Two Days of Canyons

We spent the afternoon of June 23^rd, following the all-night drive, in Red Canyon (which leads to Bryce Canyon when traveling from the west on Highway 12) and Bryce Canyon National Park. Then we spent a portion of the following day (6/24) at the Grand Canyon’s North Rim.

I did a search on adjectives in an attempt to find words that might articulate the sense of these three places—each unique, but sharing the same ‘canyon’ in their name. Amazing, astonishing, astounding, beyond belief, extraordinary, incredible, marvelous, phenomenal, remarkable, startling, and wondrous were some that I found. And yet, even these are not descriptive enough. Among these three canyons, there are a seemingly endless array of hues (in combinations you don’t expect) and countless remarkable geographic shapes, formations and natural visual oddities (some in shapes that actually resemble things we know…like the stony-shaped Organ Grinder’s Monkey, sitting atop one of the hoodoos in Bryce). There are chasms with depths that astound. There are cliffs that seem to descend to the Abyss. There are spires, standing shoulder to shoulder with others like them, each reaching toward Heaven, and one more gorgeous than the next.

The massiveness of the Grand Canyon when juxtaposed with the comparative diminutiveness of the Red Canyon surprises when you see them both within hours of one another. And then there is Bryce Canyon, which is not actually a canyon at all. This ‘canyon’ too surprises with its huge horseshoe shaped amphitheaters most of which contain the Park’s Hoodoos—the fanciful formations so called because they resemble ghostly hooded figures.

And perhaps the most surprising of all are the Scenic Drives which book-ended our arrivals and departures to these three canyons. The descriptions and superlatives about those drives must await the next submission.

And so I’ll simply end this Two Days of Canyons submission with an exhortation that you really must treat yourselves to a much larger and longer dose of God’s amazing handiwork in southern Utah and northern Arizona than we were able to enjoy.

Becky