Paria Canyon

We inaugurated the month of June by taking time on Friday the 1st and Saturday the 2nd for a two-day four wheeler expedition with Robert and Palma. We drove the ATV’s from Paria (the old town site/movie set between Kanab and Page) and up the Paria River to Tropic (up just below Bryce Canyon.) Paria itself is a bit sad – the old movie set has been burned down by drunken vandals and the only remnant of the old town site is the cemetery. The community itself relocated to what is now Kanab after they kept getting flooded out by the Paria River. There are remnants of an old miner’s home and mill, but that’s the only buildings standing anymore. Since Robert has two four-wheelers and we have none, Robert drove one, with Palma behind, and I drove the other, with Leslie behind. The round trip was nearly 100 miles just on the 4-wheelers (it was close to another 200 miles in the pickup between St. George and Paria.) The weather was gorgeous and sunny, with temperatures up near 100F (38C) – we kept our cool by driving back and forth through the river. Unfortunately, since I was driving I got the lion’s share of the splash, and I’m definitely the cat of the couple, and Leslie, the fish of the group, was riding on the back where she only got a small bit of the splashes. We spent the night at a little B&B in Tropic, the Bryce Canyon Livery (with a real stable of horses and everything that would earn the name of “Livery”,) which was nice. After signing in at the B&B we worked out some of our kinks and mud in the jacuzzi – it was refreshing. The Paria Canyon was really beautiful, with wind and water carved red rocks that looked a lot like the home of Wylie Coyote – about half way up the canyon the walls turn to white, and then up on the north end they turned to yellow. On the way up Robert drove into quicksand once, burying the back half of the 4-wheeler, and we had a dickens of a time getting him out. Robert and I pushed, while Palma pulled and Leslie drove the machine so that it could contribute to its own salvation. After we freed the 4-wheeler, the trick was getting Robert and me out of the quicksand – we were buried knee high in the mud. On the way back down we took a little side trip up a canyon where we got to see some nice colorful petroglyphs and handprints. I was saddened to see one of the petroglyphs defaced by some nimrod who (unsuccessfully) tried to chisel it out of the sandstone, presumably for his private collection – apparently the poor idiot didn’t know anything about the properties of sandstone. Also on the way down we stopped at the muddy quicksand where we’d gotten stuck on the way up and spent a few minutes throwing rocks into the mud and making these great mud volcanoes. Just then a park ranger happened by and wondered what the heck we were stoning to death – I guess he imagined that we were killing a snake or something. He seemed visibly relieved when he found out that we were just playing in the mud like little kids and even gave us a map on which he marked several great ruins and petroglyphs sites for our next expedition. On the whole we had a great time – we made the whole trip without any serious accidents or even bad sunburns – you can’t ask for better than that.