I’ve lived in Colorado since 1989. I’ve been to Canyonlands National Park, I’ve floated the Green River through Stillwater and Labyrinth Canyons more than once. I’ve been to Moab a number of times and would have been surprised if Utah canyon country had anything more to show me. My ignorance was corrected this week through our visits to two crazy awesome national parks, Bryce Canyon National Park and Zion National Park.
The approach to Bryce Canyon National Park doesn’t really give you a sense that anything special is close by. First impressions are made to be proven false in this case. A quick visit to the visitors center was followed by a 9 mile trip to the turnaround, exclaiming “Wow! Look at that! Over there, did you see that?!” Bryce Canyon NP has the most dense collection of hoodoos of anywhere on earth. I could describe what a hoodoo is, but pictures are worth a thousand words. Each weathered, standing rock formation is unique and examples of this geology can be found in many other places on the planet. Put a bunch of them together, however, as they are here in Bryce and they form amphitheaters of subtlety. Each hoodoo is the same, but different. Late spring snow accents and the shifting light of late afternoon can leave you almost speechless. Worth a day of exploration or longer if you’re interested in hiking or camping among the hoodoos.
We spent two days exploring Zion National Park, and honestly Zion National Park is in a class by itself. The sheer magnitude of the scenery is hard to believe. Walls of sandstone tower above you in every shade of tan you can imagine. Towers of rock look like big blobs of cake frosting that has been swirled this way and that then left to dry in the sun. A cliff rises out of the stream bed far below with crisscross hatching reminiscent of a checkerboard, each “square” approximately 20’ X 20’. In the less visited Western portion of the park you can go from Interstate 15 to the backcountry in less time than it takes to wash a load of clothes, (not including drying time!). You can see the north rim of the Grand Canyon from a vantage point far above the pine covered valley floor while deep red sandstone mesas watch over it all as they have for centuries. Describing the vastness of the sites in Zion National Park is almost impossible, you have to see it to believe it.
Wind, flowing water, freezing temperatures, thawing ice, searing temperatures and snowfall have worked magic on these parks. More has been written about the geology at work here than I could ever read. I am ever grateful for the preservation of these two outstanding jewels in the National Parks of the USA. On the surface, the five National Parks in Utah all seem kind of the same, but I’m here to tell you that each one is unique and magnificent and worth even a brief visit.
The red rock canyon country of Utah may work some voodoo on you like it has us. Would we visit these parks again? Absolutely! Would we live there? Well…….only park service employees (and rare grandfathered homes/ranches) actually live in the parks but that would be some pretty miraculous voodoo if we ever had that privilege.
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