Bryce Canyon National Monument

Bryce Canyon National Monument

Probably Bryce Canyon is the most astonishing blend of exquisite beauty and grotesque grandeur that the forces of erosion have ever produced. In one aspect it is a gorgeous lacework design of frost and fire, the playground of sylphs and fairies; in another it is a smoldering inferno habited by goblins and demons; again, it seems as if some cataclysmic force had shuffled together a dozen oriental cities into one spectacular municipality. The joyous prevailing colors of this immense bowl of luminous, flickering filigree heaped with jewels, are pink, red, orange, purple, yellow and white; to these may be added as many other tints and tones as one has patience to distinguish. Though Bryce is immense, yet it is intimate, presenting to the eye a scintillating coral intaglio of bizarre but definite plan, overspread with a halo of lavender mist.

It is not a canyon, but an amphitheatre of horseshoe shape, graven 1,000 feet deep into the sandstones on the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, at the headwaters of the Pahreah River; it is approximately two miles wide and three miles long and its rim is 8,000 feet in elevation. The area of Bryce Canyon National Monument, which was created in 1923 and is administered by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, is 7,440 acres.

In the maze of architecture uprising from Bryce’s sunken gardens, where pine, spruce and manzanita spread their greens, there are the styles of China and Egypt, of the Toltecs, Incas, Greeks and Goths; but stronger, perhaps, is the resemblance to those decaying Dravidian temples, bursting with decoration, in the jungles of Burmah and Java: pagodas, mosques, minarets, kiosks, fairy castles, cathedrals, theatres, flying buttresses and stairways, suspension bridges, niched and fenestrated walls, peristyles, colonnades, lotus columns, leaning towers, slim spires, massive pylons, pyramids, obelisks, pilasters capped by tilted disks, cones supporting cones, organs, shrines and altars. All of the architects of antiquity might have drawn their inspiration from the silent cities of Bryce.

And these dream-tissue cities in the realm of muted mystery have weird inhabitants statued in variegated stone: giants and gnomes, popes and queens, kneeling penitents, companies of marching soldiers, gargoyles, fauns, satyrs, nymphs, witches, horses, dogs, lizards, frogs and turtles—figures that seem to move, sway and posture in the flashing play of light and shadow. The least vivid imagination needs a checkrein.

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The Cathedral, Bryce Canyon