Last time we were in Bryce Canyon, Reuben C. Syrett owned everything but the national park itself. Circa 2005, Ruby had the deed to the sole hotel, a gigantic enterprise containing a vast gift shop, several booths peopled by enterprising souls offering various tours and services, and even the town post office. Oh, and that nightly rodeo across the street? That was Ruby’s, too. Almost twenty years later, Best Western has swooped in and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse, buying up Ruby’s place and putting up a twin hotel right across the street. Moreover, somebody has erected a large and ornate music palace nearby called Ebeneezer’s Barn and Grill, where the nightly dinner-theater crowd of 300+ scarfs down tasty barbecue and dances in the aisles to very good country music. There are worse places you could be on a Saturday night in Utah. There are cheaper places, too.
The excellent Queen’s Loop Trail in the Canyon is still packing in the hikers but it seems disturbingly steeper after all these years. This scenic pathway is the ultimate walk through Bryce’s famous hoodoos, those tall, slender rock spires which stand like sentinels in the Bryce Canyon Amphitheater. The hoodoos are dressed out in every possible shade of orange and a tiny bit of neon red, striking uniquely-shaped pinnacles seen nowhere else. Their creation is testimony to nature’s curious artistry, sculpted over millions of years using tools like wind, water and ice. Over time, their layers undergo the forces of frost wedging and erosion. Wedging occurs when water seeps into cracks in the rock and expands as it freezes, slowly breaking the rock apart. Erosion molds the rocks into fantastic shapes, exposing the colorful layers beneath. Hoodoo fans rise early in the Utah morning to greet the brilliant sunlight bouncing off these spectacular rocks.
Bryce Canyon is one of the few major national parks which doesn’t require reservations and still allows visitors to drive to most of the same areas they visited in 2005. The trick is finding a parking space if you arrive after 9 a.m. Best to jump on one of the park’s frequent free shuttles at the visitors’ center and leave the driving to them. The roomy buses travel just about anywhere you’d want to go and there’s very little wait for a ride. Maybe you’ll get a live-wire driver like 75-year-old Doris who’ll tell you about the day she ran into a black bear while changing clothes in the woods and had to run for her life half-naked. She was saved by a carload of Mormons who closed their eyes while returning her to safety. Okay, the driver squinted just a bit.
A Night At Ebeneezer’s
You can imagine the downside possibilities of an evening at a huge dinner-theater in Utah which serves up plenty of alcohol and a healthy ration of country music. But our sources tell us gunfights are rare, the crowd is congenial and despite the mess-hall-like servings, the food is delicious. All this was true on our evening at Ebeneezer’s Barn and Grill.
The way it works is a customer signs up for one of three dinners across the street at Ruby’s sometime during the day. Around 6:30, the huge parking lot at Ebeneezer’s starts filling up and temporary cowpokes begin meandering in to their pre-chosen tables in the overlarge hall. Then, while a mellow opening act provides entertainment, waiters steer diners to one side of the building where a very sprightly cafeteria crew pops dinner onto the plates with uncommon aplomb. The herders start with the four tables of eight at the front of the building and continue on until everyone is served, which takes a surprisingly brief 25 minutes. About 15 minutes later, the feature performers hit the stage. The whole procedures is as professional as it gets, no fuss, no muss. David Copperfield couldn’t do better.
Big Tim Gates, the lead vocalist of the house band is the consummate pro, a cagey showman of great experience, a commanding voice and a sense of humor. There may be an old country song somewhere he doesn’t know, but I doubt it. We got country music from every generation, backed by brilliant video and a fine band, which delighted in tossing guitar picks into the audience. If Gates and company showed up for seven nights in this neck of the woods I would attend every performance, they were that good.
For the cowboys in the crowd, the band offered pigtailed singer Heidi Weidrich of the thigh-high dress and eternal smile, which guaranteed that few old gaffers in the male audience (and a certain cadre of cowgirls) would not fall asleep. Heidi excelled at Patsy Cline songs and just about anything else she tried. The whole operation worked smoothly and the large crowd was tickled pink as they drifted into the parking lot. We of the Hogtown Opry sighed at the thought of two 300-room feeder hotels pumping guests into the building seven nights a week with the only competition being rodeo. Give us a big Yee-Haw, Uncle Dud.
The Road To Zion
If you’re driving the short 72 miles from Bryce to Zion National Park, might as well take a slight jog to the right, climb a couple thousand feet and gaze down into Cedar Breaks National Monument, the diamond in the crown of Grand Staircase Escalante near Cedar City. The Breaks is a natural amphitheater, stretching three miles across with a depth of over 2000 feet. The elevation is more than 10,000 feet above sea level. It’s far less busy there than at Bryce; it’s also far less easy to breathe.
Smoke from several modest forest fires dotted the landscape on the way to Zion, most of them so high in the mountains that aerial dousing was the only way to fight them. While in Kanab, we’d noticed a private firefighter service with at least eight vehicles heading for the hills. Virtually all the young firemen were Mexican, as was the owner of the fleet. I don’t think they were taking any plum jobs away from fire-eating Americans.
Like Bryce, Zion has grown a ton since our last visit. Happily, Flanigan’s Resort was still sitting there at bus stop #3 very near the park. The original owner bought the farm six years prior but his family still runs the place in the same homey manor. This friendly oasis had been our cheery encampment while undergoing the trials of the Zion Narrows twenty years ago.
This time the Narrows just got a look-see. We took the busy trail to the terminus of the Narrows hike and watched dozens of people alternately enter and emerge, most with no knowledge of the difficulties of the 16-mile hike through a canyon with walls 1000 feet high and sometimes only 18 feet wide. While at Ebeneezer’s, we'd shared our table with a quintet of women celebrating a young girl’s upcoming marriage. They had voted to try the Narrows in the coming days and wanted any information they could glean from us. The three younger women seemed nervous at the prospect but their two aunts, fit as fiddles, were chomping at the bit. They will make it, probably with the trio kicking and screaming, because once you’re halfway through the Narrows you have only two choices; finish or go back to the start. The girls will remember it one day as a crowning achievement in their lives, never stopping to recall the slogging truth of the Days of Whine and Sore Toeses.
Waking Up In Vegas
Our return flight to Florida was from good old Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. We stayed at a Hampton Inn almost adjacent to the tarmac because their shuttles are ultra-reliable and quick, and you can grab a free breakfast on the way out. The temperature when we arrived around noon was a pleasant 106, a scary number some fool will minimize “because it’s a dry heat,” which, I believe, is the same heat you get in Hell.
Siobhan wanted a haircut and I was in need of a massage, so we looked for a spa near the hotel which offered both. In case you’re ever looking, almost all the spas on the periphery of Sin City close on Sunday and Monday. I went into a place which offered some bizarre hair treatments but no cuts and found an unbusy young woman who assured me she was a licensed massage therapist. Siobhan discovered a single open hair cuttery right across the street. I learned the entire life history of the woman during my massage and now have several additional reasons for not wanting to live in LA. Siobhan got a nifty cut. We celebrated by leaving half of our massive dinner at an eatery called The Village Pub. This was the first time in recorded history I have ever abandoned any amount of chicken pot pie, but my dinner was sufficient to serve the entire population of Williston with some left over for Archer.
All in all, a wonderful trip, but I feel obligated to comment on the present state of hotelery. The inns we stayed at all utilized the dreaded comforter, a cement blanket placed, for some arcane reason, between two sheets. You cannot set the thermometer low enough in any hotel to allow use of the comforter, and even if you could, the noise of the air-conditioner coming on and off would waken you every fifteen minutes. If this problem was somehow surmounted, you would be left with the fat pillow enigma. Why, after all this time and good advice from chiropractors everywhere, are we forced to endure the fat pillow? Why are we not given the age-old option of one fat pillow and one thin one? Also, many hotels have abandoned the helpful wake-up call. We don’t really need one but it’s comforting to have backup when you absolutely must rise at five a.m. Some hotels will promise a call but you won’t get one, as with us in Vegas. All this while hotel rates have risen halfway to the moon.
While we’re complaining, can somebody please do something about the rickety old Charlotte airport, where you will inevitably be give a departure gate as far from your arrival gate as possible? I think I know what’s going on here. The terminal workers have some kind of pool on which passengers will make their connecting flights and which will not. In the interests of illicit profit, one gremlin changed our gate from E7 to E43 at the last minute. If that sounds close to you, think three football fields after a hard rain. Another one unplugged all the moving sidewalks. When we defied the odds and reached the gates with minutes to spare, they delayed our flight two hours just for spite. This almost never happens in Atlanta, where the worst thing they do is allow the baggage people to drop your suitcases three floors onto concrete slabs to see what pops out.
Another year, another vacation lost in time. Next year, we’re going to Paris while it’s still there and Gilbert Shelton is still alive and sane. Thanks to Sharon Byrne for all the houseminding and animal care and to Julie and Laura for keeping the business afloat. We’ll be back in twelve months, same time, same station, from the City of Light. Hopefully, it will be as satisfying as Woody Allen leads us to believe.
By the way, just got a call from Mustafa. For $200, he’ll reroof our house and put in a driveway. All we have to do is send him a credit card number. We’re thinking about it.
That’s really all, folks….
