Mt. Pleasant Classical Academy

Friday to Monday, May 30^th – June 2

Bryce Canyon’s scenery is unique they say however it reminds us very much of the Badlands in SD, but bigger and grander.  Beautiful.    Bryce is a canyon and much like Grand Canyon to the south you arrive and drive upon the plateau or rim of the canyon.  That’s where the similarity ends.  At Bryce the canyon is filled with hoodoos, a natural column of rock in fantastic form, formed by forces of nature sculpting the brilliantly-colored Claron Formation into a series of beautiful and unusual erosion features.  Bryce Canyon’s beginnings can be traced back to a network of braided rivers and streams, which transported a variety of sediments into a large freshwater lake that once covered SW Utah.  Over time the lake disappeared leaving behind the multicolored Claron Formation. 

About 10 – 15 million years ago a period of uplifting began in the region known as the Colorado Plateau, faulting and stretching and fracturing creating smaller plateaus.  Bryce has been craved from one of these plateaus.  Faults and earthquakes initiated the sculpting process by breaking the rock with vertical mini-fractures called joints.  Bringing in the forces of weathering and erosion with a meager 18” of rain a years and it’s amazing what has resulted.  At a rate of 1-4’ of erosion per year they estimate that Bryce’s hoodoos will disappear in 3 million years. 

Arriving at Bryce’s campground we easily found a site, set-up and was met by the camp host.  After she collected our money she shared that we really should check out the ranger’s programs.  In her opinion they are all excellent and after attending two I would concur.  At that point however she shared that the evening program was astronomy, with really large telescopes lead by Bryce’s Dark Rangers.   Being the astronomy buff Michael’s eyes lit up and even more so when Judy shared that this sky is dark and clear.   Being at 8000’ elevation and without cities close-by Michael knew she was correct.   We visited the grocery store just outside Bryce and then the Visitor’s Center.  This really should be high on any National Park’s visitor’s list of things to do first when entering a NP since they have a wealth of information about how the park is formed and what activities are available.

After dinner we headed over to the Lodge for the rangers talk about the night sky and then to the rear of the Visitor’s Center where four volunteers had their HUGE telescopes set-up.  I was a bit put aside by the shear number of folks there (100’s) but after an hour the crowd had dwindled to 10 or 20 folks.   Michael was in heaven, excitedly coming to find me and telling me that I needed to visit this telescope or that one to see this galaxy or that one, this globular cluster or that one.  It was fun to see these night-objects, which were so easy to spot in this oh is so dark and clear sky in Bryce; it is an astronomy’s dream-sky.  During this evening Mark kept telling me that it was time to go back to the camp since he was tired and Michael kept asking us to look at one more object and that we couldn’t leave yet.  Finally at 11:30pm the Dark Ranger called it quits and asked the volunteer’s to pack things up.  Michael and the one volunteer continued to look at objects and I know he would have stayed all night.

In the morning we hiked 11 miles on the Fairyland Trail.  Up and down and around and over; the trail took us past one beautiful and colorful hoodoo after another.  Tired and exhausted we finally made it to the General Store where the boys enjoyed ice cream and a pretzel.  Mark requested that every hike should end like this.

Sunday morning we  attended a bird hike, all of 1-mile in length it was just what we all needed after the previous long hike.  The ranger pointed out one bird after another and by the end of the two hours we had seen 22 new birds.   A couple on the outing asked if we homeschool–their daughter hs in SC, lucky woman.  They were so supportive of hs’ing and had just had their one grand daughter with them for 12 days showing her some of the west.    After a lunch of pizza from the General Store we did a little 5 mile hike through Navajo Trail and The Queen’s Garden.  Nice but a bit hot.  Tomorrow morning we pull out of here and head off to Zion National Park.