Saturday, February 18, 2023 was our final afternoon of adventure on our return trip to Moab, and Sean and I spent it having a look at a few last views from the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park and from Dead Horse Point State Park. It had been a huge trip, even if, because of the weather, we had done significantly less hiking than we’d initially thought we would. But seeking alternatives to hiking led to our exploring further afield. Without the snowstorm, we probably would not have ended up at Natural Bridges or Bears Ears. It was yet another example of unexpected conditions in the National Parks leading to remarkable experiences.
Saturday, February 18, 2023 was our last full day in Moab, and Sean and I planned to spend it up in the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park. We had been there the previous Sunday to start the trip’s adventures, and now we we would bookend the trip with a return to see the things we had missed, including a very famous arch. And we also wanted to go on a proper hike, finally.
Sean and I arrived at the Windows Section of Arches National Park less than half an hour before sunset on Friday, February 17, 2023. We were surprised that, while not exactly busy, the area wasn’t all-but-abandoned, like the part of the Park we’d just come from. The winter sunset was muffled by high, thin clouds that softened and diffused the light as we wandered on the easy paths around the area, taking in the views.
Late in the afternoon of Friday, September 17, Sean and I headed up into Arches National Park one last time (on this second trip to Moab, at least). There were two major Arches, both near the Devils Garden section of the Park, that we still had never seen: Broken Arch and Sand Dune Arch. During our other times in the Park, both on this trip and the previous year, we’d simply prioritized hiking to other arches. After Sean had unfortunately had to spend the majority of that day working, at least he’d be able to get out and stretch his legs in some astounding scenery.
Friday, February 17, 2023 was our final weekday in Moab, and unfortunately, Sean got pulled into work, so I spent the day bumming around town and then driving out to Sego Canyon to experience some of the most astonishing Rock Art I’ve ever seen, a gallery of Archaic Barrier Canyon style Pictographs some 4,000 years old.
It was approaching 3pm on Thursday, February 16, 2023 when Sean and I drove into the snow-laden Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. Down below the canyon rims, but still above the junction of the Green and Colorado Rivers, The Needles District is known for its many miles of hiking and backpacking trails amid a wonderland of red rock formations. That afternoon, as we continued our snowy driving tour to points south of Moab, we were lucky to see the red rock country blanketed white beneath a beautiful blue sky. While snow is fairly rare in The Needles (the higher Island in the Sky District gets more), they had received over a foot of snow in the same storm that had merely dusted Moab.
Bears Ears National Monument protects 1.36 million acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. President Barack Obama established the National Monument at 1.35 million acres in December 2016, during the final weeks of his presidency, using the powers granted to presidents by the Antiquities Act of 1906. In December 2017, Donald Trump and his corrupt first Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke unlawfully reduced Bears Ears by 85% to just over 201,000 acres. In October 2021, President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland—the first Native American Secretary of the Interior—restored Bears Ears, retaining an additional 11,000 acres actually added under Trump.
Newspaper Rock: Archaic, Hisatsinom, Ancestral Puebloan, and Ute Petroglyphs
The entire Bears Ears landscape contains some 100,000 sacred sites. In a historic first, Bears Ears National Monument is co-managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in the Department of the Interior, the USDA Forest Service, and a coalition of five Native American tribes, the Navajo Nation, Hopi, Ute Mountain Ute, Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, and the Pueblo of Zuni.
Early afternoon of Thursday, February 16, 2023 found Sean and me gazing out at the heart of Bears Ears—the Bears Ears Buttes themselves—from Natural Bridges National Monument.
Natural Bridges National Monument protects just over 7,600 acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. President Theodore Roosevelt used his powers under the Antiquities Act to establish the National Monument (Utah’s first National Park site) in 1908. The Park’s raison d’être is the presence of three sandstone bridges of varying age, height, and span near the intersections of White and Armstrong canyons. This tiny National Monument is entirely surrounded by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) portion of Bears Ears National Monument.
On Thursday, February 16, 2023, Sean and I set our sights on Parks and Monuments south of Moab, including Natural Bridges and Bears Ears, along with The Needles District of Canyonlands National Park.
On Wednesday, February 15, 2023, after a morning and early afternoon of touring rock art sites and after a late lunch, Sean and I set our sites on return to Arches National Park. Although we’d been inside its boundaries at the Courthouse Wash Panel a couple hours earlier, now it was time to drive on up into the heart of the Park. And although it was just wet down in Moab, up in the slightly higher elevations of the Park were experiencing a true snow squall.
Rock art is not an artifact. It is an action still happening.
When I see petroglyphs and pictographs, basic questions come to mind. What do these figures and symbols convey to me now, what did they say to people in their time, and how do they fit with other sites and repeated motifs, stories being told across distances? The entire Colorado Plateau, around 250,000 square miles of mostly exposed rock, is an open book. The questions move on from what am I reading to where am I on the land? How did I get here, and how did they get here? What are the flute players playing? A resplendent person depicted holding a snake by one outstretched arm means what?
Overnight into Tuesday, February 14, 2023, it started to snow. It would continue to snow off and on for the next two days. So Sean and I hunkered down in Moab on Valentine’s Day and then spent the following day exploring the astonishing rock art near town.
It was late in the afternoon of Monday, February 13, 2023, and Sean’s and my day at Capitol Reef National Park was swiftly concluding, but we had time for a drive along the relatively short scenic drive and one quick hike to see more Hisatsinom petroglyphs deep in Capitol Gorge. It turned out that we got to see the cliffs of the Waterpocket Fold just when the mid-winter late afternoon light was its most gorgeous.
For roughly one thousand years, from 300 to 1300 CE, the Hisatsinom people lived across what is now Utah. They left behind distinctive pottery and a distinctive style of rork art. Archaeologists call them the Fremont, named after the river that cuts through Capitol Reef National Park.
On Monday afternoon, February 13, 2023, Sean and I got to visit an extraordinary series of Hisatsinom petroglyph panels along the Fremont River in the heart of Canyonlands National Park. This was our first visit to such sacred sites on a trip that would be full of these encounters.
Temple of the Moon (foreground) and Temple of the Sun
Capitol Reef National Park protects almost 242,000 acres of the Colorado Plateau in south central Utah. Franklin Roosevelt originally preserved the dramatic heart of the landscape as a relatively small National Monument in 1937. Lyndon Johnson greatly expanded the Monument’s boundaries in 1968. Then in 1971, Congress upgraded its status to National Park while also fixing its final boundaries to just slightly smaller than Johnson’s.
The centerpiece of the Park is a one-hundred-mile-long ripple in the earth known as the Waterpocket Fold. Since the Waterpocket Fold runs north-south, Capitol Reef National Park is long and narrow. The center of Park activity, the Visitor Center, campground, and scenic drive, are clustered where the Fremont River and Utah State Route 24 slice through the Waterpocket Fold. Otherwise, the Park is fairly remote with large portions requiring high-clearance vehicles.
On Monday, February 13, 2023, Sean and I spent the day at Capitol Reef National Park, one I’ve been excited about since we started this odyssey. We had decided to make the drive from Moab early in our trip because a snowstorm was threatening to move across Utah beginning the following day. We didn’t want to risk not being able to get to Capitol Reef at all.
On Sunday, February 12, 2023, Sean and I concluded our first afternoon in Canyonlands National Park with a visit to a giant hole in the earth. In a landscape rich with dramatic topography, Upheaval Dome in the northwest portion of the Island in the Sky, is a unique mystery. Scientists are unsure how this two-mile wide, basically round hole formed.
Established in 1964 during the Lyndon Johnson Administration, Canyonlands National Park protects over 337,000 acres of the Colorado Plateau in southeastern Utah. It is adjacent to Glen Canyon National Recreation Area to the west, Deadhorse Point State Park tothe northeast, and Bears Ears National Monument to the south/southeast. At the heart of Canyonlands National Park is the confluence of two of the West’s most famous rivers, the Colorado and the Green. These rivers are foundational to the Park’s wildly eroded landscape, filled with sheer cliffs, towering buttes and hoodoos, sinuous canyons, and expansive flats. The Park is divided into three main districts, dictated by geology. To the southeast is The Needles, defined by the rock formations and hoodoos for which it’s named. To the southwest is The Maze, remote and rugged canyon country. To the north is the Island in the Sky, a great peninsula jutting south some 2,200 feet above the confluence of the rivers.
On the afternoon of Sunday, February 12, 2023, Sean and I took in some big views from the Island in the Sky.
On Saturday, February 11, 2023, Sean and I returned to southeastern Utah’s portion of the immense Colorado Plateau. The plateau sprawls across 130,000 square miles of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Its huge uplift extends from the Colorado Rockies in the east to the Utah’s Wasatch Range in the west. It’s southwestern edge rises as Arizona’s Mogollon Rim above the Sonoran Desert. It encompasses Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, and Mesa Verde National Parks. It includes dozens of other Park units, including Dinosaur, Colorado, Hovenweep, Natural Bridges, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears National Monuments. And it encompasses the Navajo and Ute Nations, as well as hundreds of sacred sites like Chaco Canyon, Shiprock, Sleeping Ute Mountain, and Canyon de Chelly.
Junction Butte and Grand View Point, Island in the Sky, from The Needles District, Canyonlands National Park
In February 2023, Sean and I returned to Moab, Utah, almost exactly a year after we’d first visited. In 2022, we had gone to the storied outdoor adventure town for a long weekend visit to Arches National Park. We had enjoyed the hotel we’d stayed in—The Radcliffe—so much that, while we were checking out in 2022, I had gone ahead and booked us the same lovely room at The Radcliffe for ten days in 2023. That 2022 trip had focused on diminutive Arches, but the 2023 trip would incorporate its massive companion Parks, Canyonlands and Capitol Reef, completing our visits to the National Parks of Utah.
Late afternoon on Sunday, February 13 [2022], we capped our time at Arches National Park with the hike to Delicate Arch, one of the iconic views in the entire National Park system. Strategically, we decided to do the hike not only on Superbowl Sunday, but actually during the playing of the game. It was a smart move. We had gorgeous late afternoon light and there were only about a dozen folks there with us.
On Sunday, February 13 [2022], we spent the second of our two days in Arches National Park. We centered the day around two celebrated hikes: Devils Garden and Delicate Arch. Devils Garden Trail is a loop route twisting through a broken landscape at the end of the Park Road. In some portions it is a broad path. In other sections it involves scrambling over slickrock. The complete hike with all side trails to see arches and other formations is a solid 7.8 miles.
By early afternoon of Saturday, February 12 [2022], we were halfway through our first of two days exploring Arches National Park. Already we’d gotten in a solid two-hour hike and checked out some of the famous roadside formations. We knew that we would be doing the longer hike at Devils Garden the next day. And our plan for the extremely popular Delicate Arch hike was to go at the end of the day on Sunday, during the Superbowl. So for the rest of that Saturday afternoon, we decided to check out the Visitor Center and more short hikes and formations along the Park Road. But first lunch.
On the morning of Saturday, February 12 [2022], we decided to do our first real hike at Arches National Park, an out-and-back to Tower Arch. The sandy, sometimes steep hike is a very scenic 3.4-miles ending at an arch that spans an impressive ninety-two feet. Tower Arch is one of the most remote large arches in the Park, so getting over to the trailhead was fun too.
Our long weekend on the Colorado Plateau began on Friday, February 11 [2022] after a very busy week. I would have a little trouble keeping Bold Bison work at bay until the weekend properly started (in Pacific time because of some cool projects we had in the works). We’d also had a later-than-usual night the previous evening with dinner out and a program of Barber, Rachmaninoff, and Elgar at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But even with some distractions, it felt great to be going on a trip!
Arches National Park was established as a National Monument in 1929 and upgraded to National Park status on November 12 (my birthday), 1971. It protects 76,679 acres of the Colorado Plateau in eastern Utah just north of the town of Moab. It also protects the highest concentration of natural arches on the planet. Over 2,000 arches with an opening of at least three feet exist in the Park. With over one and a half million annual visitors, the Park is quite popular (sixteenth among the sixty-three National Parks). It is, therefore, often quite crowded. So we always knew we wanted to be a bit strategic about when we visited. It turns out that an unhappy circumstance ended up offering us a great opportunity.
Our 2021 roadtrip to Colorado (and Utah) was sixteen full days and fifteen nights on the road. For a National Parks trip that was somewhat born of circumstance—buying a car, strategizing a post-lockdown COVID-era trip—this trip would have a huge influence on the year to come, both for Sean’s and my Park trips and for the shape of Bold Bison’s business travel. It has also reoriented us—or me—a bit to thinking about the continent. Our first taste of the Ancestral Puebloan world at Mesa Verde would inspire Sean and me to visit four more Ancestral Puebloan sites in the year to come, culminating in a May 2022 sojourn to Chaco Canyon. I would return to Great Sand Dunes National Park by myself—solidifying my infatuation with the San Luis Valley and the Sangre de Cristos—only a little over two months after this trip. We would return to Denver twice more. And flirting with the Colorado Plateau would lead to a February 2022 trip to Arches National Park (and a planed return to Moab in 2023).
But all that is to come. First, it’s time to wrap up this adventure.
We ended our time in Dinosaur National Monument on the afternoon of Friday, September 3 (2021) and began a holiday weekend journey home to Chicago that was itself an adventure. But first we had one more hike—stroll really—out at the end of Cub Creek Road before breaking camp and heading out.
The Fremont People lived in what is now Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Nevada for roughly the 1,000 years from 300 to 1,300. Unlike their contemporaries and neighbors, the Ancestral Puebloans in the Four Corners region (and later along the Rio Grande), the Fremont did not build permanent architecture like pueblos and cliff dwellings. Their villages were more ephemeral, and much of what we know about them comes from the tools and the art they left behind. The art, in the form of striking pictographs and petroglyphs, is often sublime.
On Friday, September 3 (2021), we knew that, one way or another, we’d have to be leaving Dinosaur National Monument early. But we didn’t want to go without seeing the grand Fremont petroglyphs near the campground.
After our morning visiting the Dinosaur Quarry and early afternoon checking out the paved portion of Cub Creek Road, we spent the remainder of the afternoon of Thursday, September 2 (2021) driving into the center of Dinosaur National Monument’s canyon country, just across the state line in Colorado. Our ultimate destination was the hike out to Harpers Corner, high above the Green River near its confluence with the Yampa River.
I have long wanted to visit Dinosaur National Monument.
The Monument, straddling the Colorado-Utah border, should be a National Park. By any conceivable metric, it more than deserves such a designation. At 210,844 acres, it is larger than thirty-one of the sixty-three Parks (larger than Shenandoah, Zion, Redwood, and Arches). Far more importantly, though, it contains three fundamental reasons for existing—any of which would warrant Park status—that make it important to history, science, and conservation. First, the Monument contains a world-important deposit of Jurassic-era dinosaurs: Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus. Specimens from major museums across North America came from here. Second, the Monument protects important cultural sites, including many pictographs and petroglyphs made by the Fremont peoples one thousand years ago. And finally, there is the landscape itself. Here, the Green and Yampa Rivers cut through the eastern edge of the Uinta Mountains, creating a dramatic canyon country of more varied hues than the redrock landscapes of Arches and Canyonlands to the south.
When President Woodrow Wilson declared the establishment of Dinosaur National Monument in 1915, he only set aside the eighty acres comprising and surrounding the Dinosaur Quarry just north of Jensen, Utah. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who in 1938 expanded the Monument to its present size by protecting the Green and the Yampa in their entire courses through the Uinta Mountains. FDR’s designation was crucial nearly twenty years later as conservationists successfully fought a scheme to dam the rivers at their confluence at Echo Park. This historic win bookended the fight forty years earlier to save Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park from becoming a reservoir. In both debates, the American public was asked to grapple with the question, “What is the point of protecting a landscape as a National Park or Monument if it can be destroyed by dams or resource extraction?” While Yosemite lost, Dinosaur won. And the win at Echo Park would help to protect Grand Canyon National Park in the 1960s from a long-simmering scheme to dam the Colorado River within the National Park.
Perhaps it’s lingering resentment over Echo Park. It could be local resistance in Utah to public lands protection (even as the state campaigns for and receives millions in tourist dollars from visitors to its existing Parks). It could simply be its remoteness. Whatever the reason, Dinosaur has never been upgraded by Congress despite being for decades on short lists of NPS units most likely to become National Parks.
Congress notwithstanding, Sean and I chose to treat Dinosaur as an unofficial 64th Park, both in how we approached it in the trip and in how I am treating it here on the site.
Dune field and Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Great Sand Dunes National Park and PreserveSquare Tower House, Mesa Verde National ParkPainted Wall, Black Canyon of the Gunnison National ParkMonument Canyon, Colorado National MonumentSplit Mountain, Dinosaur National Monument
Hi. It has been a while.
As Sean and I flew home from New York on March 2, 2020, we couldn’t have known how profoundly the world was about to change. We also couldn’t have known that it would be some eighteen months before we’d visit our next National Park unit. We’d had plans to visit Parks: a visit to Great Smoky Mountains National Park with my parents was already booked for April 2020; we were looking at Santa Fe and White Sands National Park in 2020; September of that terrible year was supposed to include a marriage celebration on Cape Cod followed by Acadia National Park and the Canadian Maritimes; we had loose plans for a weekend trip to St. Louis and Gateway Arch National Park. For 2021, we’d been considering possibly the Hawaiian Parks and American Samoa, maybe a 10th anniversary return to Isle Royale National Park combined with the Lake Superior Circle Tour, and then maybe that marriage celebration would be feasible for fall 2021.
None of those trips happened. Instead we stayed home, coped, watched in horror as the pandemic raged. We adjusted and created new ways to socialize. We even made some great new friends. Between gorging on poetry and the news, I built my business. As soon as it was our turn, we got vaccinated. We’re still skittish about flying, which was of course a fundamental component to nearly all of our Park trips. In June 2021 we bought a car, my first in seventeen years, because without it our horizons had contracted to the quiet, leafy streets of our Chicago neighborhood.
In early spring 2021, when it became clear that New England and the Canadian Maritimes were unlikely for the fall, we looked to alternative trip ideas. It may have felt optimistic, but we figured it would be good to get a trip booked even if we later had to cancel. Anticipating a road trip (even though we were yet to actually buy the car), we turned our gaze to Colorado.
“Wait, did you quit your job to go to the Grand Canyon?”
I was on a tour bus somewhere in rural North Carolina. Next to me was Steve, the inspiring executive director of a conservation organization in northwestern Illinois. We were in North Carolina for the annual Land Conservation Conference. We’d been on a rainy field trip most of the day and now were on our way back to Raleigh. I had been telling Steve about our upcoming Grand Canyon trip, less than a week after the conference. In thinking through the timeline, Steve realized that I would not be in Chicago for my former employer’s very important event, which he was going to attend. It was the sort of function that a staff member would not dream of missing.
“I won’t necessarily say that I quit my job to go to the Grand Canyon, Steve,” I replied with a grin. “But if you want to spread that rumor, I won’t stop you.”
After lunch on September 15, we weren’t quite finished yet with Zion National Park. That night, we’d be camping on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, but before heading south to our final stop on the Grand Staircase, we had one more Zion adventure complete: East Mesa Trail. The out-and-back trail is a three-mile one-way route to Observation Point across relatively flat country from the eastern Park boundary to the rim. Unlike Yosemite National Park, where the road to Glacier Point offers views from the rim to thousands of people a day, all of the rim views at Zion must be earned by hiking.
We woke in pre-dawn light on Thursday, September 15. Wind whipped our tent. And the decision that we had been increasingly fretting about was made for us by the wind.After the splendid performance the previous evening, we’d returned to our campsite and rekindled our campfire. We’d tried to turn in relatively early since we’d wanted to be up early to make an attempt at Angels Landing before it became crowded (we were aiming to be on the first shuttle into the restricted portion of Zion Canyon). Since we’d both had a faint signal on our phones, we’d read up a bit more on the hike. In particular, Sean had gotten his first real taste of news items about Angels Landing. The news stories of deaths on the route in the previous decade and a half hadn’t comforted either of our nerves. Nor had they helped me sleep.
After dinner in our campsite on September 14, Sean and I wandered over to the Watchman Campground amphitheater for the evening’s ranger program. On the schedule was “Concert in the Park: Plants, Animals, and live music.”
We got to the amphitheater a couple minutes late, and as we were walking up, we heard an earnest young man singing with guitar accompaniment. He was singing Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” with altered lyrics to make the song applicable to Zion National Park. We froze, wondering if this would be a somewhat embarrassing evening. Sean has intense emotional reactions to people doing somewhat embarrassing things onstage…poor standup say. But we decided to give it a go.
It turned out that Ranger Taylor, the performer, was disarmingly earnest and completely charming. More often than not, his adaptations were clever and illuminating (the best were “Rollin’ to the River” about erosion in Zion Canyon and “Free Falling” about Peregrine Falcons, the fastest birds on earth). He conjured up an image of a creative, wholesome young National Park Service ranger spending his first summer in Zion taking everything in and reacting to the experience by writing songs on his trusty guitar.
As the program came to a close, he said, “We’re technically done for the evening, but for those who want to stay just a little longer, let’s sing ‘This Land Is Your Land’ together. That’s what it’s all about isn’t it?”
After lunch on September 14, we hopped back on the Zion National Park shuttle to explore points in Zion Canyon north of Zion Lodge, namely Weeping Rock and the Temple of Sinawava. It was already 3pm by the time we boarded. Our only full day in Zion was moving swiftly.
After breakfast on Wednesday, September 14, we shouldered our packs and walked through Watchman Campground toward the visitor center and the shuttle bus stop where we would board our transportation into Zion Canyon.
We departed Cedar Breaks National Monument around 3:30pm on Tuesday, September 13 for the hour and a half drive back to Zion National Park. As we traveled south on I-15, an immense thunderstorm system blew east to west across the interstate. Thunder, lightening, winds strong enough to knock over a semi, and torrents of rain caused us to slow to a near standstill. There was even some flash flooding. It was a genuinely frightening driving experience. But finally we passed out of the storm and continued on our way under relatively dry conditions.
On Tuesday, September 13, we left Zion National Park for a day trip back up the Grand Staircase to the Pink Cliffs at Cedar Breaks National Monument on the western edge of the Markagunt Plateau. The Pink Cliffs here are the same geological layers as at Bryce Canyon National Park, but at Cedar Breaks, uplift has caused the rim of the amphitheater above the cliffs to soar 2,400 feet higher to an average elevation of 10,400 feet. That was also some 6,400 feet higher than the elevation of the floor of Zion Canyon where we’d slept the previous night.
Cedar Breaks National Monument was established on August 22, 1933 by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It protects just over 6,100 acres of the subalpine edge of the Markagunt Plateau and the spectacular Cedar Breaks amphitheater plunging 2,000 feet below the plateau rim and spanning three miles across. Despite its close proximity to some of the most famous National Parks in the country, Cedar Breaks National Monument is lightly visited, averaging fewer than 500,000 visitors per year.
It was already 4pm on Monday, September 12 by the time we drove out of Bryce Canyon National Park and into the gateway town of Bryce, Utah, where we got hotdogs and kombucha at the massive tchotchke-laden store at Ruby’s Inn. Sitting in the Jeep afterward, we made the appropriate decision that it was too late to go to Cedar Breaks National Monument and that we should continue on to Zion National Park and set up camp. We decided that we could drive out to Cedar Breaks from Zion in the morning.
We drove off the Paunsaugunt Plateau and south on Highway 9 toward Zion’s east entrance. The drive through rolling scrubland took about an hour and a quarter, and we arrived at the east entrance a little after 5:30pm. From the 8,000-feet elevation of the rim of Bryce Canyon, we’d dropped to 5,700 feet at the eastern entrance of Zion. And we would drop another 1,700 feet by the time we reached the canyon floor.
It was already after one in the afternoon on Monday, September 12 by the time we returned from Bryce Canyon National Park’s southern viewpoints to the Bryce Amphitheater area. Our plan had been to wrap up our time at Bryce Canyon in the morning before continuing down the Grand Staircase to Zion National Park with a stop at Cedar Breaks National Monument.
But we just weren’t yet ready to tear ourselves away from Bryce Canyon. At least not without one last hike beneath the rim and into the Queen’s Garden Complex of hoodoos. It was a short trail, only 0.8 miles with a vertical drop of about 320 feet.
On Monday, September 12 we woke to a beautiful, sun-drenched morning in Sunset Campground at Bryce Canyon National Park. After logging more than fourteen miles of hiking the day before, the sun was well up by the time we emerged from our little tent. Today we planned to say goodbye to Bryce Canyon National Park and hello to Zion National Park, with a stop at Cedar Breaks National Monument in between. But before we bid a fond farewell to Bryce Canyon, we still had some beautiful things to see.
After resting in camp following our long day of hiking on Sunday, September 11, Sean and I decided to have one more look at huge beauty before darkness settled across the Paunsaugunt Plateau. So we pulled our boots back on and once again crossed from Sunset Campground to the mixed-use trail on the other side of the park road. This time we turned right and headed south and uphill toward Inspiration Point.
At just about 11am on Sunday, September 11, tantalized by our sunrise hike down and up Navajo Trail and sated with our breakfast, we set out on our day’s hike. One of the joys of camping in a National Park is the accessibility of the trails and vistas. “Let’s go see something beautiful” is what I traditionally say to Sean, particularly when we set out on foot from our campsite.
Ahead of us was a hike along the Rim Trail, then the Fairyland Loop, one of the famous hikes of the National Parks. Although the loop proper was only eight miles, the total mileage we’d end up logging was ten and a half.
Mule Deer
As we shouldered our packs and headed out, a Mule Deer doe and two fawns ambled through the campground having their late morning meal.
Bryce Canyon, named for Mormon Scotsman Ebenezer Bryce, an early homesteader near the Paria River beneath the pink cliffs of Bryce Amphitheater, was declared a National Monument in 1923 by President Warren Harding. Five years later, after the requisite private properties were purchased and state properties were transferred, Bryce Canyon was upgraded to National Park status. The Park protects the southeastern rim of the Paunsaugunt Plateau and the spectacular towers of pink rock, called hoodoos, that descend from the plateau’s rim into the basin below. For all its fame, the Park is diminutive, only thirty-five thousand acres, and it is surrounded by portions of Dixie National Forest, Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, and private land.
We woke before dawn on Sunday, September 11, in the hopes that we would be able to see the sunrise from the rim of Bryce Canyon. Looking up, we saw some clouds, but we decided to walk the short distance to the rim anyway to see what we could see.
Aquarius Plateau and Sinking Ship (foreground) from Bryce Canyon National Park
On Friday, September 9, 2016 Sean and I began our trip down the Grand Staircase with an evening flight to Phoenix. More often than not, this was our modus operandi, to fly out after work, stay overnight near the airport, and begin the trip proper on the ground in the morning wherever we were. That Friday, I was more than ready to be gone. It had been a very long week at work, culminating in issues with a new vendor. (I’d ultimately be proven right in my assessment of their shoddy service.) But either way, it would be good to do some hiking in a place I’d wanted to visit since childhood.
In 2016, the Centennial Year of the National Park Service (although National Parks had existed for decades prior), Sean and I embarked on a mini-journey to calibrate our Park trips so that by the end of the year, we’d both have visited the same National Parks. That meant that we had to travel to Yosemite, Shenandoah, Dry Tortugas, and Grand Canyon. Along the way, we picked up other Parks near those four so that by the end of the year, we’d visited eight National Parks and thirteen National Park units.
After Yosemite and Channel Islands in May and Shenandoah in June (and Muir Woods, Golden Gate, and Point Reyes in August), we planned to visit the Grand Canyon in September. We knew that we’d want to pick up at least one more Park on a visit to the Grand Canyon. Very early in our planning, we considered a relatively short trip to the South Rim and Petrified Forest National Park, which is near the top of Sean’s list of Parks to visit. But we decided that an extended long weekend was giving both those Parks short shrift.
In August 2016, Sean’s firm sent him to Los Angeles and San Francisco for a week. On Sunday afternoon, August 7, we were treated to spectacular aerial views of southern Utah and northern Arizona. In particular, we were able to see Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, and Grand Canyon National Park, all from the comfortable cruising altitude of American Airlines Flight 2220 from Chicago O’Hare to LAX.
