We made it, exhausted and delirious, to Ruby’s Best Western Inn at the edge of Bryce Canyon National Park. Thank heavens for the hot tub. We’d been in the car for something absurd like eleven hours, driving mostly through the Rockies and icy sleet, stopping at gas stations to wash the increasingly opaque windshield since, as I learned long after the fact, the windshield wiper fluid I’d had in the car was only good to twenty degrees Fahrenheit. It was way, way below THAT outside. The fluid was therefore decidedly solid somewhere near its source and refused to come out and clear our frozen field of vision. The next morning, however, when the sun came out, we shed our coats and hats and scarves and set off in sweatshirts and jeans, trail mix in tow, to saunter through the towering red hoodoos of Bryce Canyon for the afternoon. Breathtaking.
First you’re gazing at the postcard-perfect spires, layered white and red and white again, trim-waisted and bulging out like the curves of a blown-glass vase, stacked impossibly high like the “dribble castles” we used to make as kids on the beach, letting sloppy wet sand dribble from our fists and pile in thin, lumpy stacks. There is a dusting of snow on the red rock now, melting in the sun and holding its own in the shade, giving even more contour and contrast to those impossible ridges. We descend first into the orange glow of hoodoos
rising around us, cutting across a few switchbacks down to an almost tunnel-like trail. I take pictures like mad, trying to render somehow that incredible glow and red dust and the staggering size of the rocks around us. There are some fantastic trees, too, growing as tall as the rocks and casting long stark shadows, and some winding, twisting and turning in gold and black stripes, spiraling and coiling like a spring and winding round and melding with a neighboring tree. The air is warm and sunshiny now, and we scramble around the rocks and find various perches on the precarious rubble mountains. It’s amazing to see that what appears to be a relatively solid, if undulating, rock formation, is actually splintered in thousands of places – it’s really a thousand little puzzle pieces that somehow hold the whole together. We played at tossing a few pebbles down steep orange ravines and listening to the tiny avalanches they made, rambling and rumbling on and on and on. |
