Bryce Canyon

March 2022 | Park 23

Part + Park 2 (of 3) on our spring break road trip.

Bryce Canyon National Park in the early spring was a place of stillness. Snowflakes drifting down from the sky while standing at Sunrise Point followed by sunshine so warm and intense at the bottom that we shed our layers down to our tee-shirts.

Bryce Canyon earned its name from Ebenezer Bryce, a Scottish immigrant Mormon who originally moved to the region at the behest of the Mormon Church and raised cattle in the area. Although we found it tiresome that the national park was officially associated with him (we couldn’t come up with a name honoring the landscape? or gained permission to use one of the names applied to this place since time immemorial from any of the many Indigenous peoples who live(d) and hold ceremony in this area?) we did find Bryce’s famous quote about the canyon to be hilarious: “Hell of a place to lose a cow.”

The park contains the world’s largest concentration of hoodoos, the tall thin rock spires that it is best known for. Overall, our takeaway from our day spent here — in the visitor center, on the rim, down beneath the shadow of the hoodoos — was that the land here feels heavy with meaning. It is, as we learned, a place with great cultural and spiritual significance to many Indigenous Peoples including the Southern Paiute, Hopi, Zuni, Ute, and Navajo. This guided us to walk softer and view our time spent here with reverence, gratitude, and care.

Pictured below:

• Sunset to Sunrise Point.

• Rim Trail and Peek-a-boo Loop Trail.

• North Campground.