Honeymoon Day 24: Bryce Canyon National Park

It's only 90 miles from Zion National Park to Bryce Canyon, and my yin and I left soon after sunrise to insure a campsite. Along the way we stopped at a Subway restaurant that, for reasons unknown, is not only open before 8am but also advertises free WiFi on a roadside billboard. So we stopped to use their internet and picked up two veggie subs for later in the day.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that we reached:

someone else's memory

in plenty of time to secure a campsite, stop by the visitor center, and journey to the park's principle attraction well before noon:

Bryce Amphitheater

For more than two-thirds of the year, Bryce experiences nights below freezing and days well above it. As a result, the floor of the canyon is covered with thousands upon thousands of hoodoos, which are tall cylindrical formations created by erosion resulting from this freeze/thaw cycle. These massive limestone pillars are unlike anything I've ever seen:

although my yin appears smaller than these hoodoos,
her mojo is actually much larger than theirs...

Even during our stay, which occurred in the most moderate part of the year, the temperature difference ranged from 80º+ during the day down to sub-40º that night. This was also the highest elevation at which we camped during our travels:

The wild thing about Bryce is the range of colors and shapes and shadows. We took a hike down from Bryce Point into the Amphitheater to get a better view of things, and I was shocked to see the colors sedimented in the limestone:

"Nature comes in this color?" I asked my yin.

As well as brightly-colored pine trees in bloom:

"What type of tree is this?"

Walking amongst the hoodoos is like walking in an unfathomably large sculpture garden, with the background, foreground, and lighting constantly shifting not only in composition, but also in intensity and proportion:

different colors and elevations

trees framed by hoodoo windows

windows on top of windows

windows inside of windows

There were also an inordinate amount of French-speaking people along our hike, which served to remind me of how little retention I have of the language. Nonetheless, I did obtain permission from this artistically situated couple to capture their image:

they may or may not have understood the question.

As we came towards the end of our hike, we came across this ominous sign before entering a part of the Navajo Loop Trail known as "Wall Street":

We continued on...

This section of the trail was truly impressive and led straight into a narrow canyon whose source of water had long since disappeared, although I imagine it would be a bad place to be caught in a rain storm:

my yin approaching Wall Street

Coming out of Wall Street, we saw "Thor's Hammer":

And my yin overheard a park ranger saying that they no longer name rock formations because the natural processes of erosion render the names nonsensical over time. In my mind I heard the voice of a former professor, "The breakdown of signifiers..."

From our exit point I was able to clearly see the Aquarius Plateau in the distance, and the haze in the canyon (caused by the heat) gave it an eerily painterly quality. From the camera's perspective it looked almost as if someone had combined an oil paining in the foreground with a watercolor background:

Bryce Canyon and the Aquarius Plateau

Wanting to give our feet a chance to heal, my yin and I spent the remainder of the day checking out various vistas along the twenty-mile road that runs through the canyon:

my yin at Rainbow Point

Unfortunately, we didn't see any of the endangered prairie dogs we read about at the visitor center. Of course, on the upside, we also didn't run over any of them:

We returned to our campsite before sundown:

And I, in an act of manliness, built a fire:

Whose chest-thumping, beard-growing benefits were immediately undone by the roasting of marshmallows:

We played gin rummy in our tent that night, but as was the case the previous night my yin soundly walloped me. We fell asleep before it got too cold and woke the next morning to an unbelievable sunrise over the Bryce Amphitheater: