Paria Canyon Is A Wonder World

The Toronto Star has this article on Paria Canyon and Buckskin Gulch, a complex of long, rugged slot canyons straddling the Utah/Arizona border. Below are excerpts.

You walk softly and quietly in Buckskin Gulch.

Not so much out of reverence but because this long slot canyon is so closed-in, spooky and dark it seems that around the next wild-textured red rock bend you might step through the back door to the universe or tumble into the Earth's navel.

"Every corner you go around – and there are many corners – the view is different, whether it's the colours or the texture of the geology, like caves, or the lines in the rock that go horizontally, and then the next corner the lines are going vertically," says Brenda Reibel of Seattle, one of a party of six Northwesterners who backpacked Paria last April.

"Buckskin Gulch, it's the most otherworldly and surreal place," says longtime hiker Bryn Beorse of Seattle. "It's just sort of a magical underworld. The colours inside it were just amazing.''

Paria Canyon has been the subject of numerous stories in national magazines and people come to hike it from all over the U.S., Canada and Europe, even Japan and Australia.

Read the complete article.