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From Nile Guide, for travelers by locals website (Bryce Canyon Travel Blog):
1. Interesting fact: Water, ice, and gravity are the natural forces that formed the geological “hoodoos” that make Bryce Canyon unique.
2. Fun fact: This park is named after Ebenezer Bryce, who started ranching the area in 1875. Upon showing the canyons to visitors, he is said to have remarked, “It’s a hell of a place to lose a cow.”
3. Cool fact: Prairie dogs were wiped out from the area in the 1950s. In the 1970s, they were reintroduced.
4. Bryce Canyon’s rocks are among the youngest of those on the Colorado Plateau, dating back a mere 65 million years ago to the Cretaceous period.
5. Interesting fact: Paiute Indian history says the colorful, wildly-shaped hoodoos were “Legend People” who were turned into stone by the trickster god Coyote.
6. Fun fact: On a clear day, visibility from Bryce Canyon can exceed 100 miles.
7. Cool fact: Most rural parts of the U.S. have 2500 stars visible on any given clear night. At Bryce Canyon, that number jumps to a whopping 7500. Currently, these essential remaining dark night skies are being threatened by mining in the nearby community of Alton. The mining will potentially adversely affect the clear skies. It is a hugely contentious situation.
8. There are 400 hardy plant species in this high desert environment.
9. Cool fact: Lions and foxes and bears, oh my! Foxes, mountain lions, and black bears inhabit Bryce Canyon, although they are rarely seen.
10. Bryce Canyon is situated along the southeastern rim of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. The word paunsaugunt comes from the Paiute Indian language. It means place or home of the beavers.
11. Geological fact: Bryce Canyon isn’t actually a canyon. It’s actually a natural amphitheater.
12. Weird fact: Marmots, a high-elevation mammal found here, are often called “rockchucks” by the local population.
This morning’s tree song was mesmerizing. Their movement and expression held me. Swaying, bending, rustling, growing, being. I hung out with them for a long time, seeing with my heart and feeling with my eyes. Still , I watched through the window as they danced…
Then, as if by magic, I found these words by Hermann Hesse that I’d never read before. He understood the dancing, singing, and wisdom filled trees.
At the end of the words by Hesse is my gallery of trees…
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Hermann Hesse, Bäume. Betrachtungen und Gedichte
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farm boy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
