Queen's Garden and Navajo Loop

Welcome to the Queen's Garden and Navajo Loop, the most popular hike in Bryce Canyon: about three miles, two to three hours, starting at Sunrise Point. We'll go down Queen's Garden, cross the canyon floor, and climb out on the Two Bridges side of the Navajo Loop to Sunset Point, then take the easy rim path back.

Wall Street, the other way up, is closed this season after summer storm damage. I'll tell you a story at each spot and stay quiet in between. The trail starts at about eight thousand feet, so pace yourself.

This is Sunrise Point. Bryce isn't really a canyon: no river carved it. It's a chain of amphitheaters eaten into the edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, a Paiute name meaning home of the beavers.

Long before anyone called it Bryce, the Paiute people knew this place. In 1936, a Paiute elder told a park naturalist the old story of how the hoodoos came to be. Before there were any Indians, he said, the Legend People lived here. They were bad, so Coyote turned them all into rocks. You can see them now: some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding on to others. You can see their faces, with paint on, just as they were before they became stone. The Paiute name for this place, he said, means red painted faces.

As you walk down, you'll be walking among them.

The rock around you was once the bottom of a lake, about fifty million years ago: Lake Claron. Its muds and lime hardened into these pink and white layers, and the whole region was later lifted thousands of feet.

What carves them now is ice. On more than half the nights of the year, the temperature crosses freezing. Water creeps into cracks, freezes, expands by about nine percent, and splits the rock a little more. Then the rain, slightly acidic, softens the edges.

Frost to break it, rain to round it. Every hoodoo you'll see today was made that way.

Meet the Queen. Early visitors thought this hoodoo looked like Queen Victoria, crowned and robed, presiding over the garden of spires below her. That's how this trail got its name: Queen's Garden.

Naming hoodoos is a long tradition here. Look around and you'll find your own: a castle, a camel, a family walking in a row. It's the same game the Paiute described when they spoke of the Legend People, frozen mid-step.

Whatever you see, the Queen has been holding court for a very long time. But she's made of the same soft stone as everything else, so she won't reign forever.

Let's talk about color. The oranges, reds and yellows come from iron in the rock, oxidized: rust, essentially. The lavender and purple tones come from manganese. The whiter bands have less of either.

Down here, the trees take over: ponderosa pines with orange, puzzle-piece bark. On a warm day, many people say the bark smells like vanilla or butterscotch. Watch for Steller's jays, with their dark crests, and mule deer, named for their big ears.

It's a different world below the rim: cooler, greener and quieter.

This is the junction where the Queen's Garden meets the Navajo Loop. Normally, many hikers head up through Wall Street from here: a narrow slot between walls hundreds of feet high, where Douglas firs have reached for that thin strip of sky for centuries.

This year, Wall Street is closed. Storms in late July damaged the trail, and in August a flash flood stranded hikers on several trails in the park. So we climb out on the Two Bridges side instead.

If you see storms building, don't linger on the canyon floor. Water collects fast down here.

These are the Two Bridges: openings in a thin wall of rock, where daylight shines through.

The rock here forms long, thin walls called fins. Frost and rain find the weak spots and work through them until a window opens. Windows widen into bridges. Bridges collapse, and what's left standing becomes hoodoos.

Fin, window, bridge, hoodoo: the whole life story of Bryce, in one place.

That's Thor's Hammer. The block on top is harder rock, a cap that shields the softer column beneath it from rain, like an umbrella.

One day the neck will get too thin and the hammer will fall. It's happened to famous hoodoos before. The park's rim wears back by roughly one to four feet every century, and new hoodoos are always being carved from behind.

So take a good look. You're seeing Thor's Hammer during its moment.

You made it to Sunset Point. Well climbed.

One more story. In 1875, a Scottish-born pioneer named Ebenezer Bryce settled in the valley below. He built a road up to the plateau for timber, and locals called the amphitheater at the end of it Bryce's canyon. He's remembered for one line about it: a hell of a place to lose a cow. By 1880 his family had moved on to Arizona, but his name stayed.

The railroad brought the crowds in the 1920s, and Bryce became a national park in 1928. The easy rim trail leads back to Sunrise Point, about half a mile. Thanks for walking with me.