Can dogs hike in Bryce Canyon National Park?

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Walk to the rim and look down. In eighteen seventy-two a government geologist, Grove Karl Gilbert, wrote in his notebook that it was "a perfect wilderness of red pinnacles, the stunningest thing out of a picture". The rim sits about eight thousand feet above the sea. This is Bryce Canyon National Park.

Before the park

People have lived on this high country, the Colorado Plateau, for about twelve thousand years. From about the year two hundred to twelve hundred, Fremont people lived to the north and west, and Ancestral Puebloans to the south and east. From about twelve hundred, Paiute people used this plateau to hunt and gather in season, without settling on it for good.

The Park Service names five peoples with ties to this place: the Southern Paiute, the Hopi, the Zuni, the Ute and the Navajo. The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah is five bands, governed from Cedar City. In nineteen fifty-four the federal government ended its recognition of the Utah Paiutes as a tribe, and in nineteen eighty Congress restored it. The Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians governs from its tribal offices in Fredonia, Arizona.

In nineteen thirty-six an elderly Paiute man living on the Kaibab Reservation told the park's naturalist that before there were Indians, the Legend People lived here. They did something bad, he said, and Coyote turned them all into rocks, "some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding onto others".

Making the park

Ebenezer Bryce brought his family to a Mormon farm settlement in the valley below the rim for his wife's fragile health. Between eighteen seventy-eight and eighteen eighty, he and his neighbors dug a seven-mile irrigation ditch and a road up to timber and firewood, and locals called the bowl where the road ended Bryce's Canyon. The story goes that Bryce called it "a hell of a place to lose a cow". The family left for Arizona in eighteen eighty.

In nineteen fifteen a ranger insisted that his new Forest Service supervisor, J. W. Humphrey, see the rim, and Humphrey said "it was sundown before I could be dragged from the canyon view". The next year he found fifty dollars for a road to it.

In nineteen twenty-three President Harding proclaimed Bryce Canyon National Monument, protected land still run by the Forest Service. The homesteaders who kept the first lodge on the rim sold it that year to a company owned by the Union Pacific railroad. A year later Congress passed a law for a "Utah National Park" here, but only once every acre inside it belonged to the federal government. In nineteen twenty-seven the railroad agreed to hand over its land at the rim, and Utah's governor, George Dern, agreed to trade away the state's piece. In February of nineteen twenty-eight Congress renamed it Bryce Canyon National Park, and that September the Park Service took charge.

One story

In September of nineteen thirty, a homesteader put the whole park in doubt. Marion Frost lived in Tropic, a farm town in the valley below the rim, and he claimed forty acres of unsurveyed land inside the park's boundary. Park surveyors told him to move his house and his fence off the land.

The law of nineteen twenty-four required every acre inside the park to be federal. If Frost's claim stood, everything the Park Service had done since taking charge in nineteen twenty-eight was illegal.

The answer came from Washington in January of nineteen thirty-one. The General Land Office ruled that neither Frost nor the Jolley family, who had bought the land from him, held a valid claim, and that there was no right of appeal. Frost lost the land, and the park was safe. Forty acres had held up a national park.

Today

Close to two million visits came in two thousand twenty-five, under a new count that tallies each shuttle rider once instead of every time they board. In two thousand nineteen the park was certified an International Dark Sky Park.

Federal staff cuts reached Bryce in February of two thousand twenty-five, when at least two of its rangers were fired. That June the park asked the public about horseback riding, which it said "has grown significantly over the past ten years".

Utah prairie dogs, protected under the Endangered Species Act, have been brought back, and more than six hundred now live here in ten colonies, called towns. Look for them in the meadows along the road near the visitor center. From October to late March they stay underground, so in the cold months look for their mounds instead. This is Bryce Canyon National Park.