I woke up that morning in Arches National Park. It was beautiful in the early morning light, casting slow moving shadows about the monolithic, oddly shaped rock formations and arches all about me.
I worked my way through Arches, and headed south on 191 past Moab and the Canyonlands, onto Blanding. I continued west on 95 through Fry Canyon toward Hite where I crossed the Colorado River as it entered Lake Powell. Then up to Hanksville, west around Capitol Reef National Park, then south through Grover, Boulder, and Escalante–home of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
What a drive! By now I almost visually exhausted. I had decided I wanted to be at Bryce Canyon National Park for the late afternoon or evening summer sun. I wasn’t prepared for Bryce Canyon. My first glimpse suggested this was a place that was different yet from Arches, Capitol Reef, Escalante, and other places I had just seen. And it was different…very different.
As I approached the entrance to the national park, I was overwhelmed with volumes of people! I took a brief look at the canyon, then headed west to find a place to sleep in a national forest in somewhere in central Nevada. I planned my return to Bryce Canyon upon my return home.
Bryce Canyon Historical Research Study
Ebenezer Bryce, a Mormon pioneer who lived in the late 1870s near the magical hoodoos, built an irrigation ditch, and the first road access into the “canyon.” It was reported that he remarked that the canyon “was a hell of a place to loose a cow!”