If Zion National Park is the Land of Make-Believe http://jeffsambur.blogspot.ae/2015/04/a-make-believe.html than Bryce Canyon National Park is a Land of Happy Hikers. Grins are prevalent except on the steep climbs. The visitors aren't happy then. But when they halt mid-stride and look around, they'll usually smile again. It's a place to let your imagination run wild.
Didn't that rock look like a camel's head? Wasn't that Queen Victoria over yonder? Is that a couple in the act of coupling to the left of that pine tree? The Hoodoos (the name for the eccentric rock formations) won't say.
The Paiute Indians believed the stones were the Legend People. However, they were evil in nature. The trickster Coyote turned them into crumbly columns for their digressions. The story is a Native American knockoff of Lot's Wife and the Pillar of Salt. I guess humanity has only so many yarns.
It's a park in constant transition. The rock is sedimentary and soft. Every time it rains (like today) or White Death descends from the sky, a little more is flushed away into the Paria River drainage. So you better hurry to catch this whimsical place before its a geologic memory.
BTW: the park is not a canyon, it's an amphitheater. In the 1870's a Mormon pioneer named Ebenezer Bryce helped build a road to the rim and its bounty of timber. His neighbors called it Bryce's Canyon.
Old Ebenezer is credited with describing the nearby turf this way, "it's a hell of a place to lose a cow!"
From rainy Tropic, Utah.
It's Saturday, (the Hebrew Sabbath) this Wandering, Wondering Jew is taking a day of rest here.
Hark! Is that an IPA calling me?
Beautiful! Blessings for Passover!
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