From the highway, the massive Paunsaugunt and Markagunt Plateaus don’t get much more than a glance from Las Vegas bound suburbanites and their bored kids taking the winding highway 89 through Southern Utah. Distant places look closer in clear, high air. Douglas fir, Rocky Mountain juniper, Ponderosa, Limber pine, and 6,000-year-old Bristlecone pine grow on the remote mountaintops.
Bryce Canyon is one of the more colorful features of the Paunsaugunt. It’s a short side trip from the main highway up a canyon so brilliant in green and red that it would deserve a park of it’s own if it wasn’t upstaged by the even more dazzling cliffs at the end of the road.
Bryce isn’t far from the final resting place of John D. Lee in the Panguitch city cemetery at the east end of town. Lee was the only man officially blamed for the Mountain Meadow Massacre. He was executed by the US Army at the massacre site a hundred miles away and brought to this spot by his family. The gravesite is nearly always deserted and unnoted, a fact remarkable since more white pioneers were killed in the Mountain Meadown Massacre than any other conflict in the entire settlement of the West. Many more Indians were killed in various US Army raids of their camps of course. But history remembers these things unevenly.
By contrast, fewer than a third as many pioneers died in the more well known Donner Party disaster. Only the wholly Mormon loss of life when unprepared pioneers died in a winter storm at Martin’s Cove in Wyoming is on the same scale. More than any other state, the Mormon settlement of Utah is steeped in blood.
Since Lee is the only person closely associated with the Mountain Meadows Massacre, it would seem reasonable that his grave site would attract more attention but few even know it’s there.
Bryce Canyon was named after early Mormon Ebenezer Bryce who is remembered for his description, “It’s a hell of a place to lose a cow.”
Bryce Canyon is really “Bryce Cliff” because there is no canyon. It’s a long escarpment of pink and red spires cresting a vast basin of mountains and cliffs to the east. The immense vista from the rim of Bryce is both a treasure and a curse to the people who live in southern Utah. The region has long been denied coal mining to keep that vista just the way it is. On the other hand, environmentalists make the case that tourism is a renewable resource which contributes much more to the local economy than a few coal mines ever could. The truth is probably that Wyoming and Montana coal is cheaper to stripmine and people don’t raise as many objections to mining it there.
In summer, the rim at Bryce is the dividing line between anthill civilization in the parking lot, and a dramatic wilderness panorama below. In the parking lot, motor homes vomit yelling kids and middle-aged professionals in tee shirts and shorts. When you start down a trail, crowds and rocks that are shades of pink and red make you feel like you’re in a plaster and plastic “Bryceland” somewhere in California. You almost expect to see a ticket booth on the trail.
At the bottom, the slot canyon echoes fade as the trail crosses a Ponderosa and Pinion pine prairie. Openness surrounds you and draws your feelings to your skin. A lot of the city people give up only a short few turns down the steep trail, so there’s the chance of being actually alone there in the off season. The openness of the forest and the sigh of the breeze in the pines make you feel for the first time that you are finally in Bryce rather than at Bryce.
Fifty miles southwest, the Markagunt Plateau erodes into the red peaks and cliffs of Zion Canyon. Early Mormons gave the canyons their most sacred names. The Great White Throne and the Court of the Patriarchs rule Zion Canyon. And the red stained Temple of Sacrifice looms over it too. They gave the name Kolob to the high country above Zion and the massive canyon that descends from it. According to Mormon sacred books, Kolob is the name of the star closest to the home planet of God himself.
The best trail in the entire United States national park system goes up the west side of Zion Canyon. The end of the trail is a place so touched by majesty, they named it for the place where angels descended from Heaven: Angels Landing.
To reach the end of the trail to Angels Landing, you have to cling to steel chains anchored into the rock and suspended over drops a thousand feet straight down between your feet. It’s utterly unlike any other place that the general public is allowed to go.
The first part of the trail gives you a hint of what’s ahead, and then you climb around a rocky point to where you can see what it’s really going to be like. The rocky point should be called, “Waiting Wife Rock” even though a few husbands sometimes wait there too, “Oh! You go on ahead, Honey. I’ll just wait for you here.”
If you’re not paralyzed in fear, you do go on.
Everybody knows Bryce and Zion, but most of these rural mountains are relatively unknown even to Utah natives. The people in Utah live three hundred miles north in the Wasatch Front cities of Provo, Salt Lake, and Ogden. Highway 89 towns like Orderville and Salina slowly dry up as the kids move away to better jobs in the cities and their parents grow old. Off highway communities like Kingston and Tropic are the last remnants of a dying culture.
