Ponderosa Canyon

Ponderosa Canyon is a roadside overlook on the southern end of Bryce Canyon's Paunsaugunt Plateau, looking into a bowl-shaped amphitheater of eroded rock. It's at mile 14.75 of the 18-mile Southern Scenic Drive, so it's an easy pause while you're heading to or returning from Rainbow and Yovimpa Points. The viewpoint is wheelchair accessible and takes little walking.

The south view drops past hoodoos at the plateau's edge to a pine-and-fir forest about 1,000 feet below. For a photo that shows the scale of the drop, include some of that forest beneath the red rock.

The name comes from the large ponderosa pines on the canyon floor. Some are more than five feet across and over 150 feet tall. Up at the overlook, the higher-elevation forest is mixed conifer, with Engelmann spruce, Douglas-fir, and white fir. The trees below and the forest around the rim are different parts of a landscape shaped by elevation, moisture, and temperature.

Looking east, the Paria Valley and the upper steps of the Grand Staircase lead toward Table Cliff, a plateau around 10,000 feet high. Its Pink Cliffs belong to the same Claron Formation as Bryce's hoodoos. The Paunsaugunt Fault runs along the park's eastern edge; the nearly 2,000-foot change in elevation across it reflects Colorado Plateau uplift over roughly 20 million years.

More than 80 miles southeast, Navajo Mountain is a laccolith: rising magma pushed the rock above it into a dome, then cooled without erupting through the surface. The Henry Mountains may appear about 86 miles to the east on clear-air days. Erosion has stripped away their covering rock and exposed their hard igneous cores.