Zion and Bryce Canyons

We had planned to visit the Utah canyons in April, but we decided to shorten the trip a bit and arrived March 21.  We should have waited, because they still have winter here.  This is in Bryce Canyon National Park.

Zion National Park was named by Mormon pioneers who saw its beauty and its fertile valley as a new promised land.

They said it was like a cathedral; one could worship God here as well as in any church building.  Many formations have Biblical names.  These three are Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Dripping Rock where water seeps out of the rock and drips down like rain.

The red mud behind the falls was not easy to clean off our shoes.

The road on the east side of the park has switchbacks up the mountain leading to a 1.1 mile tunnel blasted through the rock in the late 1920’s, a marvel of engineering. 

 On the east side, the mountains are solid rock, but somehow bushes and trees manage to grow. 

The Checkerboard has the usual horizontal layers of rock, but also more rare vertical lines eroded into the mountainside to create a checkerboard pattern.

Bryce Canyon National Park was named for a rancher, Ebeneezer Bryce, who farmed below the rock formations in the 1870’s and said, “It is a hell of a place to lose a cow.”  

The Paiute legend is more poetic in explaining the hoodoos (the strange pillars of rock). “Before there were any Indians, the Legend People lived in that place. There were many of them. They were of many kinds—birds, animals, lizards, and such things—but they looked like people. They were not people; they had power to make themselves look that way. For some reason the Legend People in that place were bad. Because they were bad, Coyote turned them all into rocks. You can see them in that place now, all turned into rocks; some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding onto others. You can see their faces, with paint on them just as they were before they became rocks.  This is the story the people tell.”

Elevation is 8,000 to 9,000 feet; our hikes made me breathless, especially the steep one to Inspiration Point that was snow-covered.

People have told us that Bryce is the most beautiful canyon they have ever seen.  I would have to agree.  However, technically, it is not a canyon (which means rivers have cut away rock along its route over time).  Bryce is really half bowls or amphitheaters in the side of the Colorado Plateau that have been eroded by rain and alternate freezing and thawing, which happens about 200 days a year.  The fins and hoodoos are rock formations that have stood against the erosion, filling the bowls on the side of the cliffs.