Confounding Expectations

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

On the rim at Bryce Canyon National Park, in southwestern Utah, violet-green swallows and white throated swifts flash by at eye level. The paths and trails of the 35,835-acre park weave through red rock canyons and around pink and orange hoodoos – whimsically shaped towers and spines of weathered stone, all carved from the edge of a plateau that sits at around 8,000 feet above sea level. What looks like the ground floor here is really the living room of these high-flying birds.


There are places that confound expectations, and the park is full of them: spots where birds soar below our feet, where green oases rise in the middle of a scorched desert, where a person can find solitude in the middle of a crowded national park. Bryce Canyon is the name of both a single canyon – the largest in the park – and the entire complex of about a dozen horseshoe-shaped canyons (known as amphitheaters) along the edge of the Pansaugunt Plateau. From the highest point on the rim to the lowest elevation in the park, the escarpment tumbles more than 3,000 feet.


I began my mid-July visit with an early morning traverse of the Fairyland Loop, an 8.7-mile trail that starts at the rim of the mesa and rapidly switchbacks its way to the floor of Fairyland Canyon, some 900 feet below. In the early morning light, some of the rocks looked as if they were lit from within. As bizarre as the terrain appeared from the overlooks above, there was something truly surreal about being down in the middle of the picture. For most of the way, I shared the path only with dragonflies, Pinyon Jays, and a young deer that I startled when I came around a corner. At the halfway point I passed a pair of women from Poland who were heading the other way and then didn’t see another soul until I was nearly back up to the rim on the far side of the trail.


I had arrived in the area just before sunset the previous evening and pitched my tent in the Red Canyon campground in the Dixie National Forest. Red Canyon is a small area of hoodoos and ridges about 15 miles outside the entrance to Bryce Canyon. The Red Canyon campground is $9 a night, with flush toilets and shower facilities on site. If you want to camp in the National Park itself, sites are $10 a night, with showers available just outside the park entrance. There are a number of hotels and motels in the area, including the Bryce Canyon Lodge within the park, which has motel-style rooms and cabins for about $120. (Bryce is about 260 miles from Salt Lake City and 270 miles from Las Vegas.)


Although Bryce is one of the few relatively cool places in Utah’s red rock desert, thanks to its high altitude it still gets quite hot – above 90 degrees – on a midsummer afternoon. I planned to spend my mornings doing long hikes before the sun got too hot, and then spend the afternoons doing quick hikes and admiring the views along the 18-mile scenic road along the rim.


For years I had wanted to see a bristlecone pine tree, which are among the oldest living things on Earth, but the ancient trees are usually hard to reach. They grow in cool, high-altitude islands in the middle of the searing western deserts. If it isn’t too hot to hike at the foot of the climb, it’s usually already started to snow up where the trees are. This is not a problem at Bryce, where the Bristlecone Loop is a half-mile, paved, wheelchair-accessible trail that leads from the parking lot at Rainbow Point (elevation 9,100 feet) to a scraggly, half-dead-looking tree that scientists say is more than 1,600 years old. It felt a bit like cheating, but there’s still something awesome about standing in the presence of a tree that was already 1,000 years old before Europeans had any idea that America existed.


The next morning, I drove from Red Canyon back to Bryce and walked down Wall Street, a majestic slot canyon with a single, towering ponderosa pine growing in it. Then I followed the Navajo Loop trail to the Queens Garden, an especially fantastic array of hoodoos with names like Thor’s Hammer and Queen Victoria.


For my last night in canyon country, I had planned to hike into the backcountry and spend a night out in the open. My first stop was the visitor’s center of Bryce Canyon Park to talk to the rangers about the trail and to get a backcountry permit ($5). Bryce is not known as a backpacker’s park. Less than 1% of visitors get off the roads and nature trails to explore the park’s backcountry trails. Most of the spectacular scenery is visible from the road or from the most popular day hikes, and Utah’s desert country is not always an easy place to navigate. In many of Utah’s other parklands, flash floods can turn slot canyons from sublime campsites into deathtraps when a rain falls miles away, somewhere up in the watershed. One of the things that makes Bryce Canyon unique is that the mesa slopes backward away from the rim, so very little water flows through the canyon that doesn’t fall on the canyon itself. The ranger told me that I’d know if the creeks were going to rise because I’d be getting rained on. I loaded my pack, drove to the trailhead, and hiked down into the canyon on the Swamp Canyon trail.


I had reserved a site at Sheep Creek, but judging from the absolute absence of anything resembling a swamp in this canyon, I wasn’t expecting much water in the stream. I knew there wouldn’t be any sheep. Many of the park’s features were named by early settlers who lived at the bottom of the canyon. The park is named for Ebenezer Bryce, a Mormon settler who arrived in 1875.


The trail starts at the rim and makes its way down through a forest of ponderosa pines, where Western tanagers – gorgeous yellow-and-black birds with orange faces – sing from the upper limbs of the trees. It winds along under the eaves of the canyon, through scrubby manzanita trees, and across small stretches of white sand until it intersects Sheep Creek and heads further down.


The arid climate of the West produces few subtle landscapes. Along the trail, I passed giant trees that had been struck by lightening. Since no moss and no underbrush could grow on the fallen trees, you could still see where the sap of the tree had exploded, super-heated and boiled by the thunderbolt until it shattered the trunk of the tree.


Some of the park’s scenery can be so spectacular it’s overwhelming. Swamp Canyon and Sheep Creek are in older parts of the canyon, where erosion has worn away most of the hoodoos, arches, and bridges, but it’s just as stunning in a more quiet way. When I arrived at my campsite, I was delighted to find water running through the creek. Just upstream the water disappeared under rocks and mud, but for about 100 feet, there was a patch of rich green, with reeds growing in the water and a tangled mass of trees on both banks of the stream. Walking up the creek bed to try to find the source, I startled a small hawk, which barked at me for a few moments before it flew away.


With the sun getting low in the sky, the red in the canyon walls above deepened. When evening approached, I set up my bedroll and settled in for the night. With no threat of rain, I could sleep under the open sky. I expected to see a few stars, but got an even better show instead. A succession of hummingbirds appeared above my head one or two at time, wings whistling and buzzing as they swooped and dived, sipping tiny insects out of the air. In the fading light, I caught a few last flashes of color – reds, greens, purples – before my private, living fireworks flew off.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use