Back in July, I finally visited Bryce Canyon National Park and it quickly became one of my favorite parks. The geography is just mind-bottling (yep!) consisting of bright orange hoodoos (tall spires), slot canyons, windows, and fins in a dense bristle-cone pine forest surrounded by mesas of the Colorado Plateau.

Being only 18 miles long and a few miles wide, it’s not a massive park, but the striking thing to me was that the park has an intimacy to it with only minimal effort. In many other national parks and wild spaces, you really need to work hard (strenuous hikes) to get more up close and personal and find that indisputable profound beauty. To really comprehend the massive power of the Yosemite National Park waterfalls, you really need to hike right up to one. There’s no doubt the Grand Canyon’s a big hole, but you can’t truly experience its depth until you’re standing at the Colorado River looking up at the rim a solid mile above your head. And the Tetons are an American icon that are amazing from a distance, but are so much more breathtaking from directly below at one of the glacial lakes.

While standing at an overlook mesmerized by the hoodoos, Bryce Canyon National Park, like all the other parks, has that distinct beauty, but instead of an intense hike, you can take a casual stroll down some switchbacks and your perspective will be completely changed as the hoodoos begin to rise over your head – That intimate experience that you really need to to work hard for at all the other parks. Long hikes (hard work) is absolutely rewarding, but with Bryce, it was awesome to shoot sunrise from an overlook, wander some trails for a bit, and be back at my car for coffee by 7:30 a.m.