Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Bryce Canyon NP


If it seems like we are spending all of our time in canyons lately, you are right. This part of the country has an amazing collection of canyons each with a different look, all formed by the millions of years of erosion driven by the constantly evolving topography of the Colorado Plateau.

Bryce has some very interesting sandstone pillars called “hoodoos”. All kinds of interesting geology behind why and how they where created, but we’ll save that for another day. In short, the canyon was beautiful and the park was very nice. We got up to watch the sunrise over the hoodoos on Monday morning and it cast and interesting light over the valley. It was a cold morning however, we were holding right about 32 degrees and realized that now that we have turned back northeast, Fall temperatures in the Rockies are in store for a while. Where did summer go? We are also starting to see some signs of fall foliage peeking out at the higher elevations. After leaving Bryce on Monday morning, we headed further across Southern Utah toward Colorado. This part of Utah in between the natural wonders of the many national parks wins the award for the entire trip as having the longest expense of nothingness and will now forever be regarded as “the middle of nowhere.” On the way to Moab, we stopped in Capital Reef National Park. Again, known for geologic reasons because of the “waterfold”, a.k.a. a crack in the Earth’s crust, that forms another canyon. This park served as a nice place for us to stop for lunch and in which we discovered that the Park Service maintains a 130 year old fruit orchard started by the first settlers here many years ago. Depending on the time of year, visitors are allowed to pick and eat any of the fruit in the orchards. Since it was apple season, we picked some apples (we think pink lady variety) and a few pears that were left. The park service is great at keeping nice parks, but not at growing good fruit.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We gotta see this Grand Canyon thing. Sounds wonderful. See u guy in a few weeks, maybe?

PAPA (aka dadeo)

Anonymous said...

Usually the pics get on before the blog, let's get with the program.