Mossy Cave and the Man Made Waterfall
Near Bryce Canyon, Utah
On the quiet eastern edge of the park, along a short and easy trail, there is a waterfall that looks entirely wild and is entirely artificial. This is the Tropic Ditch, and the little cascade here is water the pioneers of Tropic diverted more than a century ago. When those roughly forty settlers finished their ten mile canal in eighteen ninety two, they pulled the East Fork of the Sevier River out of its natural bed and sent it tumbling down Water Canyon toward their farms.
The stream you hear splashing over the ledge was placed there by human hands and hand tools, and it has been running through this canyon of hoodoos ever since. The trail also leads to its namesake, Mossy Cave, a shallow grotto where seeping groundwater keeps a hanging garden of green moss alive in the desert, and where in winter the drips freeze into a curtain of icicles. It is a small, strange lesson standing in one spot.
The hoodoos above you were carved by water and ice over unimaginable time, and the cheerful little waterfall below you was carved into the plan of a town in a single hard working season. Nature and settlers, both rerouting water through the same red rock.
