Bryce Canyon has one of the best night skies in North America, so of course it was cloudy for most of both nights we were there. Each evening we caught maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes of clear skies and stars and we saw the Milky Way as best as I’ve seen it in years.
It’s the evenings at Bryce that I really want to talk about. The days gave us wonderful sights, like the natural bridge and Pirate Point and this really spooky tree and every sight from an overlook anywhere.
Bryce has an obtainable beauty to me. The Grand Canyon is so huge and distant- it still looked painted to me, like someone had figured out a lovely backdrop and placed it by a cliff. It was a picture you can fall to your death into. Bryce still had that height factor, but at least my eyes could handle the realness of what I was seeing. The evenings at the camp site allowed me some time to reflect on that.
I don’t go camping. It’s not that I’m opposed to it, it’s that I don’t have any equipment (we borrowed a lot from Joy’s grandmother) and I don’t have anyone to go with. Plus I never really saw the appeal. But at our campground at Bryce, there was a family with guitars and other strings, guys playing frisbee, a Canadian making friends with a Korean couple, a pair of French friends, and several families with adorable children. You could sit by your picnic table and listen to all sorts of music and conversation, just bask in the general atmosphere.
We had a campfire and made quesadillas, hot dogs, s’mores, and hashbrowns over our two days out there and let the sun set and the stars come out over the campfire smoke. It was… pleasant. I could see why people would want to do this. And of course it rained some our second day at Bryce and of course we missed some of the stars, but I’ll keep the campfire evenings as my memories of Bryce.
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