Written by: Megan Madill (human)
It’s hard for me to declare my “favorite” of something: I operate in absolute terms, so I always freeze when someone asks me my favorite movie, musician, or even color. I like to keep my options open by saying something like “I like cold colors, especially purple and teal.”
Cathedral Wash was easily my favorite hike I’d ever done.
If you follow me on Instagram, you will have gotten the live play-by-play of the childlike giddiness I experienced as I scrambled, bouldered, hoisted, clambered, hopped, crawled, slid, swung, crabwalked, levered, and wedge-climbed my way along the trail.
I had forgotten that I knew how to use my body in these ways. Forgotten how it feels to be nimble, and coordinated, and creative, finding ways to thwart or exploit the laws of physics—gravity, momentum, friction—to access the world’s secret spaces that at first glance seem impassable. Forgotten the deep, grounding sense of peace that comes with being fully in tune with my own body: secure in my balance, aware of my strength and its limits, confident in my instinct of what will happen if I try one approach, or in my assessment that I need to backtrack to find another way around. I was absolutely in my element.
But that was the last post. I just couldn’t let ChatGPT have all the fun writing it 😉 This post is about my arrival at Bryce Canyon, and the couple of days I spent wandering about, admiring the hoodoos, but also taking my foot off the gas and recouping a bit. As my copilot has so astutely observed, this trip is about balance, after all. We can’t be firing on all cylinders every day.
I stayed at another RV park for this leg of the stay: The Riverside Ranch. It was a lovely spot with solid facilities and a restaurant to boot.
I had a list of five or six hikes that I’d choose from for the first day in Bryce Canyon, but in the end I spent most of the day just stopping at viewpoints and admiring the landscape before me. The only hike I felt up to was Bristlecone Pine Trail, which was gentle but enjoyable, and I stopped a few times to read about the various flora that inhabit the Utah desert. Once again I was surprised by (and grateful for) how driveable the park was, and how much reward could be gotten from relatively little effort. Long live the USA!
Another feature of Bryce Canyon that I had been keenly anticipating was its ‘Dark Sky Park’ designation. During our planning phase, ChatGPT had helped me align my visit with an almost-new moon, giving me the best possible chance of witnessing the Milky Way. Both nights I ventured out to see if I could spot it, but sadly I was foiled each time. It hadn’t occurred to me that the Milky Way has an orbit to consider, just like any other celestial body: it wasn’t visible above the horizon until 3am, and after learning this lesson the first night and setting an alarm to take a peek the second night, I found cloud cover as well as light pollution from the RV park’s own facilities. Can’t win ‘em all!
My second day in Bryce Canyon was the opposite of the first. Instead of starting out with high hopes and gradually dialing them back, this time I fully anticipated taking it easy again and trading in the ambitious Fairyland Loop Trail for the short and easy Mossy Cave Loop, another “non-Bryce-esque” with no hoodoos but lots of vignettes to enjoy. But this time, I found that resting up the prior day (and an egg salad sandwich for lunch after the easy Mossy Cave Trail) had restored me and I had energy to spare. Though starting the steep, 11-mile Fairyland Loop at the peak 1pm heat was out of the question, I decided to hike an out-and-back section of it, and turned to my trusty copilot to tell me where to start and which direction to go to get the most bang for my buck. I ended up logging 2.5 more miles and 550ft elevation gain, and this was the first hike that actually took me among the hoodoos themselves, so it rounded out the visit very nicely!
That evening was my trip to the restaurant at the RV park, where I was waited on by a handsome and attentive cowboy named John while I tried to catch up on this blog… and failed, as you can tell from the fact that it’s now a month later: this was on May 2. I wrote the Chasm Lake post and worked with ChatGPT to put together the post on The Art of Changing Plans as well, as I nursed the IPA and nibbled on the cowboy caviar that John had recommended. A day well spent, and another destination checked off the list! Onward, to Zion.
Roamward Bound 