Great Western Trail

The Great Western Trail is a long-distance, multi-use trail corridor stretching roughly 4,500 miles from Canada to Mexico through Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. Utah carries about 1,600 miles of it, and one stretch runs through the Dixie National Forest backcountry near Bryce Canyon and Grand Staircase-Escalante, crossing the high plateaus east of the park — Table Cliffs, Griffin Top, and the country around Barker Reservoir and Pine Lake.

Good to know

• It was designated Utah's Centennial Trail in 1996 and is built as a shared corridor — sections are open to hikers, mountain bikers, horseback riders, and OHVs, though the mix varies by segment
• The local segments near Bryce are broken into named sections (Cameron Wash, Sweetwater, Horse Creek, Pine Creek, Griffin Top, Barker, and others), each with its own trailhead, distance, and character
• This is backcountry travel through Dixie National Forest, not a park day-hike — expect dirt roads, old double-track, and stretches with unreliable water

If you're picking a piece of the GWT to hike near Bryce, look at the individual section rather than treating the whole trail as one outing — the segments differ a lot in scenery, grade, and how developed the tread is.