Festivals Galore! Geology Festival This Weekend At Bryce Canyon

The Centennial Celebration at Bryce Canyon National Park continues this weekend with the Geology Festival. Activities will include guided hikes, geology programs and interactive booths.

This year the festival will also include a special evening program from geologist and author Christa Sadler and park paleontology fellow Tut Tran. They will be discussing fossil discoveries within and around the Bryce Canyon National Park area.

The Geology Festival is a free event with park admission. Some events will require obtaining free tickets.

The festival will start at 10 a.m. on both Friday and Saturday with a geologist guided hike that should take about 90 minutes. These hikes, appropriate for the entire family, do require those free tickets, which can be picked up at the Visitors Center as early as 8AM.

Interactive geology and paleontology booths will be open to the public in the Visitor Center plaza until 4 p.m. both days. Those booths will feature local public lands and educational institutions.

Bryce Canyon’s daily 11 a.m. geology talks and 2 p.m. rim walks exploring natural and cultural history will continue to be offered throughout the festival. These programs both begin at Sunset Point and are open to the public.

Evening programs will begin at 8 p.m. at the North Campground Outdoor Theater, unless inclement weather necessitates moving the events inside. If that happens the evening programs will be moved to the Bryce Canyon Lodge and will be limited to those who have obtained free tickets. Those tickets can be picked up at the Visitor Center, again starting at 8 a.m.

The Friday evening program will be presented by Tran and will be on the paleontological work he and fellow researchers have been spearheading in the park since last summer. After a nearly ten-year hiatus in research, their findings have underscored Bryce Canyon’s potential to produce scientifically significant fossils, from snails and clams to crocodilians, mammals and even dinosaurs.

Sadler will be presenting the Saturday evening program. Her talk will cover the paleontology of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Bryce Canyon's immediate neighbor to the east, which in recent years has produced many new dinosaur species.

With research and field experience in places ranging from the Grand Canyon to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, her work has kept her outdoors in one form or another for more than twenty years. She has authored multiple books, including “Life in Stone: Fossils of the Colorado Plateau” and “Where Dinosaurs Roamed: Lost Worlds of Utah's Grand Staircase”.

Keep up to date with current conditions at Bryce Canyon National Park by visiting the the park website at nps.gov/BryceCanyon.