Bryce Canyon National Park – Utah

The History of Bryce Canyon National Park

Bryce Canyon is not really a canyon at all, and that is the first thing that surprises people. It is a series of natural amphitheaters carved into the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau in southern Utah, and they are filled with hoodoos, the tall thin spires of rock that Bryce is known for, standing up out of the ground in their thousands. The rock runs orange and pink and white, and at sunrise the whole thing lights up in a way that barely looks real.

How the Hoodoos Formed

The hoodoos are the work of water and ice more than wind, which is not what most people expect. Bryce sits high, between eight and nine thousand feet, and it goes through more than two hundred freeze and thaw cycles a year. Water seeps into cracks in the rock, freezes overnight, expands, and slowly pries the stone apart. Over a very long time that process carves the edge of the plateau into fins, then windows, then the freestanding spires you see today. The rock is still eroding, which means the Bryce of a few hundred years from now will look different than the one you are standing in front of.

The Paiute and the Legend of the Hoodoos

The Southern Paiute lived in this region long before it was a park, and they had their own account of the hoodoos. In their telling the spires were the Legend People, turned to stone as punishment for their misdeeds, frozen in place in the rock of the amphitheater. It is hard to stand at the rim looking out over thousands of these strange shapes and not feel like the story fits better than any geology lesson.

Ebenezer Bryce and the Name

The park takes its name from Ebenezer Bryce, a Scottish-born Mormon settler who moved to the area in the 1870s and ran cattle below the amphitheaters. Local people started calling the place Bryce’s Canyon, and the name stuck. Bryce himself is supposed to have summed the place up, in the most practical terms imaginable, as a hell of a place to lose a cow. The area was set aside as a national monument in 1923, and it became a national park in 1928.

Know Before You Go

• Region: Southwest United States
• Location: Garfield County, southern Utah
• Address: Highway 63, Bryce Canyon City, UT 84764 (Visitor Center)
• Coordinates: 37.5930, -112.1871
• Costs: NPS Fee $20 – $35; America the Beautiful pass accepted
• Schedule: Park open year-round, 24 hours a day. Visitor center hours vary by season. A free shuttle runs in the busy months. Check the NPS site before you go.
• Attraction Type: National Park
• Activities: Hiking, scenic driving, sunrise and sunset viewing, photography, stargazing, snowshoeing in winter, the Rim Trail, the Navajo Loop, Queens Garden
• Notes:
  • Bryce sits high, between eight and nine thousand feet. The air is thin and it runs noticeably cooler than the lower parks like Zion. Bring layers even in summer.
  • Sunrise and sunset are when the hoodoos light up. If you can only catch one, make it one of those.
  • The elevation means snow is possible well into spring and starts again in fall. Check conditions before a winter visit.
  • Bryce has some of the darkest night skies in the country and draws stargazers from all over. Stick around after dark if the weather is clear.
• Additional Resources: NPS Official Site

My Visit

I reached Bryce in 2006 on the second day of a road trip home from Arizona, the same rainy day my brother and I had spent the morning at Zion. The drive between the two parks climbs a couple thousand feet, and you feel the country change as you go, the air getting cooler, the trees coming back, the red rock taking on a different character entirely. By the time we got to Bryce the rain had mostly let up, though the clouds hung around.

You come to the rim and the whole thing just drops away in front of you, spire after spire as far as you can see. I had never seen anything like it, and twenty years later I still have not seen anywhere else that looks quite like Bryce. We walked the rim, looked down into the amphitheaters, and tried to make sense of how water and ice and time could carve something so strange. We camped in the Bryce area that night, the cold high country air settling in after a long day of driving and weather. Like Zion, we barely scratched the surface, and like Zion, I left already knowing I would have to come back.

Photos From My Trip

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