Journey to Utah in 2013, part 8: Queen's Garden Trail, Navajo Trail, and the Utah Prairie Dog at Bryce Canyon National Park

This post is part of a series. Click here to read the first post. To see the Bryce Canyon gallery, click here.

MORNING IN THE LIGHT OF AN APPROACHING STORM

I’d fallen asleep thinking about hoodoos, and I woke up thinking about hoodoos. They were nearby! I was going to see them again today! My excitement reminded me of being a child on a camping trip at the beach. I remember opening my eyes in the morning on those long-ago vacations, my first feeling of the day a thrill of pleasure simply from knowing the ocean was close at hand. There was something about the rim of Bryce Canyon that felt like the edge of an ocean. I’d noticed it the afternoon before, when I first looked out over the amphitheater. Maybe the millions of years during which the Claron Formation had been deposited by water had left an energetic imprint on the land. Certainly the hoodoos had already reminded me of coral reefs.

Today we planned to venture beyond the edge of that ocean, into its limestone depths. Stepping outside in the morning, I noticed that the air felt different from the day before. Warmth was gone. The sky looked odd, as if a storm was brewing. There was cell reception in this park, and Bev waited as I went online to check out the weather forecast. Snow was predicted.

“Snow? Really?” we asked each other, not quite believing it. This was mid-April, after all. Then I recalled the small patches of white stuff I’d seen lurking near our campsite. Snow had obviously fallen here, and recently.

Our friendly park ranger had warned us about being caught in the canyon during a snowstorm. Should we still take our planned hike? Of course we should – with plenty of layers to keep us warm and some extra food in case we got stuck somewhere. The snow wasn’t supposed to arrive until the evening anyway. As soon as we walked out onto the rim, I was glad we’d decided to risk it. The sky was gray in some places, sapphire in others. Light scattered from the distant clouds. These were wonderful conditions for hoodoo photography.

THEY LOOK EVEN WEIRDER UP CLOSE

From the Rim Trail, we followed the Queen’s Garden Trail in a gentle descent down to the canyon floor. Hiking down into the hoodoos was like walking through the pages of a children’s pop-up book. On either side of us, towers and walls of rock rose up in a multiplicity of shapes and textures. Their appearance was so far out of the ordinarily encountered range of landforms that they seemed to be constructed by human hands, rather than naturally occurring. The dramatic contrast of bright blue and dark gray in the sky above us further emphasized their resemblance to paper cutouts.

Up close, the hoodoos looked less uniform than they had from the far-off rim. Each one was unique. Their shapes demonstrated various stages of the hoodoo life cycle, and I began to better understand how these bizarre sculptures form. I saw thick plateaus of rock, with rough grooves in their surfaces, standing next to thin fins of rock which were clearly plateaus at a later stage of erosion. The tops of these fins were already turning into hoodoos. Holes in narrow, parallel ridges of limestone showed which fins were about to birth more spires. Beneath the hoodoos, and all around these colorful limestone wonders, reddish debris showed the eventual fate of all of these landforms: to crumble into dust.

It's amazing that the hoodoos, which as you may remember erode at a rate of about 2-4 feet every hundred years, have lasted so long. Their rate of erosion is fast, but it would be a lot faster if it weren't for the tilt of the Paunsaugunt Plateau and the fact that this whole escarpment is far from any natural river. When rain falls, water tends to flow westward from the rim, away from the hoodoos. This protects them from being crumbled more quickly. Though there are flash floods in the slot canyons during rainstorms, no river runs through the area to regularly carry away large amounts of material.

But the erosional process is going to speed up dramatically someday. The hoodoos and the entire edge of the plateau here are all being crumbled away slowly but surely, and eventually this retreating plateau edge will meet up with the watershed of the Sevier River's East Fork. When that happens, hoodoos will stop forming, a river will run through Bryce Amphitheater, and the valley will look more like a normal river valley and less like a fantastical landscape.

LEGEND PEOPLE TRYING TO ESCAPE THEIR FATE

The Southern Paiute people who lived in this region after about 1200 AD had a better story to account for the unique shapes of the hoodoos. According to this tale, told to a Bryce Canyon naturalist in 1936 by a Paiute elder, a different kind of people had once lived here before the Paiutes, called the Legend People. These creatures were actually animals who had the power to look like people, and often did so. The Legend People drank all the water from the streams, a real crime in an area with limited rainfall. After observing their bad behavior, the trickster god Coyote chose to turn them into hoodoos. The Legend People were trying to escape over the rim as they were being transformed into rock, which is why the hoodoos are clustered near the top of the amphitheater.

The Paiutes who originated this story were seminomadic people, living near but not actually in Bryce Canyon. They came to the canyon rim to collect pine nuts in the fall, and to hunt small game, such as rabbits. They left behind their arrowheads and obsidian tools. Long before their visits, possibly 15,000 years ago, Paleo-Indians most likely traveled through this place and hunted larger game. These earlier people were part of the worldwide spread of humans that happened during the final phase of the late Pleistocene. There’s no evidence of Paleo-Indian presence on the Paunsaugunt Plateau itself, but it’s wonderful to imagine them chasing mastodons around the hoodoos.

After the Paleo-Indians, the Basket Maker people were the earliest known inhabitants of this area. They arrived by about 700 AD. Evidence of their habitation has been found at nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. They were followed by Ancestral Puebloans, then Paiutes and Navajos. None of these groups lived in Bryce Canyon itself, but all of them used the area for hunting and gathering. Aside from the Paiutes, we don’t know what any of these groups thought of the unusual rocks here. They may have come up with explanations just as interesting as what the Paiutes believed. These strange goblin sculptures inspire the imagination. When experienced as part of a life completely integrated with nature, they can also generate highly creative spiritual insights.

MORMONS, RAILROAD COMPANIES, AND A FOREST SUPERVISOR

For the Mormon settlers who came here in the 1870s, life was hard and not necessarily conducive to creative spiritual insights about the hoodoos. Like the native people who had come before them, the Mormons didn’t live in Bryce Canyon itself, but rather in nearby valleys. Ebenezer Bryce, a Scottish-born carpenter, journeyed out west with Brigham Young to lend his valuable skills to the establishment of Mormon communities. He set up a homestead just below Bryce Canyon and grazed his cattle within the park’s present-day borders. Though he only lived in this part of the country for five years, Bryce made an impression as a man of great capabilities; besides the logging road, he helped dig a 7-mile irrigation ditch from Paria Creek to bring water for livestock and crops. The name “Bryce’s Canyon” stuck around long after he’d moved to Arizona. About the hoodoos, he is quoted frequently as saying: “It’s a hell of a place to lose a cow.” This demonstrates a soundly practical outlook on life that was probably quite common among the Mormon settlers. No Legend People for those guys.

The 1870s were a big decade for this area, and for scenic places in the United States in general. Around the same time that Mormon settlers were trying to live on the land here, scientists and explorers were conducting the first surveys of the geography of southern Utah, and the wonders of the geology here were beginning to be described. Elsewhere, the first national parks were being established, places like Yellowstone which was established in 1872. For the most part the public did not find out about the wonders of Bryce Canyon for decades, and would have had no way to get here anyway. There were no big towns nearby and no railways, only wagon roads. That was a time before cars.

Around the turn of the century, railroad companies began to capitalize on the tourist potential of the newly forming national parks by building railways to get to them. The railroad industry played a crucial role in the development of national parks, and Bryce Canyon was no exception. Articles about this area in railroad publications stoked public interest in visiting. But even more influential in the evolution of Bryce Canyon into a national park was a man named J.W. Humphrey, Forest Supervisor of Utah’s Sevier National Forest. The Bryce Canyon area fell under his jurisdiction, and when he first visited the hoodoos in 1915, he was gobsmacked. It was Humphrey who sent photos of Bryce Canyon to the railroad publications, made the rim accessible to auto traffic, and constructed the very same trails I was walking on that day. In 1928, once the land within its borders had all been purchased by the federal government, Bryce Canyon became a national park. 

THE BASE OF THE HOODOOS

I found the lower part of Bryce amphitheater to be one of the most enchanting places I’d ever visited, on par with Point Lobos. I devoured it with all my senses: the crunchy limestone rubble under my feet, the smell of the juniper branches, the bleached, hardened skeletons of trees coated with red dust, the bright, weird towers rising up around me.

At the bottom of the Queen’s Garden Trail, we passed through an area where previous hikers had built hundreds of cairns, more than I’d ever seen in one place. These piles of pastel-hued stones were stacked on branches and dessicated trunks of trees. They lined both sides of the trail, creating a miniature version of the gallery of hoodoos found at the higher elevations. The cairn-lined passage gave way to a trail through pinyon pines. Now the hoodoos and cliffs towered above us. I was amazed by the difference between looking up at the hoodoos and looking down on them.

Up above the hoodoos, the terrain was dominated by Ponderosa pine forest. As we descended into the canyon, the ranks of yellow pine trees thinned and were joined by other trees, especially on ridges with sandy soil where pinyon pines, Utah junipers and manzanitas often appeared. The elevation range between 7,000 to 8,500 feet is known as the Transition Zone, the same zone that predominates in most of Zion National Park. We were within the boundaries of this zone from our campground all the way down to Queen’s Garden and beyond.

Below that range, from 3,000 to 7,000 feet of elevation, is the Upper Sonoran Zone: a realm of desert scrub and pinyon-juniper pygmy forest. We wouldn’t officially enter the Upper Sonoran at Bryce Canyon, though fingers of this zone extend several hundreds of feet up into the Transition Zone in response to variations in soil type and exposure to the sun. Many plants in the park are listed in more than one zone because of such variations. The floor of the amphitheater was a perfect place to observe this mingling of zones in response to growing conditions.

A PRETTIER WALL STREET

We walked for a while in the wide-open valley, then turned right and entered a deep canyon. This was Wall Street, part of the Navajo Trail. Now we walked on narrow paths that separated enormous fins of deeply grooved rock in brilliant orange. In some places, the walls hung over the trail, a result of differential erosion: mudstone layers had eroded faster than the overlying limestone. Douglas firs reached up to the sky, seeking sunlight in narrow spaces where the sun only shines directly for brief periods every day. I felt tiny next to these huge walls and tall trees. The wide-angle lens came out and I found myself stopping every minute to capture a new perspective on this fascinating space.

Soon the Navajo Trail became a series of switchbacks up a steep slope, taking us out of Wall Street. This incredible trail, completed in 1929, is one of the oldest in the park. It’s listed in the National Register of Historic Places, along with Queen’s Garden Trail, the Rim Trail, and several other trails we wouldn’t have time to visit. All of these lovely trails are connected to each other, I was beginning to realize, and I wished we had more time in the park so I could explore every inch of this intricate network through the hoodoos. I was struck with a pang of envy of people who live near Bryce Canyon and have the chance to get to know all the best secret spots in the park.

The climb from Wall Street was quite strenuous with all the equipment I was carrying. I got dizzy from the effort of racing up the switchbacks in that high-altitude air to take pictures at each new vantage point. I felt positively intoxicated as I sweated my way breathlessly upwards. The steepest switchbacks soon gave way to a more gentle upward path alongside a gallery of hoodoos resembling Middle Eastern architectural wonders. Bev and I both moved more slowly now, catching our breath and taking pictures, until we reached the rim. Then we sat down to stare down at the hikers who were now enjoying the same steep route we’d just finished. This view is even better with people in it, I thought.

PINE TREES AND TAXIDERMY

Hiking up those switchbacks made us hungry, and we fell upon our lunch in the RV like ravenous wolves. After this, Bev was ready to sit down with her book, but I was supercharged by the morning’s exercise and the food. I wanted to roam around some more with my camera. I was also curious about what Bryce Canyon looked like away from the amphitheaters of hoodoos, so I set out along the main road to check out more of the park.

Away from the amphitheater, the scenery wasn’t nearly as dramatic, but it was intriguing in its own way. Ponderosa pines were everywhere, their branches shifting in the wind with soft shushing noises, their needles a latticed cushion on the ground. In some places the pines had been blackened by prescribed burns, an effort to combat the vegetation density and species invasion caused by years of fire suppression. I saw wildflowers and other plants but the most interesting thing I saw was a meadow full of holes, with a sign that indicated this area was protected. This meadow was part of the home of the Bryce Canyon community of Utah prairie dogs. I glimpsed movement at a distant hole, but didn’t see a real, live prairie dog.

I did see a taxidermied Utah prairie dog that day, at the small museum at Bryce Canyon’s visitor center, near the end of that three-hour walk. The little guy was so adorable and friendly-looking that I was moved to read up on the species. Members of the squirrel family, Utah prairie dogs are about a foot long as adults and weigh 1-3 pounds. They build burrows underground where extended families live, and these are quite elaborate: networks of rooms serving as nurseries, sleeping areas, and toilets. The holes I’d seen in that meadow were their exits; I later learned that these exits have listening posts where the animals keep an ear out for predators.

These highly social animals actually greet each other with kisses and nuzzles. They spend much of their time working on their homes, which are sometimes also inhabited by burrowing owls and snakes who take advantage of the prairie dog’s construction work and then repay them by hunting and eating them. Despite these predators, prairie dog villages can grow quite large. Now the Utah prairie dog is a threatened species, having been mostly exterminated by farmers who poisoned them for ruining crops. Bryce Canyon has an adopt-a-prairie-dog program in addition to their other prairie dog conservation efforts. They were successful enough in the efforts to raise the prairie dog population that some of these adorable little rodents were transported to another place to start a new colony. I wonder if that was a weird experience for them, or do prairie dogs just go with the flow?

This small, somewhat run-down museum had many wonderful stuffed specimens on display, along with fossils and a “star chamber” which imitated the night sky at Bryce Canyon. Besides the prairie dog, my favorite display was the taxidermied mountain lion. I’d seen mountain lions at a distance in Santa Cruz, but I’d never had a chance to check one out up close. It was marvelously fierce and stunningly gorgeous. I gazed into its glass eyes for a while. Then I walked back to the campground, full of new information, in a cloudy late afternoon that was growing increasingly, forebodingly cold. 

To see lots more Bryce Canyon photos, click here.