| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Virgin Islands as countries, but they also listed
Alaska and Hawaii! The clerk I mentioned this too seemed genuinely
surprised and said that the sheet came from the videocassette manufacturer,
but that they would correct it. (Can someone who visits Zion let me know if
this is true?)
But back to traveling. We had dinner at 5:30 PM at Pancho's Family
Restaurant in Tuba City. Mark has a 'Navajo Taco,' which is fry bread
topped with lettuce, tomatoes, beans, and cheese. Fry bread is like (Asian)
Indian roti. We had had these last time we were here, at a restaurant in
Kayenta which seems to have gone out of business.
For the last stretch of driving AAA routed us over the scenic route.
The only problem with this is that we were driving over curvy mountain roads
into the sun, and visibility was at times extremely bad, even with
sunglasses. Again, though we made it through to Kanab by 9:00 PM where we
stayed at the National 9 Aikens ($42 per night plus tax). We probably
didn't need to book ahead; there seemed to be lots of vacancies, though
that's probably because it's very early in the season here. (The Grand
Canyon North Rim has been open only for a week, and most of Zion National
Park and all of Cedar Breaks National Monument is closed until May 27th.)
Minimum elevation: ? ft (? m)
Maximum elevation: ? ft (? m).
Distance driven: 547 miles (882 kilometers).
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After breakfast at the Four Seasons 1950s Restaurant, we
drove to Bryce Canyon National Park, arriving about 10:30 AM.
The first thing we noticed about Bryce Canyon was that it was swarming
with people! I'm sure in the summer it's even worse (they get 1,5000,000
people a year), but compared to the other parks we've been visiting, any
sort of crowd was amazing. And the road in the Park past Farview point was
closed because they were doing construction to widen it to handle the
increased numbers.
The weather was good, about 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18 degrees
Centigrade), although at 8000 feet (2438 meters) it still felt hot.
I overheard one of the rangers talking about how the Parks Service
wants them to label more trails strenuous, but how mis-leading this is,
because the most strenuous trail here is still nowhere near as strenuous as
a strenuous trail at the Grand Canyon. This is true; maybe there needs to
be some sort of standard scale, like they have for white-water rafting.
We started with the combination Navajo/Queen's Garden Trail at 10:45
AM. Both the Navajo Loop Trail and the Queen's Garden Trail go down into
the canyon (actually an amphitheater) canyon and then back up. In the
canyon there is a connecting trail joining the two and it seemed more
interesting to do the combination than backtrack over what we had already
seen. (Half the Navajo Loop Trail was closed, so it wasn't really a loop
for now.)
Bryce Canyon is known for its 'hoodoos': rock pillars formed by
erosion and usually in fantastic shapes (different layers of rock erode at
different rates). Someone named them hoodoos because they cast a mysterious
spell, and it's true that seeing them and walking among them is magical and
mystical. First you descend through them down a switchback path, then you
meander through them as the path gradually descends to the canyon floor.
Along the canyon floor is a path that goes through forested ground before
ascending the other side, the Queen's Garden Trail (named in honor of Queen
Victoria for some reason).
There seem to be trail markers on the Queen's Garden Trail, but no
trail guide to identify them. We finished our loop by walking along the rim
from Sunrise Point to Sunset Point and returning to our car by 1:30 PM.
We drove to Farview and Paria Viewpoints for a look at the other parts
of the canyon (amphitheater). Farview is the highest point in the Park at
8819 feet (2688 meters), and the snow is obvious here.
At 3:00 PM we took the one-hour Rim Walk with the ranger. She talked a
little bit about the early inhabitants, including Ebenezer Bryce, who
described it as 'a hell of a place to lose a cow.' But most of her talk was
about the history of tourism at Bryce, a subject of some interest, but
perhaps better suited to a talk in an auditorium than a walk along the rim.
The first year Bryce was a National Park (1929) it had 22,000 visitors; in
1994 it had 1,500,000 visitors, including lots of foreign visitors. Even
so, the ranger said, it is not as heavily visited as many other parks in the
area. Someone said that the most visited National Park was the Smokey
Mountain National Park; other popular ones include Yosemite, Yellowstone,
and Grand Canyon.
After this talk we went to Inspiration Point, which required quite an
uphill hike, but provided the best view of the hoodoos in Bryce Canyon. We
also stopped at Fairyland Canyon at about 5:00 PM, on our way out of the
Park.
We returned to Kanab at 6:30 PM. Coming back on Route 89 to Kanab, we
could see the tour buses winding their way north from the Grand Canyon to
Zion and Bryce, ready to disgorge more masses of people at designated
viewpoints and photo stops.
We had seen a sign for the 'Wok Inn' and though we weren't expecting
much, we figured it was probably as good as the meals we could get in the
more typical restaurants. It was surprisingly good. We had Kung Pao
Chicken and Garlic Shrimp, both quite spicy. The owner is Chinese, and I
imagine caters to the tourist crowd more than the local population, at least
based on the other diners.
Minimum elevation: 4925 ft (1501 m).
Maximum elevation: 8819 ft (2688 m).
Distance driven: 183 miles (295 kilometers).
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: Today we had breakfast at the Chef's Palace--not as good
as the Four Seasons and more expensive. On the tables they have A FEEDBAG
OF COWBOY POETRY by Bob Christiansen, which is a sampler of his poems. The
only catch is that each has the last verse missing and to find out how it
ends, you have to buy one of his poetry books sold at the cash register.
This restaurant also had Postum (a coffee substitute made from some sort of
grain, and having no caffeine) on the menu.
The last time we went to the Grand Canyon we went to the South Rim
(where most of the visitors go). This time we went to the North Rim. To
get from one to the other is 10 miles (16 kilometers) if you can fly, or
about 180 miles (290 kilometers) if you can't.
We left Kanab at 8:00 AM and arrived at the Canyon at 8:30 AM. This
does not mean that the drive took only a half hour. While Utah is on
Daylight Savings Time, Arizona is not, so we gained an hour.
On the way, we passed snow-covered meadows, and in fact the North Rim
had just opened a week ago. (Unlike the South Rim, which is open year-
round, the North Rim closes with the first heavy snow and re-opens only when
the winter is over.)
Some of you may have read the children's classic, BRIGHTY OF THE GRAND
CANYON by Marguerite Henry, but I have not. Apparently this is a big thing,
and there was a life-size statue of Brighty in the sun room of the lodge.
The Grand Canyon is 5,000,000 years old. That is, the river has been
cutting it out for that long. The rocks in it are considerably older, the
layer at the bottom being 1,800,000,000 years old.
We started at 9:00 AM with the Bright Angel Trail, a short trail out to
(where else?) Bright Angel Point. It involves some uphill hiking as well as
crossing two narrow bridges over gaps in the rock, a fact that distressed
some people. The path didn't seem to bother the mule deer, however, since
three of them crossed the path in front of us. These were the first of many
that we saw in the Park; they seem quite used to people and, while they
don't come up to you, they don't run away either.
From Bright Angel Point (actually, from the lodge as well) we could see
Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim. (It's a measure of how many more
people visit the South Rim that it has an entire village, while the North
Rim has just a lodge.) We could also see what turned out to be a controlled
fire on the South Rim.
For some reason, someone had placed a bouquet of flowers on one of the
rocks off the trail overlooking the Canyon. I'm not sure why, but I noticed
them mostly because they had attracted a hummingbird, not a bird one sees
very often.
At 10:30 AM, we went to the half-hour geology talk at the lodge. The
ranger talked about the three aspects of the formation of the Grand Canyon:
deposition, uplift, and cutting. Deposition is the creation of the various
layers. The bottom layer is the Vishnu layer; other of the forty-two
distinct layers include red wall limestone (500 ft thick), the Supai group
of four layers, sloping red kermit shale, yellow Coconino sandstone, and
Kaibab limestone on top. Geologists say there were even more layers above
that have eroded--1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) of them. Traces of these
remain, in Red Butte south of the Grand Canyon, in Zion National Park, and
in Bryce Canyon National Park.
The layers were built at or below sea level, however, and we were
sitting at 8000 feet (2450 meters). What happened? Well, the uplift of the
Colorado Plateau occurred when the Pacific Ocean tectonic plate crashed into
the North American continent. Subduction occurred; that is, part of the
Pacific Ocean plate went underneath the North American one, pushing up the
plateau.
Finally, 5,500,000 years ago, a river flowing west below the Colorado
River (which was then flowing eastward cut through the cliffs at the foot of
the canyon and captured the Colorado (this is known as stream piracy).
Suddenly the Colorado was flowing westward and at a very rapid pace, since
there was an enormous elevation change in a short distance. The force of
this began cutting the canyon (and presumably is still cutting it).
At 11:00 AM, we were going to drive to Cape Royal for a hike there, but
the road was still closed. There had been a small landslide last night and
they had thought the road would be cleared and open by 10:00 AM, but that
was off. Now the estimate was noon. I found this out from the two women in
the car ahead of us, who said it was like waiting at the inspection station.
This made me ask where they were from, and it turned out that not only were
they also from New Jersey, but from two towns only one town away from ours!
Rather than wait an hour, we drove back to the lodge and hiked the
Transept Trail, which followed the rim of a side canyon from the lodge to
one of the campgrounds. Mark asked what 'transept' meant and I said I
wasn't sure. He said it meant mediumly skilled--halfway between ept and
inept.
We saw several deer on this hike, not on the trail itself, but in the
trees along the trail. Other than that, the only wild mammals we've been
seeing are chipmunks and squirrels.
We got back to the lodge about 1:30 PM. It might have been sooner, but
another hiker said he thought going back by way of the road was faster. |
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| Copyright © - "Evelyn C. Leeper" |
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