the narrow road down to it don't run at this time of year, and there's no way of getting a coach down there.

The temple of Sinaweva, in fact, is the name given to the point at the very end of the valley road where the road becomes a walking trail which meanders through the rocks to the foot of a giant waterfall surrounded by 1000 foot high cliffs. It all sounds like it might've made for a nice trek like the walks I went on back in the red centre of Australia, but there was simply no way of getting down to the temple in the time we had. So we just sailed past the entrance to the road down into the valley, the bus taking us right through the park and all the scenery passing us by. One thing I did discover, though, was that there was no iron, and certainly no lions, in Zion.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.