August 24th Day 56

Escalante to Panguitch:

The night before we were having a drink outside at the Escalante Outfitters and someone came up to us and said she heard we started our trip in North Carolina.  Her name was Kim Cardwell and turns out she is from Winston-Salem, NC!  She was there with her family on a long road trip through the west and flying back to Winston in a couple days.  She and her daughters Katie and Lauren had to get back to Winston for school starting.  

After coffee at the Escalante Outfitters shop we headed out towards Panguitch, UT.  For me, today was the most beautiful day of scenery the whole trip.  Just really spectacular natural formations that don’t even seem real they’re so insane looking.  We didn’t have that much climbing for the day except one brief significant haul into Bryce Canyon.  In Tropic, UT we chatted with Pat, who had recently quite his job working in oil fields to go on an 11 week motorcycle tour.  He started in Minnesota and from there headed to Alaska, which sounded unbelievable.  Pat was a cool guy and it was interesting to swap stories from our journeys.

After Tropic we began the climb into Bryce Canyon which really is unreal and otherworldly.  One of the coolest things was the bike path which ran down “Red Canyon.”  The bike path was about 7 miles long and had great views of the super red canyon walls, contrasted by tons of evergreens.  Our ride was pretty much downhill from there into Panguitch although the last 10 miles felt like battling uphill because of a really nasty, hot headwind.  As someone described, “it’s like a hair dryer on high a foot in front of your face.”  Once we arrived in Panguitch we quickly found the local pizza joint (finding food has become like a 6th sense for us) and devoured a whole pie to end a great day of riding.    

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