PICTURE 1 - Looking Down Bryce is essentially a long side of a mountain that is BADLY eroded! 'Bryce' was actually a rancher below, who said the canyon was 'a hell of place to loose a cow'. This picture shows just a small part of the eroded landscape and the gorgeous palate of colors.


PICTURE 2 - Looking Up This picture shows how each 'hoodoo' looks, the canyon having thousands of these. They survive erosion because the top layer of each is harder than the layers below, thus protecting the structure. The whole series is created from vertical cracking/faults, with water eroding in the cracks, leaving the 'hoodoos'.


PICTURE 3 - Future Hoodoos Because of the snow, you can see future 'hoodoos' in the making (criss-crossing crack/faulting lines). We're looking east, with creeks and drainages leading into the Colorado river about 70 miles east of here. In-between, there is just not much flat surface!


PICTURE 4 - Mesas or Tabletops The reason you have so many national parks around here (Zion, Bryce, Grand Canyon, Capital Reef, Arches), is that we're in an area called the 'Colorado Plateau'. It's most interesting feature is thick flat layers of sedimentation stretching for hundreds of miles, cut by winding rivers. Left behind are flat 'mesas' seen in the distance here. In geologic time, they'll be gone in 'hours'.


PICTURE 5 - 'Closeup' There's a nice trail from the lookout section here that takes hikers deep into the 'hoodoos' below. Unsuspecting hikers often forget that the hoodoos are 'clay' (thus their resilience to rain), and so, spend extra time pealing off the mud from their hiking boots! Ah. Erosion in reverse!


PICTURE 6 - From sand and back to sand As the 'hoodoos' slowly disappear (and more show up), mountains of sand grow below with wonderful mixtures of colors, from white to salmon and then deeper oranges. It's just like an orange popsicle!


PICTURE 7 - Protective top layer Here you can see the top layer that protects the weaker layers below. Note that as the 'hoodoo' is born, arches form at the top, which later erode away leaving free-standing structures. What most people don't wonder about (ha), is why one falling doesn't tip all the others over like dominoes! Interesting question, but they usually don't tip over unless they're in the valley areas.


PICTURE 8 - Tunnel Back in the early days of automobiles, they seemed to just love tunnels. This one is on the drive up to Bryce from the west. I suppose it was cheaper to dynamite a tunnel, than remove the whole hill. These days, they just cut the whole hill and be done with it.