Like a Best Friend | ✓

chapter fifteen

Our time in Zion is over too soon, but the views aren't finished. As we leave, once we've been reunited with Sofia and Max (who, disgustingly, spent the whole three hours running various trails), Dylan pulls into a layby where we can check out Checkerboard Mesa, a sandstone hill criss-crossed with horizontal and vertical lines that make it look like, well, a checkerboard. Whoever named it hit the nail on the head with that one. It kind of looks like a head with a military buzzcut, with the little copse of trees on top.

Max and Sofia sit at the back of the van murmuring to each other in Portuguese. His is a bit stunted and awkward and American-accented and I can't tell if they're being rude, or if she's teaching him. The van is the same type we took to Death Valley so it has space for fourteen, which means Kitty, Leila and I get to spread out. We have a row each to ourselves. Kitty sits in the middle row with her back against the window; she can look left to me, or right to Leila. We've almost made it to Bryce Canyon, a ninety minute drive from Zion National Park, for an even more fleeting visit. It's almost one thirty now, and the plan is to catch the sunset at the Toadstool Hoodoos in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in four hours' time.

"I spy with my little eye ... something beginning with P," Kitty says.

"I swear to god, if it's pine tree one more fucking time," I say with a groan. We've been playing this game far too long, after the license plate game proved pretty fruitless – not enough cars on the road, and almost every single one we've seen has been from Utah, Arizona, or Nevada.

"Well there isn't much else to see," Kitty says. She's not wrong. The vista has mostly been pine trees and red sand and low-lying shrubs for a while now.

"Luckily for everybody," Dylan says, "we're almost there, and then you'll have some better views. Although, I gotta warn you, Bryce Canyon is impressive for its scale more than its color scheme. Prep yourselves for a lot more orange and green."

Our first stop is Bryce Point. We arrive at exactly one thirty p.m., as per the paper itinerary we each have a copy of, and when we get out at the viewing point, I see what Dylan means. The canyon is orange rock and green trees. But it is huge. Magnificent. Awe-inspiring. The ground falls away from us beyond the viewing platform and all we see for miles is the bowl of the canyon, filled with trees, and the red and orange rocks that rise from the canyon floor like stalagmites.

"This is an awesome place to come for a sunrise," Dylan says. "The whole place looks like it's on fire, the way the first sun hits the rocks. Truly a sight to behold."

I can imagine. It's already a sight to behold.

"Look, a chipmunk!" Kitty says, pointing at a black and brown striped thing with a fluffy tail that skitters across the floor and pauses to pick up a scrap from a sandwich some guy is eating. She is so easily entertained, grinning at the sight of a chipmunk when Boston is riddled with them.

"Actually, that's a golden-mantled ground squirrel," Dylan says. "You'll see a lot of those around here, as well as Uinta chipmunks, which look pretty similar but they're smaller, and their heads are striped."

"Dude, you need your own nature show," Leila says. She's right. I could listen to Dylan's ramblings about nature and geography for hours. With all his chatter as we drive, I already have.

We spend a few minutes taking in the view from eight thousand three hundred feet above sea level and we take plenty of pictures (and, thanks to Leila, I end up in far more than I usually do) before we're back in the van for less than ten minutes before we pull up a couple miles later at Inspiration Point. Somehow, although it's the same canyon, the view is completely different. Gone is the bed of green at the base. The spires dwarf the trees, mammoth rock formations in orange and pink and white that are eerily symmetrical, like totem poles. The result, Dylan tells us, of millenia of wind and rain.