🧡 Bryce Canyon: What You Will Find

First a correction: Bryce Canyon is not a canyon. A canyon is carved by a river running through it. There is no river here and never was.

What it actually is is a row of enormous amphitheatres eaten into the edge of a plateau. The water here does not run along but from the top down — and the whole edge of the plateau retreats with it, roughly half a metre a century.

Hoodoos

Those stone towers are called hoodoos. Bryce has more of them than any other place on Earth.

They are made by freezing. At an altitude of around 2,500 metres the water here thaws and freezes over two hundred times a year — and in doing so it expands by nine per cent. It seeps into a crack, freezes, and prises the crack open. This repeats more than two hundred times a year.

First vertical walls crumble out of the plateau edge, then windows appear in the walls, the windows widen, and columns are left. And because the rock is layered and some layers are harder, heads, noses and hats form on the columns. Hence the figures.

The best known is called Thor's Hammer: a narrow column with an angular block on top that obviously cannot stay there, and stays there anyway.

The colour comes from iron. The orange and red are iron oxides; the white and pink bands are layers of a different composition. At sunrise, when the rays come in from the side and bounce between the columns, they are so intense for an hour that photographs of it look edited.

Where to Walk

From the rim you can only look — and Sunrise Point, Sunset Point and Bryce Point are worth it even so. But the main thing is to go down among them.

The best combination is Queen's Garden down and the Navajo Loop back up, just under five kilometres together. Part of the Navajo Loop is a passage called Wall Street: a slot between two hundred-metre walls in which two Douglas firs grow, because they stretched for the light.

Mind the altitude. The rim of the plateau is at 2,400 to 2,700 metres, and the way back up is all uphill in thin air. Going down is fun; coming up is work.

And about the weather: there is snow here in winter and that is the very best time. Orange columns with white caps are the strongest thing in photographs from the whole of Utah, and in January there is almost nobody there.

A Dark Sky

Bryce is one of the darkest places in the United States. There is no large city for hundreds of kilometres and the plateau is high, so there is less air above it.

On a moonless night around seven and a half thousand stars are visible from here with the naked eye. In a central European city you will see two hundred if you are lucky. The rangers run night programmes with telescopes and a whole astronomy festival in summer.

Trees That Were Here Before Everything Else

Bristlecone pines grow along the rim. It is one of the longest-living organisms in the world: the ones here are around one thousand six hundred years old, and the oldest known specimens in California over four thousand.

You will recognise them easily — they look half dead, because they largely are. The tree gradually cuts off supply to branches that do not pay their way and keeps only a strip of bark alive. That is exactly why it survives where nothing else grows.

Where the Name Comes From

In 1875 the Mormon church sent a carpenter named Ebenezer Bryce here to farm. He built a house below the amphitheatre and people from round about started calling the ravine Bryce's canyon.

Bryce left behind one sentence that is still quoted in the park. Asked what he thought of the place, he is supposed to have answered that it was a hell of a place to lose a cow.

Much older is the explanation of the Paiute who lived here before him: the hoodoos are the Legend People, whom Coyote turned to stone for what they had done. The colours on the rocks are, in that account, the remains of their war paint.

Practicalities

The park is small — the main road is twenty-nine kilometres and is a dead end, so you drive there and back. In summer a free shuttle runs and it is worth using, because there is no parking at the viewpoints.

Around two and a half million people come each year, which is a lot for such a small area. Most of them are standing at Sunset Point between ten and two. Anyone who walks down, or arrives at six in the morning, has it almost to themselves.