Southwest National Parks and Canyons - Small Group

Las Vegas bursts into colour, with neon glowing overhead and the promise of the national parks waiting beyond the city. Meet your Travel Director and fellow travellers, then make the first night your own. You might wander Downtown beneath the lights of Fremont Street, follow the Strip past its towering hotels or find a table overlooking the city as Las Vegas glitters below. Raise a toast to the road ahead: seven days of wide-open landscapes, extraordinary geology and the American West.

Leaving Las Vegas behind, you’ll travel through Mesquite before entering Zion National Park, where bands of red and cream sandstone line the canyon walls beside the road. Over lunch and a visit to the Visitor Centre, you can take in the canyon at your own pace, following paths beneath steep cliffs that tower above you in layers of weathered rock. Continue to Bryce Canyon for the night, with the evening yours to enjoy at an easy pace or to join the Optional Experience at Ebenezer’s Dinner and Show for dinner, music and a little Wild West theatre.

• Visit Zion National Park

With your Travel Director, you’ll follow the rim of Bryce Canyon, pausing above a vast amphitheatre crowded with orange, pink and cream hoodoos carved into slender spires. Around lunch, you can wander a trail among the rock formations or saddle up for an Optional Experience through Water Canyon Amphitheatre and Bristlecone Pine Ridge, feeling the steady sway of the horse beneath you as you ride through the high-desert landscape. Later, you’ll continue to Page, where dinner is yours to choose or you can join an optional MAKE TRAVEL MATTER® Experience at Red Heritage, a Navajo-owned and operated dinner show.

• Bryce Canyon Sightseeing

Page is yours to explore, with two very different optional MAKE TRAVEL MATTER® Experiences to choose from. In the morning, you can hike through Owl Slot Canyon, weaving between its narrow sandstone walls as the passage twists through the rock, before returning to Page for lunch at your leisure. Later, you might head out on an Optional Experience through Monument Valley, travelling into one of the American Southwest’s most celebrated landscapes. Back in Page, you’ll have dinner this evening.

You’ll travel through Northern Arizona to Cameron Trading Post, where Native American artwork fills the historic stop and the desert stretches far beyond. At the Grand Canyon, walk with your Travel Director between viewpoints above the mile-deep chasm, pausing as ridges fold into the distance and layers of rock mark millions of years of erosion by the Colorado River. With Canyon Tim, you’ll look more closely at the landscape and the forces that carved it, before continuing to Williams, a Route 66 town with its own slice of classic Americana.

• Explore Grand Canyon National Park
• Grand Canyon National Park with a Geology Expert

Back in Grand Canyon National Park, you can trace a rim trail on foot, browse the historic lodge or hire a bike and pedal beneath ponderosa pines with the canyon opening beside you. For an even wider perspective, you might choose an Optional Experience by helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft, sweeping above the South Rim, North Rim or Kaibab Plateau as cliffs, ravines and immense stretches of rock unfold far below. Later, you’ll return to Williams for dinner at your leisure.

You’ll leave Williams behind and travel west towards Las Vegas, with the desert stretching out beyond the road as the journey begins to wind down. One last stretch of open country accompanies the final miles with your Travel Director and fellow travellers before you arrive in Las Vegas late morning. Your journey ends with a drop-off at Las Vegas airport at approximately 11:00am.