Steps: Shaun: 17,631, Shannon: 14,814
After our exertions from the previous day, we decided to take it a bit easier today. We slept to 8 am and then leisurely ate breakfast, drank our tea, and generally got our shit straightened out.
We headed out at 11 am for our only real hike of the day, the 1-mile roundtrip hike up Water Canyon to the Mossy Cave and Tropic Ditch. The cave and ditch offer two different examples of water as it appears in the dry Southwest landscape. Mossy Cave is just that, a cave with moss and other plants growing on its walls, watered by a natural spring that seeps through cracks in the rock. Water Canyon is fed by the Tropic Ditch, an irrigation canal cut in the 1800s by Mormon pioneers, that traditionally directed runoff from melting snow or rain into the canyon, to be used by nearby farmers. Now, irrigation water flows annually from May to October. Overall, this was an easy hike, made better because it wasn’t yet super hot.
The rest of the day was spent driving the park. On our way in, we saw the smoke from a nearby forest fire that had been left to burn, as we also encountered in Alaska. We stopped first at Ruby’s General Store, which has everything you could possibly need (and many things you don’t need). We bought stuff (of course) and then headed into the park, through Bryce Canyon City, established in 2007 for the express purpose of representing the 138 year-round workers at Ruby’s Resort.
Our first stop was the visitors center, which was pretty cool because it had these giant, free-standing solar panels that were programmed to pivot over the course of the day to follow the sun. Inside, we learned that there was going to be an astronomy talk at 8:30 pm and telescope viewing at 9:30 that night. This clashed a bit with Shaun’s wish to see the canyon at sunset (8:25 pm), so we had to make some hard choices.
We had read that it’s better to drive to the end of the scenic road and then stop at the lookouts on the way back because most are then on the right-hand side of the road, so that’s what we did. We drove to Rainbow and Yovimpa Points at the end of the Park Road, both of which had different but equally spectacular views.
We also encountered some winged wildlife along the way, including a red-tailed hawk...
Steller’s jay...
and the ubiquitous turkey vultures.
From there, we stopped at the overlooks along the road, including Ponderosa Canyon, Natural Bridge, etc., before heading to the main overlooks, Inspiration Point, Paria View, and Bryce Point. By far, our favorite was Bryce Point. It encapsulated all of the spectacular scenery with one overlook and took our breath away.
We next traveled to the Bryce Canyon Lodge, one of the old-style National Park Lodges from the early 20th century. We had an awesome dinner, checked out the gift shop, where Shaun bought a beautiful tile by a Cherokee artist, and looked around a bit before heading to Sunset Point to view the changing light reflecting on the canyon walls as the sun set. Unfortunately, we arrived 30 minutes before sunset, and most of the canyon was already in shadow, with only a bit of light showing on the topmost cliffs. Shaun was very disappointed, but Shan liked the way the raking light looked on the scraggly trees (as evidenced by the 500 pictures she took of them).
On the plus side, we did see a mule deer defecating on the side of the road, so…
We stayed to see the light recede almost entirely and the sun set on the other side. The sky turned pink, and it was a really beautiful sunset at least. We finally left to attend the ranger talk on astronomy, which we initially thought was at the visitors center, but upon finding it deserted there, realized was at the Lodge.
We saw a coyote on the way back to the Lodge (though we couldn’t get a very good picture of it), so the mistake was worth it.
By the time we arrived at the Lodge, the main parking lot was full, and we were a little late to the talk, but they were having projector issues, so we didn’t miss anything. Unfortunately, the projector issues persisted, and the ranger had to cut the last 20 minutes of the program short. That was disappointing because what we saw was pretty interesting, and the ranger was an engaging speaker.
After that debacle, we all headed BACK to the visitors center for a telescope viewing, and by all, I mean all 50 BAJILLION people who had been at the ranger talk. There was a huge line and, because the ranger talk was cut short, the telescopes weren’t fully set up. The only good thing to come from waiting in line is that one of the rangers had a green laser that they were using to show the constellations, including the Big and Little Dippers and Polaris. After waiting for almost half an hour, we decided to leave and go out to a dark place to view the stars on our own with our own star chart. We were able to use our new headlamps with the green lights that wouldn’t wreck our night vision to walk out to Sunset Point and view more stars than we had seen in our lives.
Bryce has some of the darkest skies on Earth, and we believe it after experiencing the expanse of the heavens that were visible. We stayed there at Sunset Point for half an hour and then headed back to our hotel to pack up and prepare for our big hike into Bryce Canyon and then to move on to Capitol Reef tomorrow.
