Gorgeous vistas - extraordinary natural beauty - epic landscapes - they make me happy and high.
In a time when there seems to be no end to America’s brokenness and failings, its greed and hoarding of resources, the National Parks remind us that we’re not total garbage. Our country contains immense beauty, and can pull off nurturing it and making it accessible.
Recently we took a family trip to Bryce Canyon, a park known for its orange hues and its tall, thin rock spires formed by erosion, which are called hoodoos, and we were gobsmacked by its otherworldly beauty.
Bryce Canyon is small compared to other national parks but it still took us a half day to sort out how to approach it. The folks at the Visitor Center recommended the Sunset or Sunrise trail, and after parking, we sort of stretched out our maps and scrunched our faces looking for these trails before realizing we were… on them. A half hour later, a storm came in and we were pelted by hail stones! Nature: She’s moody.
The next day we found our way to the various view points in the park and settled on a The Bristlecone Loop Trail, one that at 9000 feet, offered 300 mile views. It’s categorized as an easy trail that takes 23 minutes but it took us at least an hour with stops and starts and there were pain points. I carried my little one for most of it. My husband had a hard time with the altitude. The Park embeds trails with medallions that kids can look for - if they find three, they get a prize, and my older daughter is at a place in her life, third grade, where she is about a billion percent invested in getting the prize, whatever it may be. We had a bunch of conversations about how when you’re going with a group, you have to go at the pace of the person in the group who needs to go the most slow; and to be gracious about it, because some day that person will be you. Who knows what permeated. But the experience was deeply moving to me - I look back on it with such pride and wonder, like we visited another planet. And on the ride home we sang songs the whole way, a departure from the norm, where my kids are on screens in the back seat.
I’m increasingly - massively - creeped out by screens and what they’ve done to the fabric of our relationships and interior lives, so getting off screens and into nature was one of my main goals/hopes I had for the trip. I decided we’d “glamp” at Under Canvas, where there is no WIFI. I left my lap top at home. We slept in canvas tents, on lovely beds, and fed a wood fireplace to stay warm with overnight temperatures in the 30s.
If you have young kids you know that a vacation isn’t exactly a vacation - you may never actually decompress while still on it.
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