Some places have names that sound as though the tourism department worked a little too hard.
Fairyland Point is not one of them.
Standing at the northern end of Bryce Canyon National Park, itis hard to find a better word for what spreads out below. The landscape looks less like something carved by ordinary erosion than something imagined—ranks of hoodoos, towers, fins and broken walls in shades of cream, gold, orange and red.
And then there is the scale.
A photograph can show the formations, but it struggles to convey just how much country is out there. In the foreground, individual pinnacles rise from the slopes. Beyond them are ridges and valleys, then still more ridges fading toward the horizon. What first looks like a collection of unusual rocks turns out to be an entire landscape built from them.
Fairyland Point sits a little apart from the busier overlooks along Bryce Canyon’s main scenic drive. That seems appropriate. The view feels less like looking into a single amphitheater and more like looking across a vast piece of southern Utah.
The hoodoos are the stars, of course, but they are only part of the picture. Dark green pines cling to slopes and ledges that seem barely able to hold them. Farther away, the colors soften into muted bands beneath a huge western sky.
On the day this photograph was taken, the clouds added another layer. Sunlight broke through in places while other parts of the landscape remained in shadow. That constantly changing light is part of what makes Bryce so difficult to photograph—and so hard to stop photographing.
Geologists can explain what happened here: layers of sediment, uplift, frost, rain, and millions of years of erosion. Water entered cracks, froze, and expanded. Softer rock disappeared faster than harder rock. Walls became fins. Fins became windows and eventually isolated spires.
All perfectly reasonable.
Then you stand at Fairyland Point and look at the result.
“Reasonable” isn’t the first word that comes to mind.
Fairyland will do.
Photo: October 5, 2015
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