"An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity." Martin Luther King Jr. In honoring the life of one of our nation's greatest leaders, Bryce Canyon, along with all national parks, is free to enter today. Whether or not you'll be visiting, we wish you the courage and clarity to live today with love. (pd)

The picture you see on the glass [within the camera] is upside down and left to right. So when I look at stuff I can say, 'okay that’s a hoodoo', but the minute it gets upside-down you can’t recognize things, so it becomes more about visual relationships. At least I seem to become more sensitive to it. I grew up in India, and when I was much younger and much thinner I used to go climbing in the Himalayas, so I’m used to these really big mountains, and I thought that really resonates to me. The first time I came here I realized, man, this is like an inversion of mountains. It looks flat, but then you come here and boom, you get this. It’s one thing to intellectually say it’s an interesting place, but it’s more than that. Every time I come here I feel my batteries recharged. (pd)

When snow falls and winds blow, leave the plateau edge to the trees. Snow cornices are formed when winter wind blowing across the plateau creates a delicate ledge of snow suspended in nothing but air beyond the rim. Stay on the trail and respect seasonal closures to avoid these wintry trap doors. (pd)

Snow has closed the Wall St side of the Navajo Loop, as well as Fairyland and Paria roads. Rainbow Point scenic drive will remain closed until snow can be removed. A big thank you to our maintenance plow crews, who are currently busy at work keeping roads in the main amphitheater clear for traffic. (pd)

A snowy day expected here. Possible accumulation of 5” by tomorrow. Rainbow Road currently closed just past turn off for Bryce Point. Drive slowly and be safe! (pd)

Have you seen piles of wood during your visit and wondered what they were? These are called "hand piles" and are a key part of the park fire management plan. Controlled burning of the park's approximately 250 hand piles is scheduled to resume as soon as next week. Without fire, forests grow very densely and are forced to compete for available resources, making them more vulnerable to blight and disease. Subsequent accumulation creates fuel for potential wildfire, and necessitates periodic gathering and burning of dead, stricken, and overcrowded growth. Beginning as soon as Monday, January 8th burning of piles located primarily at Rainbow Point, and secondary piles in park housing and maintenance areas, will resume. Smoke from the fuel reduction burns may be visible to park visitors and local residents, but should produce only minor, localized impacts. The piles may smolder for a few days after ignition, but fire staff will closely monitor them until declared out. Thanks to the hard work of our Resource Management crews, Utah Conservation Corps, members of Americorps, and volunteers from the Sierra Club we have been able to drastically reduce the fuel load in the park's forests, and maintain the integrity of this fire-dependent ecosystem. More information can be found on our webpage: https://www.nps.gov/brca/learn/news/newsreleases.htm (pd)

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” Henry David Thoreau Photo of the sun rising near Sunset Point by Jim Su (www.sharetheexperience.org) (pd)

Due to a lack of snow, all trails and roads in the park remain open. There's a chance of it falling this weekend though, and one little Bryce Canyon resident is already dressed and ready for the occasion. The long-tailed weasel (Mustela frenata) is a year-round resident of most of North America. Hunting in all seasons both day and night, it is a notoriously ferocious predator of mice, rats, squirrels, chipmunks, shrews, rabbits, moles, and other small mammals--the burrows of which it also makes its home. A quick bound and an unexpected strike to the neck has been used to overcome birds, reptiles, fish, and insects too. After seizing upon their prey, the small claws and slender body of the long-tailed weasel wrap quickly and tightly until a fatal bite can be delivered. Unlucky rodents, which are sometimes plentiful, are subsequently cache'd for winter feeding; though as the weasel prefers live meals they are not always eaten. In winter, long-tailed weasels in the northern areas of their range will molt, turning their brown fur to white over the course of a few weeks. This transformation is genetically determined, meaning that a northern weasel taken south will still molt white in winter, while a southern weasel brought north would remain brown year-round. So while the park may not be white during your visit this year, natural contrasts may make the bright winter coats of our long-tailed weasels stand out a little better. Maybe just enough for you to catch a glimpse as good as this one, seen last week near the main park road. Photo Credit: Sreemala Das Majumder (pd)

Bryce Canyon National Park, a geologic landscape unique unto itself, is situated at the boundaries of more than a few major geologic provinces: the Grand Staircase to the south, the Colorado Plateau largely to the east, the High Plateaus of Utah to the north, and the Basin and Range Province to the west. Today we continue our exploration of the ways in which the surrounding lands help tell the remarkable story of this national park. Images from "Shadows of Time" available from the Bryce Canyon Natural History Association: http://shop.brycecanyon.org/product-p/130.htm 4. THE BASIN AND RANGE PROVINCE Approaching the Basin and Range Province from either east or west is to travel a rhythmic series of upheavals; immense blocks of rock first broken and compressed east by the underlying subduction of the Farallon plate around 70 million years ago, then finally slowly stretched and extended back west amidst the great volcanic activity that surrounded this area beginning 20 million years ago. The compression and re-extension of these rocks takes place along north-south trending normal faults (extensional, i.e. down and away) that exist on either side of nearly every mountain range they've formed: from the Wasatch Mountains and the Grand Tetons in the east, to the Sierra Nevada in the west. Clarence Dutton, the geologist who named the Grand Staircase, colorfully described these north-south trending ranges as an "army of caterpillars marching toward Mexico". The ranges, known as "horsts", are the uptilted sides of these still extending blocks, and are interspersed by "grabens", the down-tilted basins that fill slowly with sediment washed down in grand alluvial fans from the sometimes 13,000+ ft peaks on either side. Life that thrives at these higher, cooler, and wetter altitudes is ultimately isolated to its home mountains by the low-lying, dry basins, leading to the emergence of endemic, or unique species. It has been theorized that the modern appearance of Nevada is much what New Jersey may have looked like as the Atlantic began to form, as basin and range extension continues to this very day. The eastern-most normal fault of Basin and Range region is the Paunsagunt fault, found along the eastern edge of Bryce Canyon National Park. Extensional forces that tie us to the Sierra Nevada 400 miles west, have pulled us down and away from land to the east, and resulted in the titled-up appearance of features like Sinking Ship, as well as our position approximately 2,000 feet lower than our sister rocks located on the Aquarius Plateau just outside the park. (pd)

Bryce Canyon National Park, a geologic landscape unique unto itself, is situated at the boundaries of more than a few major geologic provinces: the Grand Staircase to the south, the Colorado Plateau largely to the east, the High Plateaus of Utah to the north, and the Basin and Range Province to the west. Today we continue our exploration of the ways in which the surrounding lands help tell the remarkable story of this national park. Images from "Shadows of Time" available from the Bryce Canyon Natural History Association: http://shop.brycecanyon.org/product-p/130.htm 3. THE HIGH PLATEAUS OF UTAH (Best seen from: Inspiration Point) Approximately 28 million years ago, after the 30-50 million year old lake sediments of Lake Claron (later to become Bryce Canyon) were deposited, one of the largest volcanic fields in the western United States would explode from the lands north of the park. Magma melted from Farallon-related tectonic movement below worked its way through fractures in the rock and bursting skyward, created the black mountains of the Sevier Plateau, colorful Big Rock Candy Mountain (yes it exists, near Sevier UT), and the Markagunt volcanic fields seen when travelling highways 14 and 143 near Cedar Breaks. Huge expanses of basaltic and rhyolitic volcanic rocks are found atop nearly all of the three fingers of high plateaus that descend south from the southern extent of the Wasatch Mountains at the western margin of the Colorado Plateau. The magnitude of these eruptions were such that rippling shockwaves travelling through the sedimentary layers below. A profound effect of these shockwaves was to create new East/West-running thrust faults, as rock layers closest to the eruptions were shoved over layers further south. One of the most prominent of these is the long-inactive Ruby's Inn Thrust Fault, which roughly parallels Highway 12. Here the Cretaceous, dinosaur fossil-rich Wahweap formation (approx 80 million years old) was compressed and slid atop rocks half its age. Combined with another major fault in the area, this section of Highway 12 is by far the park's most complex geologic zone, and creates unusual formations such as hoodoos with their oldest rocks at the top. Tomorrow: our final installment, how the high plateaus and their intervening valleys formed, the oceanic expanses of Nevada, and that deep-down westward tugging everything here once felt. (pd)

Fee-free days for 2018 have been announced! January 15: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day April 21: First Day of National Park Week September 22: National Public Lands Day November 11: Veterans Day The annual $80 America the Beautiful National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass allows unlimited entrance to more than 2,000 federal recreation areas, including all national parks that charge an entrance fee. There are also free or discounted passes available for senior citizens, current members of the military, families of fourth grade students, and disabled citizens. Any of these passes can be purchased upon your visit to Bryce Canyon. (pd)

Bryce Canyon National Park, a geologic landscape unique unto itself, is situated at the boundaries of more than a few major geologic provinces: the Grand Staircase to the south, the Colorado Plateau largely to the east, the High Plateaus of Utah to the north, and the Basin and Range Province to the west. Today we continue our exploration of the ways in which the surrounding lands help tell the remarkable story of this national park. All images from "Shadows of Time" available from the Bryce Canyon Natural History Association: http://shop.brycecanyon.org/product-p/130.htm 2. THE COLORADO PLATEAU (Best seen from: Farview Point) As Pangea splits apart beginning around 200 million years ago, the layers of the Grand Staircase reveal to us the great variations in environment that come into being as this region of the continent drifts north and west. Over these millions of years the moving continent encounters oceanic plates and island chains which will subduct beneath and collide against it, leading to a series of mountain-building events giving rise to mountains such as the Sierra Nevada. These major mountain-building events are known as "orogenies". Approximately 70 million years ago, our drifting continent begins to slip above an oceanic plate we now call the Farallon Plate (named for the islands found off the west coast of California). Owing either to the rate of movement, or the thickness of the Farallon Plate, this plate slides rather shallowly beneath the continent, instead of plunging at its edge. Moving beneath us, it crumples up land to the west that will later form modern-day Nevada (see this Friday's post), and in the rising heat of its relatively slow dissolution beneath the modern four-corners area, begins to create a broad area of uplift, slowly raising the province to its present-day elevations. This subduction event is known as the Laramide Orogeny, which also leads to the creation of the Rocky Mountains. Though deformation in the 130,000 square mile region we now call the Colorado Plateau was minimal, the movement of the Farallon Plate nevertheless creates in this area bulges known as monoclines and upwarps, which by approximately 50 million years ago begin to provide the sources for run-off water and iron and magnesium-rich sediments that accumulate in a lower-lying basin existing in the present-day location of Bryce Canyon National Park. Over the next 20 million years these upwarps and neighboring mountains will feed a shallow, freshwater lake system known in this area as Lake Claron, depositing a variety of sediments from soft mudstones to sandstones to iron rich limey clays and purer white limestones in layers that will later be clearly evidenced in the varied forms of hoodoos. Perhaps one of the most beautiful remnants of the Farallon Plate-induced upwarps and bulges that fed Bryce Canyon's freshwater lakes can be found in Capitol Reef National Park. Here a once grand monocline has eroded down to reveal along its former margin the many layers that composed it, tilted up along a 100-mile "reef" known as the Waterpocket Fold. The incredible geology exposed here results in a unique opportunity: rather than driving 100 miles south from Bryce Canyon to witness the many layers of the Grand Staircase stepping down, one could drive about 45 minutes west to east through Capitol Reef, and experience these millions of years of planetary history like the tilted pages of a book. Of course the only step of the Staircase you won't find are Bryce's Pink Cliffs, considering that at that time the area of Capitol Reef was shedding sediment rather than gathering it. Tomorrow: the story of the High Plateaus of Utah, and the violent world that crowns them with black mountains. (pd)