Bryce is fantasyland. Like at Mesa Verde, you drive on top of a plateau among the trees, stop at overlooks and look down into chasms that stop your heart. At Mesa Verde the chasms were heart-stoppingly deep canyons with the occasional cliff dwelling up high on the cliff face—how did they keep their children from falling off? At Bryce Canyon the canyons are also deep, deep, but filled with thousands of rock sculptures called “hoodoos” in pastel colors:
These photos are beautiful (this is a place where it would be difficult to take an uninteresting picture!), BUT you cannot possibly do the heart-stopping experience justice with a photo: you have to be there (I expect Doug’s favorite place, Banff, where he has taken some eye-popping photos, is the same). The eye sees huge pieces of space in 3 dimensions, without the compression of a wide-angle lens. If you set your lens at about the right distance to see things at life-size the camera only sees a small piece of the scene in front of you. The only way to approximate reality is to take a really wide-angle picture and then make a very large print or project it onto a screen.
We were there on a blindingly bright day. There were snow patches at the higher elevations. At several overlooks ravens would invite you to feed them, and you could almost (but not quite) touch them:
What solemn, ponderous birds! Impossible to not take them seriously, even though they were mooching--but with such dignity! Beautiful, glossy, very big, blacker-than-black birds with a piercing eye:
Nevermore!
Bryce should be on everyone’s bucket list. We are so grateful to have been there—this was Mary’s best place so far, she was almost as enthusiastic as me!
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