Day 19 - Monday 7/18/2005 -  On to Bryce Canyon, the "Chasm in the Sky"...

Another hot night, and another pool of sweat around my body.  As with the night before, the evening finally started cooling off about 3am.  When the morning warmth finally chased us out of bed, we packed up the camp, got some breakfast (read: cold drinks), and headed off for our next stop - Bryce Canyon.  Leaving Zion, we drove through a man-made tunnel that was built in the 1930's.  Cars were much more narrow back then and the tunnel accommodated 2-way traffic well.  Enter the 35-foot RV.  Suffice to say that traffic is stopped often to accommodate these behemoths.  Leaving the eastern portion of Zion, we watched the canyon country slowly transition into rolling graze lands.

For the entire Southwest portion of our trip we have been hearing about the native peoples and the geology.  One of the prominent forces that has affected the people, and more importantly the climate, is the uplift of the Colorado Plateau.  The Colorado Plateau stretches from central Colorado (surprise!) to western Utah, and from northern Utah south to northern Arizona.  This uplift is directly responsible for all of the canyons and most of the unusual landforms in the area, including the Grand Canyon.  The plateau is actually an ancient seabed that was built up through silt deposition in layers over millions of years.  Depending on the mineral content of the layers, the color and consistency is different.  The sea would retract, and a layer of salt would be deposited.  This process continued until the layers were over 3000 feet thick, and continental drift began squeezing up the central part of America (the Colorado Plateau).  At one point, areas like Zion were covered with blowing sands (also over 3000 feet thick) that became compressed and turned to "petrified dunes". Now for the canyon part.  How could huge canyons like Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon be cut so deep by small streams? (e.g. how come the Virgin River which is about 40 feet wide cut a huge canyon in Zion, but the Mississippi River hasn't cut a canyon anywhere and it has thousands of times more water???)  The answer is SPEED.  A small river flowing quickly picks up silt and carries it downstream, cutting the canyon deeper every day.  The little river in Zion carries out enough silt in one day to fill 280 dump trucks.  Multiply that by millions of years and you get the picture.  The headwaters of the Colorado Plateau are at about 11,000 feet in elevation and the water makes it to the Gulf of California at sea level - a drop of 11,000 feet.  Of that drop, about 6,000 feet of it happens over just a few hundred miles at the edge of the plateau.  The really big canyons (like the National Parks) are at the edge of the plateau where the drop is the greatest.  Contrast that with the Mississippi River which might drop 1,000 feet over 1,000 miles.  So much for the short lesson in natural history.

The drive to Bryce was nice (air conditioning for a change) and we sipped espresso and logged the miles.  As we neared Bryce, the landscape once again began to change.  The rolling hills gave way at once to mesas with embedded spires of reddish clay.  It looked as though a giant had been playing with "Silly Sand" and got bored, leaving spires and lumps of brightly colored sand scattered across the plateau.  This area is called "Red Canyon" and has some beautiful bike trails.  We snapped some pics and continued on.  We reached the Bryce Visitor Center, and then cruised up to "Sunset Point" - one of the key overlooks.  

I've been to several canyons, but Bryce is by far the only one I could refer to as "upfront and personal"  It is not as large as others, but the first impression is that Bryce is not "A" canyon, but thousands of smaller ones intermingled.  .

The bulk of the rock formations are a form of "Hoodoos".  Given their inherent instability, "Hoodoo" is probably Navajo for "WATCH OUT!".  The composition is extremely brittle, and they will probably all be gone in the blink of a geologic eye.  What you see at Bryce is geology in the process of hitting the delete button.

I would add more, but the pictures below do more for Bryce than I ever could with words.  We hope to hike down into the hoodoos tomorrow morning and snap a lot of pics.

As for this evening, Hunter got a three-hour swim, and I got to catch up on web updates.  No one ever said life is fair for Dads!