After the clutter and the cost of camping in Zion we were ready for a little more quiet and a lot less rules. We headed for Dixie National Forest which was situated conveniently between Zion and Bryce. It was fairly late in the evening as we made our way through the area and we weren’t quite sure where we were going. After a couple of detours down dirt roads that ended up being entirely private property we found a recreation area that was obviously marked for public use. A few miles back a forest service road and we were completely alone and completely surrounded by trees and nature. Zion had been beautiful and breathtaking, but in a way it was like visiting a zoo; you are enthralled by the novelty and beauty of the animals but you’re always conscious of the context in which that novelty is held.
Dixie would be where we stayed, in one place or another, for the next two nights and made a great staging ground for getting into and out of Bryce without feeling the press of the crowd like we had at Zion. After our first night at this random roadside site we day tripped to Bryce and returned again to a named campground called Duck Creek.
