Day 50: Bryce Canyon National Park

People from home and on the trip had told us about the spectacular beauty and the unusual rock formations at Bryce. Before we entered the park, we started seeing the iconic shapes that define Bryce, named “hoodoos” by the early Mormons who were the first whites to irrigate and farm the surrounding lands. Erosion has brought these hoodoos down to size (“hoodoo graveyards”) and they were, shall we say, interesting even kind of welcoming.

Secluded Campsite

We arrived late and camped outside the park that first night at Ruby’s Inn, a 2,300 acre resort started in 1916 by Reuben (Ruby) Syrett, a Mormon, whose decendents today offer reasonably priced shelter (of all kinds), food, gas, breakfast, dinner cowboy shows, rodeos, rv dump, water etc. Ruby’s Inn actually is in a town of 5,000 called Bryce Canyon City, UT, created in 2007 in a controversial move by the State Legislature taking the resort’s hefty ratables away from the county and giving them to the new town. Joanne, a former Mayor in our town of Ringwood, NJ, likes this kind of politics.

The next morning we moved our base inside the park to a lovely secluded campsite at the Park’s Sunset Campground. We spent our first day visiting the fabulously beautiful scenic viewing points, one more stunning than the other. Informative signs tell about the geologic history. They also offer interpretive drams with the various rock formations given fairy tale, Western European, or Native American Indian mythology names. For centuries, these shapes have captured human attention and it would be hard to say who exactly owns them or the ideas they inspire.

For those interested in geology, we learned that Bryce is not really a “canyon.” There is no great body of water that created the divide. It is the product of the Colorado and Pacific Continental Plates crashing into each other. Rather than attempting to give an inept geological interpretation, let these pictures speak for themselves about what air, water, and dramatic shifts in temperature have produced. The change is ongoing and it is estimated that Bryce Canyon will be obliterated in 3 million years. So, there is still time for a visit.