Visiting Bryce Canyon National Park
With a childhood of campervans and portaging with a canoe on my back, my recommendations for traveling to National Parks go something like this: come for the natural wonder and wilderness! Stay for the natural wonder and wilderness! If there are luxurious, mellow diversions for visitors to American National Parks, these alternatives have eluded me, and will henceforth receive no address.
Last year I spent a month in the American Southwest. Just before revisiting the Grand Canyon, I reserved a few days for the fake Canyon. On a surprisingly eventful drive from one National Park to the next (convenient neighbors Zion and Bryce Canyon), I was too pressed for time to stop at Dixie National Forest. From the road, it appeared hardly a forest, but rather a garden of bright orange hoodoos. Against the green pines her pillars rose brilliant! A hoodoo appears like a totem, an arthritic finger that rises from the dry earth, sometimes solitary, sometimes in a handful, they form what is left behind after erosion.
Now, we come to the reason for that disclaimer I began with: there is nothing to do at Bryce Canyon but marvel. You can explore significant measures of this alien, mythic territory. You can easily fill any memory card and become inspired to take up photography (even on cloudy days the orange rock seems to emit its own luminescence). So perhaps it’s excusable then, that there is no good food, waterpark, IMAX theater, or civilization for many many miles. When I visited, the lodge inside the park had not opened for the season. From research, I gather that the lodge offers decent food.
Ruby’s Inn at the gates of Bryce Canyon operates like a small town- they have a restaurant, post office, liquor store, auto-body repair shop, beauty parlor, film processing shop, and even a small strip mall open after Memorial Day.
Now, here’s what I’ve been waiting to dish: the entire amphitheater of this canyon is full of the natural wonder that enthralled me so at Dixie National Forest: the “canyon” is full of the bright orange hoodoos! This hole in the earth was first claimed by early Mormons, then the Department of the Interior made a Park out of it, thus saving it from overdevelopment, reminding us of the oddness of geology. The inside of the basin is primarily sandstone, with that dense upper crust of something on top- the perfect condition for hoodoos. Two hundred days of the year, the canyon experiences a temperature shift between freezing (32 fahrenheit, 0 celsius) and above. This incredible consistency causes regular cracking in the rock. Over time, many of these fissures destabilize part of the rock tower, which falls. What remains is still tall, but thin, skinnier.
After avoiding the breakfast buffet, some serious hiking was in order. Our books struggled with day-trip route suggestions. So we headed to the visitor’s center. The trails are divided into backpacking length, day length, and wimpy short. A young ranger proved himself knowledgeable and positively rapturous as he opened the Park map and described his ideal route with a flourish: four smaller trails linked into an agreeable figure eight. By beginning at the Navajo loop, a steep downhill into the Bryce Canyon amphitheater (because it isn’t really a canyon), you can connect to the Peek-a-boo loop, which meets up with the Queen’s Landing trail for a gradual up-hill out of the amphitheater, and then an easy Rim walk will escort you back to your car, all in a pleasant seven miles or so. The figure-eight trail was perfect. I was not challenged for any of the trail, but it was nice to explore the region at a slower pace. The Peek-a-boo trail is certainly on my suggested list- it winds through rock passages and windows, to the extent that you seem familiarized with a fantasy world of bright colors and other-planetary terrain, before meeting up with Queen’s Landing for a nice ascent back to Earth.
In the beginning, I looked out at the canyon before me. The morning sun was not spectacularly bright, but the blue of the sky gave that stark contrast, and it took my breath away. What a cool planet we live on! The layers of the canyon were displayed in varying concentrations of red- from the orange hoodoos, to the ecru floor, and segments of red that circled the walls at the same height for miles.
Bryce Canyon is an incredible piece of land. I heard from others we spoke to along the trail that for some who had seen much of the world, this spot remained the most captivating.
As an lover of natural wonders around the world, guest writer Sara Haxby kicks off our week on National Parks.
