And On to Bryce Canyon

Today we traveled north and east to Bryce Canyon National Park, and as we drew closer to the entrance to the park a series of signs along Highway 12 urged us to pull over for: Rodeo, Moccasins, Bakery & Fried Chicken, Indian Trading Post, Rock Shop, Horse Riding, Scenic Flights, Laundromat, Car Wash, ATV Tours, Wigwam Camping, General Store with Digital Media, or the chance to Hand Feed Exotic Deer. We found some of these things curious and amusing, but, as we were already well fortified with lemonade, jerky, and granola bars, we were eager to enter the park and explore.

Past the gate we came to a large parking lot that was unexpectedly crowded and busy.One large long-distance transit coach gleamed silver in the sunlight: Dream Tours, it said. Privately owned RVs were parked side by side like relatives from an expansive family who all bore a strong resemblance to each other: big boned, wide hipped cousins with loud voices and a thirst for gas. One of them, whose owner leaned against it, emanated the unmistakable smell of a stogie. There were cars with plates from several states, one as far away as Florida, and people were busily loading and unloading coolers, backpacks, and various kinds of apparel. The parking lot was hopping.

We walked with dozens of other folks in groups or couples to an overlook and interpretive center. There were bearded guys with hiking sticks and sturdy boots, amply-fleshed women in pedal-pushers, matched bookend pairs of senior citizens with white hair and sneakers. Friends posed for each other with signs or scenery in the background, and some closely studied the captions at the interpretive center, reading them out loud, pointing things out to others. We heard French and German, and Boston accents. Who were all these people? They seemed to be everywhere. Wasn’t summer over?

“It’s a hell of a place to lose a cow,” Ebenezer Bryce supposedly said of the place, at least according to the blurb on a sign adjacent to a plastic coated picture of him alongside his wife Mary. They were homesteaders, and they looked stern. Ebenezer had already supervised the building in 1868 of the Latter Day Saints church in Pine Valley, said to be the oldest Mormon building in the world. From 1875 to 1880, the couple settled at the mouth of a certain canyon with colorful towers of limestone, digging ditches for irrigation and building roads to carry timber for firewood, fences and a house. Other settlers began using the road and, in the oblivious manner of newcomers indifferent to what might have been happening in the eons before their arrival, took to calling the canyon “Bryce”.

Life couldn’t have been easy. The country is beautiful in an eerie way, but harsh and windy, and depending on the season, uncomfortably hot or miserably cold. We gaze out onto a vast panorama of red rock pinnacles called hoodoos, whipped into shape by weathering and erosion, and twisted pine, and mountains in the hazy distance. The palette is exquisite, with limestone as its base, oxidized into orange and a brick-ish red, with an occasional blue hint of magnesium.

But we’re discouraged by the sheer population and wonder how far we’ll have to walkto get away.

Answer: not far at all. We set out on a clearly marked trail that will take us throughan area called “Fairyland” and before you know it, there are just the three of us again, descending into a sun-bleached world so quiet we can hear only the hum of wind and the sound of our footsteps, and by the woodsier wash below “Tower Bridge” a burst of birdsong. Some of the hoodoo formations line up side-by-side like sentries, others resemble the ruins of an ancient temple, and it occurs to me how readily we turn to metaphor to label the world’s mysteries and marvels.

We watch how the light paints warm hues onto the surfaces of stone, how a window in a peach-colored wall presents the sky and a small white cloud, how a tree struck by lightning has been sculpted into swirls like a barber-shop pole, but is charcoal at the edges, and reaches up like a stick of cinder against the blue. We feel that we are in another world, an ancient one.

We get silly, too, taking pictures from all angles, calling each other Ansel, blaming our cheesy cameras for our inability to capture the full wonder of what we are beholding, but knowing it is impossible. I am wearing my l’avventura hat, the black cap I bought in Italy and wore to hike in the mountains above the Amalfi coast. I pause on a hill and lean against a tree and Steve is taking a picture of me saying things like, “Tilt your head back a little. Touch your hat. Chew on your sunglasses.” We’re not very old.

We walk further, and we grow silent, and with every rise and turn there is some new marvel to behold. The air is light and I feel light. I think about good things: the sound of a raven’s wings as one passes overhead, the way sunlight illuminates green leaves, the fact that people do come here, drawn as to a church, but that it doesn’t take much to leave them all behind.

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