So what’s the deal with the Dutch?
Are you puzzled that there’s been no mention yet of anything Dutch? Perhaps you’re wondering whether I was jumping rope while at Bryce. I wasn’t. But I will solve the mystery.
Safely checked into my cabin, it was late afternoon when I left Kanab and started north on U S 89 toward Bryce Canyon. I had little idea what to expect and even less (if any) idea of how I’d structure my visit. I did know that when I reached my destination I’d have journeyed from the bottom of the Grand Staircase at Grand Canyon to near its top at Bryce. According to the NPS,
The Grand Staircase is the world’s most complete sequence of sedimentary rocks – rocks formed over vast timespans from sediments built up in lakes, inland seas, swamps, deserts, and forests.
From Grand Canyon at the bottom, through Zion National Park in the Middle, to Bryce Canyon National Park near the top of the staircase, this rock record recounts a history of 525 million years.
Elsewhere on Earth the geological sequences have been interrupted by uplift of mountain ranges or carving and scouring action by glaciers. In the Grand Staircase, however, very few gaps mar the sequence. Most chapters and even pages of this book are still intact.
I promised I’d tell you how Bryce Canyon received its moniker. It’s really a simple and straightforward story. The area was settled by Mormon pioneers in the 1850’s. Among those settlers was a fellow named Ebenezer Bryce who built his homestead in the area. Bryce constructed a logging road in the Bryce Amphitheater that other locals dubbed “Bryce’s Canyon”. End of story.
I arrived at the Visitor’s Center, picked up a map and saw that it would be an easy drive to a number of viewpoints. I estimated I could take in Sunset Point with a walk to Sunrise Point, Inspiration Point, and finally a drive to Bryce Point before heading back to Kanab.
However, as Robert Burns wrote in his poem To a Mouse, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley”. Everything started according to plan. I followed the signs to Sunset Point, parked and headed off to the Rim Trail. Despite having seen the hoodoos at Fairyland, I was still unprepared for this view which generated greater emotional intensity than I would have imagined.
I walked out onto Sunrise Point with one hand planted firmly atop my head because, in addition to being surprised by the view, I also hadn’t planned for the intensity of the wind. At some point, A young fellow and his girlfriend, both walking barefoot along these paved and unpaved trails, approached me. He showed me a picture he’d taken of me from behind as I was grasping my hat and asked me in slightly accented English for permission to keep it. I told him I was flattered and happy to let him keep the photo.
The next step, of course, was asking him where he was from. When he told me he was visiting from Rotterdam, I told him that I’d been on a tour in Monument Valley just that morning with a couple from The Hague. He had a funny response. “I know Holland is a small country but I probably don’t know them.”
Then things got weird. Another young fellow who’d been standing nearby walked over and told me he thought it was kind of me to let them keep the photo. I told him I never gave it a second thought and that I didn’t see any issue with it whatsoever. He extended his hand, introduced himself as Andries and told me he was from Hilversum – a small city about 35 kilometers from Amsterdam. I thought, “Four Dutch people in the same day and in Arizona and Utah to boot. Is the universe trying to tell me something,” I wondered. (If it was, I never discerned it.)
We started walking together along the Rim Trail and I learned that he had been visiting a friend in San Diego and he was traveling on his own because he wanted a chance to see this part of the world and his friend had to stay in San Diego for a reason that I’ve forgotten. He’d been to Las Vegas and hadn’t particularly liked it but he did like Bryce.
Well, we got to the top of the Navajo Loop Trail and, perhaps because I’d been in the car most of the day, he convinced me despite my misgivings to make the mile and a half loop. I was hesitating because the trail looked like this.
We set off and emerged from the walk more than an hour later back at the rim with Andries chatting and me huffing and puffing. Along the way he’d given me a brief lesson in botany, which was his academic specialty. I listened much more than I talked – in part because this was beyond my ken and in part because I was concentrating on breathing. We parted ways when we reached the top of the trail.
One other fact I didn’t know as I stood at Inspiration Point is that the processes that create the hoodoos will eventually consume and dismantle them. In Bryce, the hoodoos erode at a pace of two to four feet every century. As erosion continues to push westward, it will eventually capture the watershed of the East Fork of the Sevier River. Once this happens (in about three million years) the river will become the dominant erosive force and will replace the hoodoos with a V-shaped canyon and steep cliff walls typical of the weathering and erosional patterns created by rivers and Bryce Canyon will, at long last, be just that – a true canyon.
I spent some time at Inspiration Point and considered waiting for the sun to set but ultimately decided that, as awed as I was by Bryce, I wanted to start the drive back while some remnant of daylight remained. During my research into hoodoos and Bryce I came across this Paiute legend told to a park naturalist in 1936. It’s copied from one of the NPS web pages about the park. It seems a fitting way to close this entry.
“Before there were humans, the Legend People, To-when-an-ung-wa, lived in that place. There were many of them. They were of many kinds – birds, animals, lizards and such things, but they looked like people. They were not people. They had power to make themselves look that way. For some reason the Legend People in that place were bad; they did something that was not good, perhaps a fight, perhaps some stole something….the tale is not clear at this point. Because they were bad, Coyote turned them all into rocks. You can see them in that place now all turned into rocks; some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding onto others. You can see their faces, with paint on them just as they were before they became rocks. The name of that place is Angka-ku-wass-a-wits (red painted faces). This is the story the people tell.”
Good night for now.