BryceCanyon

 SURPRISE: Bryce isn’t really a canyon but only looks like a canyon. Its enchanting facade is displaced by two major faults that make one side to the other a seeming chasm. 

• When asked by tourists and travelers what he thought about homesteading here, Ebenezer Bryce, a mid-19th-century Mormon, declared, “It’s a hell of a place to lose a cow."

• Although it’s difficult to imagine, the original landscape that defined this northernmost sector of the Colorado Plateau was once an ancient lakebed. In time, the changing geophysical events caused by plate tectonic and mountain-building activities dissipated the water, and when dried out,  erosion set in and fabricated the wide-angle vista seen today. 

• The varying tincture of Bryce's eroded features is caused by iron oxide, also known as hematite, a mineral causing the predominate and mesmerizing pink to red facade from the rim to the floor of the off-setting faults.

• From the prehistoric standpoint and perspective, Southern Paiutes from the Great Basin Culture settled in this region a couple of centuries before the Spaniards arrived in 1540. They believed Bryce’s hoodoos were the “Legend People who were turned into stone by the so-called trickster, “Coyote."