If you want to see our real place in the world, it may make you feel insignificant. It’s all around us, but never more than in our American treasure, our national parks. We recently got back from spending a few days visiting Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. The majesty of nature is overwhelming. It’s as if you traveling back thousands of years when the earth was first forming. You’re struck by the enormity of the rocks and cliffs that envelop you, and the colors. The greens, browns, grays, and most of all the reds. The reds range from a deep rust to coral. The texture of the stone has gradations from smooth to ridges that look like they were created by a baker putting the finishing touches on the icing of a wedding cake.
The parks are part of the Grand Staircase. An immense stretch of sedimentary rock that stretches from Bryce Canyon through Zion in Utah and into the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Geologist Charles Dutton first realized nature’s huge staircase rose from the bottom of the Grand Canyon northward in cliffs that formed giant steps. They were named for the colors of the rock: Pink, Grey, White, Vermilion, and Chocolate. Everything in Zion takes its life from the Virgin River. The flow of water created cliffs and towers that have stood for centuries. Zion means “promised land”. It calls itself a sanctuary in the middle of a desert. Semi-nomadic Native Americans called Basketmaker Anasazi started living there eight thousand years ago. That’s how time and place are measured here, in thousands of years. It’s said you look up to the cliffs of Zion as you drive through. The earth tones reach into the blue sky and you’re enveloped by nature and its silence. You can hear the quiet.
We then traveled north to Bryce Canyon National Park with its natural rock formations called “hoodoos” formed by frost and stream erosion. Bryce was settled by Mormon pioneers in the 1850s and named after Ebenezer Bryce who settled there with his wife and twelve kids in 1874. We humans imagine figures in the giant rock formations like “Thor’s Torch”, “Two Chipmunks” “Snoopy” and even “Cinderella” and her evil sisters. You look down on Bryce from the rim that varies from eight to nine thousand feet. The sunlight and shadows change the view as the day goes on, and the sun warms the chilly autumn morning air which can be in the upper 30s.
Words and pictures cannot truly capture the experience of standing in the middle of this world like no other. It brings home the importance of our responsibility to respect and preserve this gift of nature. It makes us all part of something bigger than ourselves. Stephen Mather was the National Parks Director in the 1920s. He said, “The parks do not belong to one state or to one section…”(they are)…”national properties in which every citizen has a vested interest; they belong as much to the man of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of Florida, as they do to the people of California, Wyoming and of Arizona.”
It should be a call for all of us to worship at these cathedrals of nature.
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