Bryce Canyon or Yosemite?

Neither has a sea, but Yosemite at least offers a real swim. In late summer the Merced River slows into pools and sandbars in the Valley, Tenaya Lake has a sandy, icy shore, and Bass Lake to the south has a summer lake-resort feel. Just avoid the rivers in spring, when they run fast and dangerous.

Around Bryce the water is used for fishing, not bathing. Tropic Reservoir and Panguitch Lake are cold, and a motel pool is the only practical way to swim.

Both places treat food as fuel, so neither is a reason to come. Bryce's best meals are a drive away along Scenic Byway 12, where kitchens in Escalante and Boulder cook with local produce, and Utah's rules keep alcohol limited.

Yosemite's gateway towns are more relaxed about a drink, with wine bars pouring Sierra foothill wines, and its grand historic dining room in the Valley is a better special-occasion setting than the Bryce lodge.

The built heritage is slight in both places, and the main sights are rustic 1920s-era park lodges of timber and stone. Bryce adds Paiute stories at the visitor centre, the red-brick pioneer houses of Panguitch and the Puebloan village at Boulder.

Yosemite has a little more to fill a wet afternoon. The Yosemite Museum covers Miwok culture, Ansel Adams's photographs link the park to the history of conservation, and the Wawona history centre has a covered bridge and stagecoach-era cabins.

Evenings end early in both. Bryce's gateway towns are small Mormon communities with very few bars, while Yosemite manages a lodge lounge, a campfire or a brewpub in a gateway town. In both places the real evening activity is looking at the stars.

Both are among the great landscapes of the American West, but they feel very different. At Bryce the drama is concentrated in one plateau edge, where crowds of orange and pink hoodoos fill the amphitheatre and short trails like Navajo Loop and Queen's Garden take you down among them. Red Canyon, Kodachrome Basin and the slot canyons of Grand Staircase-Escalante are close by.

Yosemite works on a larger and wetter scale. It has 1,000m granite walls, waterfalls at full force in spring, sequoia groves, alpine lakes in Tuolumne and the world's most famous big-wall climbing. Wildlife such as black bears is part of the experience in a way it rarely is on the Utah rim.

Yosemite gives better reasons to leave the park for a day. The Gold Country to the west has Columbia's preserved gold-rush street, the steam railway yard at Jamestown and wineries around Murphys, and in summer Tioga Pass opens the way to the ghost town of Bodie and Mammoth Lakes.

From Bryce, almost every outing leads to more landscape. Its towns, from Panguitch to Kanab's Western film heritage and Cedar City, are pleasant, but none of them fills a day.

Yosemite is somewhat easier with children. The flat Valley floor, its bike paths, meadows and calm late-summer river edges let younger children explore at ground level, and the sequoias of Mariposa Grove need no explanation.

Bryce works best for school-age walkers. The paved Rim Trail between Sunrise and Sunset Points is easy, but the altitude, steep climbs back out of the canyon and unfenced drops make it hard going with toddlers. Both parks run a Junior Ranger programme.

Once you have arrived, Bryce is the simpler park to get around. A single scenic drive of about 30km runs along the rim with pull-outs at each viewpoint, and the summer shuttle and Rim Trail link the busiest overlooks. The catch is getting there, with major airports hours away and no public transport between the towns.

Yosemite can be reached without a car, by regional bus from the train station at Merced, and the Valley has free shuttles. Beyond the Valley, however, Glacier Point, Mariposa Grove and Tuolumne are each an hour or more of winding road away, and summer brings queues at the entrances and full car parks.

Neither place is for shopping, and in both you should bring what you need. Bryce's roadside rock shops sell fossils and geodes, and the general store sells Western wear. Yosemite's most distinctive purchase is a fine-art landscape print from the long-standing gallery in the Valley.

Bryce is the cheaper of the two, though neither is cheap in high season. Its lodges and motels charge firm summer rates, but there is camping in the park and the national forest, and the older motels in Panguitch help keep costs down.

Yosemite's few rooms inside the park sell out at high prices, the gateway towns charge peak rates all summer, and food inside the park is expensive for what it is. Its cheap campsites are hard to get. In both places the trails, shuttles and ranger programmes cost nothing once you have paid to enter.

Bryce has the one real reason to book a ticket. The long-established Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, about an hour and a half away, stages a full repertory from early summer into autumn and can fill a memorable evening. Closer to the park there is a summer cowboy music show with dinner.

Yosemite has campfire talks, the odd one-person historical performance in the Valley and a small theatre in Sonora, which is pleasant but not worth planning around.

Neither has a real spa culture, and the calm in both comes from the wild setting. Yosemite has slightly more to offer: a couple of resort spas near the southern entrance, and in summer the open-air hot springs around Bridgeport and Mammoth Lakes beyond Tioga Pass. The Valley in July is too crowded to be restful, though.

Bryce's quiet is steadier. Its small towns and empty roads stay calm, and an evening on a lodge porch under one of the country's darkest skies is the closest it comes to pampering.