Bryce Canyon National Park

The culmination of our two week tour of northern Arizona and southern Utah was our day trip to Bryce Canyon National Park. Once again, this proved to be a place of indescribable geological formations, a vast rolling landscape of red, pink, yellow and white hoodoos. The surroundings are otherworldly, at times ghostly and ethereal, and walking among these ancient towers was like being transported to some other planet. We hiked through several trails in the park, and at every turn in the road was a new shape, a new color, and a new impression, with our eyes constantly drawn skyward to the spires and pinnacles at the top of each hoodoo. At the bottom of the canyons, as I wound my way around the rock formations I felt tiny and insignificant, almost like an intruder into some secret world. Along the ridges, gazing down into the canyons below, the hoodoos were transformed into rippling waves of an ocean of rock, with arrangements that looked like gigantic aquarium ornaments.

“Poetry in Stone” is how the National Park brochure describes Bryce Canyon, and I can’t think of a more apt definition. Millions of years of weathering and erosion shape the rocks, with flowing water playing only a minor role in this story. As snow and ice melt, water seeps into fractures. As it re-freezes, it expands and cracks the rock around it. The combination of gravity and meltwater causes soil creep, moving the stone fragments downhill. There, is of course, always a geological explanation for all planetary structures and phenomenon, and hoodoos are curious and captivating, begging the questions of “how?”, “why?” and “when”?  But the immediate experience of seeing the crystalline blue sky, rocks ablaze with sunlight, shifting shadows wrapping in and out of the hoodoos as the day progresses, and the forces of nature creating this dynamic, mesmerizing place cannot be confined to merely geological terms. Hopefully our pictures help fill in some of the blanks as well.