Tropic and the Ditch That Made It
Near Bryce Canyon, Utah
Just east of the park, the little town of Tropic exists because of one of the boldest water schemes of pioneer Utah. When Mormon families tried to farm this bench in the late eighteen hundreds, they hit a simple wall. The land was good, but there was almost no water.
So they decided to steal a river from the other side of a plateau. Beginning in eighteen eighty nine, roughly forty men with hand tools carved a canal about ten miles long. It reached up to the East Fork of the Sevier River, on the far plateau, and pulled its water over the cliffs above Bryce Canyon and down into the valley, a drop of some fifteen hundred feet.
On the twenty third of May, eighteen ninety two, the water finally flowed, and it has flowed ever since. Ebenezer Bryce, whose name the canyon carries, built a small irrigation canal of his own in the Paria Valley before he left for Arizona. The town founded on that water was named Tropic, reportedly for the warmth its boosters hoped to promise, and it grew from about fifteen families into the eastern gateway of the park.
Nearly every green field you see around Tropic today still drinks from that hand dug ditch.
