Sonata in Gold

Zion, whether seen near or from the distance, is both colorful and impressive. In the canyon proper sycamore trees turn to gold in the fall.

Sonata in Gold Portrait of Autumn in the Parks

Through the deep silent winter, the brisk spring and summer, the forests of the high mesas are content to stand as cool preludes to the fantasies of Cedar Breaks, Bryce, Zion, and the Grand Canyon. Anywhere else in the world these forests would be known for their endless parades of giant ponderosa, spruce, and fir; the bright patterns of their flowered earth, the singing leaves and frail white trunks of their groves of quaking aspen. But here among the canyons the air of expectancy is so great, the amazed fulfillment is so overwhelming that the forests are scarcely noticed on the approach to the canyons, and are taken for granted on the return. The canyon's Presence looms in the mind long before it appears to the eyes, and the forest is but incidental, the silent hour before the storm breaks, the vague illumination before the miracle.But then in late September and early October the days of the forests arrive. They are no longer simply an im-pressive overture, a minor theme. They are the grand fantasia, the tour de force, the impassioned and consummate largo to the canyons' Masterwork. This is their brief glory, their hours of jubilation and triumph and they make the most of it.

Even if there were no Grand Canyon I would continue to make my annual pilgrimage to the North Rim toGRAND CANYON, ZION, BRYCE AND CEDAR BREAKS form the most beautiful scenic areas on this continent. Fine highways tie these places of Northern Arizona and Southern Utah together and a person could see them all in a day of fast travel. But would be foolish, of course, to do so. They are at their loveliest in Autumn. The first frost comes generally around the middle of September and from then until late October autumnal colors are bright torches in a fantastically colorful landscape.

CENTER PANEL—“BRYCE CANYON IN AUTUMN” BY RAY J. MANLEY. Photograph taken with a Graphic View Camera, 4x5 Daylight Ektachrome, 8½ inch Commercial Ektar lens, Harrison c 1/4 filter, Weston meter reading 200, exposure 1/10th second at f14. Manley says: “I spent three days at Bryce waiting for sunshine. On the fourth morning the sky was clear and locations found earlier were quickly used. This scene was made from within the canyon shooting being towards the rim.”

When the first frost hits the aspen trees on North Rim, pageantry of autumn is most brilliant. Rich color of Canyon is enhanced.witness this fiesta of color. Bryce and Zion Canyon and Cedar Breaks have their own bright carnivals when the Paunsagunt and Markagunt and Aquarious Plateaus burst into fall colors (although whole groves of aspen are dying on the Markagunt, and it is a melancholy sight); it is on the long approach to the North Rim that a forest reaches its ecstatic height in autumn jubilation. Here is the thrilling and immortal Kaibab forest.

UTAH PARKS COMPANY OPERATES superb lodges at North Rim, Grand Canyon, Bryce, Cedar Breaks, and Zion. The lodge at Cedar Breaks is in a national monument, the others are in national parks. Service and accommodations are of the best, and each lodge is in a beautiful setting. The traveler, aspiring for an autumn adventure in the parks, should plan the trip between September 15 and October 15, starting out at the North Rim and ending in Zion. Photographers Joseph Muench and Ray J. Manley, responsible for our Autumn picture essay this issue, are no strangers to the most scenic areas in the West, but both contend few trips are comparable to this excursion into Autumn for these pictures for ARIZONA HIGHWAYS. Here is a journey where the traveler has superior highways at his command. It would be advisable, however, to arrange for accommodations at the various Utah Parks Company lodges in advance. Reservations could be made at Cedar City, Utah, the headquarters of the Parks Company. The National Park Service, which supervises Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce and Cedar Breaks, maintains complete staffs at these places, where travel information can be obtained.

The Kaibab forest has its own prelude, in the streaming groves of juniper and piñon pine on the lower levels. As the road curves upward the ponderosa pine begin to emerge from the piñon singly and in small groups, tentative notes in preparation for the final crescendo. Their numbers rapidly increase increase on the long shoulders of the mountain and soon they are a stately and noble procession marching in grace and dignity along a lifting horizon.

All at once there is no horizon, only rivers of sky above, in infinite depth, upon which the yellow saffron clouds float in soft October dreams. Straight trunks everywhere strain out of the seed-brown grass, out of the shining torrents of blue and yellow asters and daisies, and lift their feathered branches in imitation of the clouds. It is a world of wings, a world soaring, insubstantial, liberated from matter in exquisite flight.

Strokes of sombre green mingle with the eerier ponderosa on the long high summit where the air is rarified and drained of oppressive warmth. And into this bold overture the groves of aspen burst in startling dissonances of color. All through the summer the aspen have given contrast with their pale green leaves and slender white Cedar Breaks National Monument is between Bryce and Zion and possesses some of the characteristics of each of these National Parks. Autumn is a brief interlude between summer and winter. It would be hard to find an autumn so rich.

trunks. Now in autumn the dissonance is a brilliant one, exciting the eye with flames of yellow and red-gold. In the soughing of cellos and the deep moving strains of the violas, an interval for aeolian strings.

The aspen are as gregarious as the deer. They cleave to each other as the parts of a chorus. If there is the slightest drift of air they will discover it, and when a breeze comes by they bring the forest alive with the music of myraid tiny streams, the phantom chirring of all the ghost-birds in paradise. It is a joyous, haunting sound, as if made only for the ears of angels.

Poetry should be written to the aspen, the most femi-ninely human of all trees. Here is woman, woman in abstract throngs, in virginal purity, lustless, serene, etherial; expressing delicate grace in their lithe white bodies, responding to every whim of the atmosphere in chorales that seem to come from a far distance. Their fragile forms and voices have in them a remote and mist-like evanescence that seems to belong to no world of ours, but comes from somewhere in the stars.

The deer have a kinship with them. They have no more substance than the clouds. They gaze from the shadows, with mellow, luminous eyes, mirroring beauty; or glide in stately grace among the white trunks; or, fright-ened, bob in grey reflection of tonal shadings in the liquid autumn colors. In the deeper gloom where thick growths in spruce and aspen screen out the sun, they are as fleet-ing and indistinguishable as trout darting through a hid-den pool. When they emerge briefly into the patches of sunlight their course is so swift they seem to carry flashes of color with them as they plunge again into the dark, brightening it as they vanish.

or glide in stately grace among the white trunks; or, frightened, bob in grey reflection of tonal shadings in the liquid autumn colors. In the deeper gloom where thick growths in spruce and aspen screen out the sun, they are as fleeting and indistinguishable as trout darting through a hidden pool. When they emerge briefly into the patches of sunlight their course is so swift they seem to carry flashes of color with them as they plunge again into the dark, brightening it as they vanish.

The white-tailed squirrel and other creatures, like the long-bodied puma, are so noiseless and ephemeral that a sense of unreality pervades the forests. As if nothing actu-ally lives or moves here in the ordinary understanding; as if the whole were deft brushstrokes or images richly designed. Only the aspen know the meaning of sound. They catch the mountain's breath and a shiver of ecstacy goes through them, but it is a high, frail sound, as if they had some intimacy with heaven.

Through all the forests of the high mesas the aspen are an intermittent parade of gaiety, but within a few miles of the Grand Canyon brink, when that Presence has brought expectancy to its highest pitch, the crescendo of color also reaches its summit. The way has been ofbrief glimpses and swift plunges into yellow, sunlit depths, or long stretches of browning meadow edged with spruce and fir, set afire here and there with patches of aspen yellow. Now the colors are a conflagration consuming hillsides, narrowing sky to patches of blue and sheepwool.

Here in the winding draws and on the rides almost at the Rim, the aspen toss themselves into a riotous frenzy where the world is on the verge of being torn apart. There are walls of lemon-yellow flame and shimmering tapestries of red-tinted gold. One moment a stately group at a turn in the road catches the sunlight, twirls, agitates it and sifts it down upon asters and goldenrod in yellow drifts. Another moment the hillside draws back and the aspen become a concourse of torchbearers abandoning themselves to the last orgiastic rites before the winds of bleak November extinguish their fires.Even the scattered pine and spruce share in the revelry and toss and sway in this inebriating harvest of color. One might think that this voluptuous dance of brilliance would end with dusk, but I have seen it impart itself to the night-in red lightning! Do not smile and say that the wine of autumn has gone to my head, and that for the sake of euphony I have invented an illusion. During an equinoxial storm when heavy black clouds in the night towered over the forest I saw their domes quiver with red lightning. Not a pale, imaginary tint; but drenching floods of burgundy red poured over their boiling folds. Maybe it was color drawn from the autumnal slopes below, or drained from the abysmal walls of the Grand Canyon beyond. More likely the vaporous air transformed the light as it does in a sunset. Whatever it was, it gave a baleful tone to the night and to the thunder mumbling over the rims.Sometimes in autumn storms, the gaiety of the aspen is obliterated in sinister foreboding, an omen of greater than human catastrophe is weighted with a note of sadness bringing memories of aspen bent and tortured by the snows, their frail trunks twisted and gnarled in neuromic agony, their crippled naked limbs shivering in the wind.

But this is a song of autumn and of sunlight, of high, dim voices; of yellow and orange and gold inlaid with diamonds as the leaves flicker and turn their million facets in the effervescent glow. No looming winter nor imminent catastrophe like the breaking earth, nor lowering clouds, can effect the gleeful suppliance of these limber, delicately responsive spirits.