12 Legs Travel

One thing I learned while visiting Bryce Canyon National Park is that people have been describing it in print since 1916, when articles about the area appeared in magazines owned by the Santa Fe and Union Pacific railroads. That’s around the same time tourists started driving their automobiles up to the Colorado Plateau to gawk at the park’s gallery of sandstone hoodoos. (A side note: According to a roadside marker on Highway 89, those old cars had to climb the steep road to Bryce Canyon in reverse because their gravity-fed fuel systems couldn’t get gas to the engine the other way around.)

My point is this: Our national parks have been around nearly as long as the combustion engine, and rivers of ink have been devoted to their wonderfulness. Ken Burns alone spent six years filming his 12-hour PBS special about the park system, and a Google search for “national parks” on the Interweb turns up 188 million hits.

Jill and I were discussing this particular reality the other night at the Canyon Lodge, in Panguitch, Utah, as we sipped cheap bourbon from disposable motel cups. After several minutes of semi-serious deliberation, we decided we are not going to kill ourselves trying to out-Burns Ken Burns. Instead, we’re going to treat our visits to national parks like mini-vacations within our “working honeymoon” and document them in travelogue style: with snapshots and narration. (Only our travelogues will be two or three minutes — not two or three hours like the ones my parents attended in the ’70s.)

To be fair to Jill, I should point out that all of the photos contained in the slideshow below were shot in less-than-ideal light (read: not at dawn or dusk), and a few of them were snapped by me using the little Canon PowerShot D10 Jill gave me for Christmas. (It’s snowproof!)

It should also be noted that both of us hate the sound of our own voices. We can only hope that Bryce’s epic beauty outweighs our aural insufferability.

—Scott