Bryce Canyon is a
collection of towers, steeples and tunnels washed into the soft yellow sandstone
by wind and rain. It glows in the sun like heaps of lost gold. Everyone who visits is forced into metaphor overload as they search for
ways of describing it. Sue suggested it looked like a big... big... castle with battlements and everything,
indicating that they don't go into poetic nonsense down in Oz.
It seemed to me that
the lost souls of hell were reaching up through a primal golden ooze to send their last scream of
penitence toward heaven before being petrified in eternal lamentation... but decided that Oz practicality
might think me a fairy, and said instead that it looked like nature's biggest spitball collection.
I wondered if after a hundred years more natural attrition it might become nature's biggest
yellow sludge pit. Who knows.
Zion
Our final hike was in Zion National Park, an area of soaring sandstone cliffs, the highest in the world.
We wandered up Angel's Landing, a 500m sandstone monolith that rose like a defiant fist from the valley floor.
We pulled ourselves up by chains from the knife edged snake path to reach our final summit. We dangled our feet over the edge at the top and stared straight down the cliffs. All around the weathered red and yellow rock looked like confectionery. I had to resist the impulse to jump across the mile wide gap and break a piece off for a quick snack.
Skies above Utah
What was there to expect from Utah? All I had known was that this was the land of the mormons,
and Indians in the south. A land of religion and spirituality. Having seen it, I'm not suprised.
The land lifts you. It has power, depth to humble the greatest will, and then lift you, following the
vast fingers of stone, up, up to the vast enveloping sky, blue and purple, and dark within
a thousand stars, and wonder what might lie beyond.
We went to Delicate Arch,
a forty minute uphill hike to an perfect sine curve in rock standing in stark yellow on a stone hill.
We went at sundown, to see the arch in side-light. Just in case we
felt the slightest bit jaded after so much natural wonder, nature chipped in with a bonus thunderstorm,
a crashing desert downpour and lightning that arched and cracked across the primal hills. I timed the bursts as we ran - perfect targets -
over the bare hilltops: "Three kilometers! Two! Two klicks! One - oh shit - 800 meters -
oh bugger this - run!" And we sprinted through the rain, soaking, electric, laughing, all the way home though God's
own Lego set, NOW with real working lights.
Each had a sober English name like Mason's Plateau, and a more
shrewd Navajo alternative: "John Wayne on a toilet". I had only been on a horse once before, and agreed to go this time
because, well, what other way could you ride the range? After two hours of being
bounced majestically around like a royal sack of spuds on my noble tailbone, I can tell you,
next time I'll walk. It'd be quicker, easier on the inside of the legs, and you wouldn't have
an indian on a donkey cantering after you, whooping your horse on faster and making jokey references
about your manly horsemanship to other passing guides.
