Ebenezer Bryce and the Canyon He Called a Hell of a Place

Twenty-five miles east of Panguitch, the Paunsaugunt Plateau drops away into one of the strangest landscapes on earth. Thousands of delicate limestone spires crowd together in a natural amphitheater whose rim runs for miles at an elevation of roughly nine thousand feet. The colors shift from cream to yellow to orange to deep red as the iron and manganese content of the rock varies layer by layer. The entire formation looks as if it was designed by someone who had never seen anything like it before, because nothing quite like it exists anywhere else on the planet.

The Mormon settler Ebenezer Bryce arrived in the area in the eighteen seventies and built a homestead and a trail into the canyon to retrieve his cattle when they wandered in. Visitors who asked him what he thought of the place encountered a man with a gift for understatement. His reported reply has become famous: it is a hell of a place to lose a cow. The formation took his name by popular usage long before it received any formal designation.

Bryce Canyon was declared a national monument in nineteen twenty-three and elevated to national park status in nineteen twenty-eight. The park brought visitors to this remote corner of southern Utah on roads that passed through Panguitch, converting the quiet county seat into a waypoint on the national parks circuit. For a community that had survived two abandonments and decades of subsistence agriculture, the discovery that tourists would travel hundreds of miles to see the rock formations next door was a kind of economic revelation. Panguitch had always been in the right place. It just took the national parks system to prove it.