This morning we stopped at the Carl Hayden Visitors Centre and Glen Canyon.

The dam here took 3.5 years to do all the preparatory work, beginning in 1956. The work involved building the road, bridge, town of Page, diversion tunnels and electrical lines. It then took a further 2.5 years to raise the 710 foot / 216m dam. This surprised me, as it didn’t seem very long to build something this big. In England it would have taken a lot longer?!

Workers called highscalers used these little seats to travel down the Canyon face during the dam’s construction. They blasted and chipped the rock to prepare the Canyon walls for bridge footings and dam abutments. The seat was so tiny, and didn’t look too safe. Certainly wouldn’t have passed health and safety tests today. Highscalers still maintain the concrete surface of the dam and the adjacent canyon walls. Although thankfully, now they use harnesses and much stricter safety regulations!

We then took a cruise along Lake Powell. This lake was in Planet of the Apes and also a Britney music video! Our cruise went around Antelope Canyon, created from flash floods and named this because antelopes migrate here in the winter.

The cruise was amazing we went right into the Antelope Canyon, winding round with more of the layered sandstone. The colour comes from the sand which is coated with iron oxide. This rusts and creates the beautiful autumnal colours.

We travelled to Utah, and took a visit to Bryce Canyon, which I think has been the favourite part of the trip so far. You could trek down to the bottom, I didn’t make it all the way down but the views from the top were absolutely outstanding. More of the beautiful layered rusty sandstone which had been eroded away created columns of stone.

We made our way back to Kanab where our hotel was. We headed to an amazing restaurant where I had fresh fish tacos and shared key lime pie, and pecan caramel cheesecake which was obviously sent from heaven as it was so, so delicious. The service was great too, welcomed us in as if we were family. It was a great end to a fantastic day.