The Superlative Land of Strange Standing Stones (Part III): Bryce Canyon National Park

One of the mysteries of the origin of the Grand Canyon involves the fact that early rivers flowed in the opposite direction of the Colorado River that exists today. Some of those early rivers ended in lakes that covered hundreds or thousands of square miles, and the deposits from those lakes form some of the most vividly colored rocks on the Colorado Plateau. And it's not just the color.. Erosion has sculpted the freshwater limestone of the Claron Formation into one of the craziest landscapes in North America.

Welcome to Bryce Canyon National Park, part III of our tour through the Land of Strange Standing Stones. In the first entry, we were checking out strange erosional forms left after groundwater moved through crushed rocks on the Cockscomb Monocline along Cottonwood Wash Road. In the second, we explored the strange sedimentary pipes of Kodachrome Basin State Park. We've now moved a few miles west onto the Paunsaugunt Plateau, one of the faulted mesas in the High Plateaus province of the Colorado Plateau. Headward erosion along the edge of the plateau has produced the bizarre landscape of Bryce "Canyon" (there is no actual canyon; the park is instead a series of erosional amphitheaters).
Natural joints and fractures in the limestone are exploited by water and ice, producing the pillars of stone called hoodoos. The rate of headward erosion is rapid, amounting to feet per century. Many places in the world erode this way, but few if any display the sheer number of fins, spires and hoodoos. There are tens of thousands of them in the park.

Sometimes people on a strict schedule visit the park, go to a single viewpoint and say "okay, hoodoos and Bryce Canyon checked off the life list", and rush on to the next park. One can miss some pretty incredible things by doing so. For one, the tour buses rarely go past Inspiration or Bryce Points. The views are spectacular at the main tourist parking lots, but the main park road goes fourteen miles farther, past nearly a dozen other viewpoints.

View north from Rainbow Point

Rainbow Point, for instance, is the highest viewpoint in the park (at 9155 feet, it is a thousand feet higher than the more popular viewpoints). From it and adjacent Yovimpa Point, one has an incredible view extending from the Wasatch Front to the north, Navajo Mountain to the east, and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to the south (part of the view from Rainbow is seen above, and Yovimpa Point is below).

View southeast from Yovimpa Point, towards Navajo Mountain and the north rim of Grand Canyon

Likewise, Natural Bridge is an incredible 85 foot arch that is missed by many park visitors who don't venture beyond the busier parking lots. Every time I mention the feature I feel compelled to point out that natural bridges usually have watercourses of some kind. This one is best described as an arch.

And then there is the fact that every viewpoint at Bryce Canyon is on the rim, which means that every tourist who visits only the viewpoints is an outsider looking in. There is nothing quite like walking among the towering rocks and seeing them from below. I didn't walk below the rim on this particular trip, but I encourage you to check out my post from a previous trip, when I walked the Navajo Loop through Wall Street Canyon. It includes some of what I think are my best ever pictures from Bryce Canyon.

There are also the animals. I caught a nice Say's Phoebe at Natural Bridge (above), and we saw a small herd of Pronghorn Antelope in the woods and meadows back of the rim.

There is a colony of Utah Prairie Dogs next to the park road, and I've had no luck catching a picture of any of them for years.

We didn't have any such adventures on our latest trip, but I must say there is nothing quite like experiencing the summer monsoons of Bryce Canyon. In July and August, moisture-laden air moves north out of the Gulf of Mexico, and sweeps up against the plateau margins, producing spectacular thunderstorms and flashfloods. One of our family memories involved a terrifying lightning storm and cloudburst that produced a lake in our tent, and a six foot wide river below our campsite just a few hundred feet from the rim.

Bryce Canyon is worth a second look if you've ever rushed through in the past, and if you've never seen it in person, make sure to make the time to really explore it! Pictures just don't do it justice.

Into the Great Unknown: "Disaster" in National Canyon and the Volcanoes of Grand Canyon

Yeah, I was not feeling all that comfortable. It was day 13 on our journey into the Great Unknown, the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Day 13, and Lava Falls Rapid, the worst rated rapid on the river was...13 miles downstream. And I didn't know it yet, but we would arrive there at 13:00 hours. I'm not at all superstitious, but it was nice when the message written in the sands of time on the river shore appeared. Okay, I put it there myself, but I was apprehensive just the same!

We were camped at the mouth of National Canyon, which for many years was one of the larger and more popular campsites on the river. And then in the summer of 2012 it was hit by an apocalyptic flash flood that just about wiped the camp out of existence.

It's hard to imagine the scale of the flood. Estimates put the flow at 15,000 cubic feet per second. To put that into perspective, the flow of the entire Colorado River for most of our journey was around 8,000 to 12,000 cfs. And the flood was witnessed. A Western Rivers Expedition boat was passing by, and captured the flood entering the Colorado. Check out the video below by Joe Clark, one of the river guides:

Our campsite was rocky, but we found places to sleep. The rocky plain was barren of plant life. There is hope that a few artificial floods may ultimately deposit more sand on top of the bouldery deposits, but I wonder if the Bureau of Reclamation will be doing any artificial floods in light of the ongoing drought.

In any case, the experienced members of our crew were curious about how much the canyon above the river had been changed by the flooding. To me, the canyon was a beautiful place, regardless of how it might have once looked. How could I know any difference?

I could see that eroded ledges of Muav Limestone had indeed been buried in debris, and barely a single plant was visible along the course of the creek, despite the presence of a clear babbling stream. The going was tough in a few places. Boulders choked the channel.

The barren nature of the canyon was almost disturbing. It felt like there should be plants growing along the water. It drove home the point that no matter what ever else may happen, the rocks remain. Battered, broken, or polished smooth, they will last as everything else passes. But the rocks were also very beautiful, though, and the narrows spectacular. It occurred to me that this canyon, were it to be anywhere else in the country would be a national park or monument in its own right. Here, it was simply a tributary to the larger river, one of many.

The sun was high, and it was getting hot. We got onto the river and rowed downstream. We had reached a fairly long stretch with no major rapids, and lots of quiet passages through vertical canyon walls of Paleozoic sediments. In places we could see all the way to the canyon rim four or five thousand feet above us. The rim, and the world beyond, seemed remote and very far away.

I did a double take at Mile 176. Thousands of years ago massive landslide had broken away from the Supai cliffs out of sight above, and had come thundering over the Redwall Limestone, coming to rest near the river. It is called the Red Slide.

Over time erosion began to tear away at the debris-covered slopes, but here and there a large boulder protected the underlying soft material. The boulders were left standing on spires called hoodoos. It was yet another strange sight along the river.

I was on the lookout, because for the first time we would be seeing a new rock unit (the last "new" rock unit had been 100 miles upstream). It is not a familiar rock to the vast majority of visitors to the Grand Canyon, and in fact, most people are surprised to find out that such rocks are present in the national park: there are volcanoes and lava flows!

I looked high on the walls, and there was the first one, a fragment of black basalt clinging to the cliff. It was an exciting moment for me, because I've never seen these rocks before. I will deal with the profound effects of the lava flows in one of the next posts.

There were more signs of volcanism along the river where a sill had intruded into the Muav Limestone. It was one of the finer examples I've ever been able to photograph.
Soon we could see the source of some of the lava flows, a cinder cone on the high canyon rim called Vulcan's Throne.

We could also see the long tongue of lava from Vulcan's Throne that had reached the river. John Wesley Powell's description remains one of his most poetic writings:

Just over the fall a cinder cone, or extinct volcano, stands on the very brink of the canyon. What a conflict of water and fire there must have been here! Just imagine a river of molten rock running down into a river of melted snow. What seething and boiling of the waters; what clouds of steam rolled into the heavens!

And then, one of the strangest sights of all. A huge mass of congealed lava stuck right in the middle of the river. It was a plug of lava that filled the vent of one of the cinder cones. Called Vulcan's Anvil, it seemed like a message or a warning to river travelers, which indeed it is.

When we passed the anvil, we know we had less than a mile to one of the biggest challenges on the river: Lava Falls Rapid. The moment of truth had arrived...

The Anvil receded into the distance, and we prepared to scout the wildest rapid on a wild river.

The Abandoned Lands...A Journey Through the Colorado Plateau: A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow

No wonder he abandoned the place...the best that Ebenezer Bryce could say about the national park that now bears his name was "It's a hell of a place to lose a cow". Ebenezer had a ranch for a few years in the 1870s in a canyon below the rim, but the region doesn't seem like much of a place to try and graze cattle. On the other hand, Bryce Canyon is one of the most unique landscapes on the planet, and was a wonderful stop during the latter part of our exploration of the Colorado Plateau. I've been calling this series "The Abandoned Lands" because the Colorado Plateau and adjacent provinces remain today one of the least populated parts of our nation, despite many efforts to settle the landscape over the centuries. The land always seems to defeat the efforts of human beings, but for geologists it is a treasure.

We had left Fremont Indian State Park and were headed south to Bryce Canyon National Park. Bryce is not really a canyon at all, but a series of horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters at the headwaters of the Paria "River", a tributary of the Colorado River system that flows south from the park (unless there is a flash flood in progress, the "river" designation is a clear exaggeration). The Sevier River drains the top of the plateau, which slopes towards the north. The pillars and spires are called hoodoos.

The main rock type forming the cliffs of Bryce Canyon is the freshwater limestone deposit called the Claron Formation. It accumulated in vast lakes that formed in the Colorado Plateau region in the aftermath of the Laramide Orogeny, a crustal disturbance that raised domes and mountain ranges across the American west around 50-70 million years ago. Intense weathering of the iron-bearing minerals in the sediment has produced the bright orange oxide coloring of the rock.

It had been a couple of years since I had been down the Navajo Loop trail through Wall Street Canyon, so that's where I headed when I gave the class a few hours of free time. The trail is not overly long at 1.3 miles, but it drops 550 feet, and every step down has to be repeated upwards on the other end of the loop.

The Navajo Loop Trail is on my short list of greatest hikes in this country. There simply is no place quite like the deep cleft where the rocks seem to glow from within. The switchbacks become shorter and shorter as one approaches the slot canyon. Erosion is stunningly rapid here, around 2-4 feet per century. I've been at Bryce during intense thunderstorms, and I find these numbers reasonable. Few plants ever gain a roothold on the upper trail, and certainly not trees.

No trail can be perfectly safe, and the vertical walls and narrow slot canyons channel rockfalls right onto the trail. A serious rock fall happened in 2006, the remains of which have to be surmounted by hikers.

Walking through the bottom of Wall Street Canyon, the trail levels some, and a few conifers have managed to sprout and grow upwards towards the life giving light. The trees, with their long branchless trunks are among the most photogenic I have ever seen.

And then begins the climb back out! It's one thing to look down on distant hoodoos from a comfortable perch on the canyon rim, but the scale is totally different when you stand at their base looking up, knowing that you have to climb as far as they reach into the sky, and then some.

Mysterious little alcoves show up along the trail...

As we approach the rim, more and more of the countryside becomes visible. Arches in the hoodoos help to frame the distant cliffs of the Aquarius Plateau, composed of the same pink cliffs as Bryce, but several thousand feet higher on the other side of the Paunsaugunt fault.

Close to the end of the trail we passed a hoodoo that recalled the monuments of Easter Island. The mind gives us all kinds of logic and order where such order doesn't really exist.

I suspect that black and white photos of Bryce Canyon would still glow with bright orange light...

Vagabonding Across the 39th Parallel: A Hoodoo Homily postscript - Red Canyon

Our vagabonding adventure continued...

People who are in a hurry to get to Bryce Canyon National Park from the west sometimes miss a little gem of a geological site on their way in: Red Canyon. The canyon (which unlike Bryce Canyon is actually a canyon) is carved through the same formation that makes up the spires and hoodoos of Bryce, the early Cenozoic Claron. We had left Bryce and were on our way to Zion National Park, but as we passed Red Canyon, we couldn't resist stopping and taking a look.

Although Red Canyon is not a specific park, it is on national forest land, and the NFS has constructed a decent visitor center, and developed a small network of trails in the area. The short nature trail we hiked was nice and level, in contrast to the steep trails below the rim at Bryce Canyon. It gave us some up close access to several vivid orange hoodoos. Because there are fewer of the them, the spires that are there stand out as individuals. Your imagination can have some fun here.

We wandered along the trail. Over the last few days the weather had stabilized. In Colorado we had been hit with some pretty severe thunderstorm activity, but now high pressure had settled in, and the temperatures soared. Even though we were at more than 7,000 feet, it was in the high 90's, and the sunlight reflecting off the rock just made it feel hotter. By the time we reached the visitor center again, we were happy the place was air conditioned.

The heat was a bit of some concern, because Zion Canyon was several thousand feet lower and would presumably be an oven. We felt no need to rush through things when we had such a pleasant place to explore.

As we passed the mouth of Red Canyon we had a startling view of the Sevier fault zone, which raised the Paunsaugunt Plateau (that includes Bryce Canyon) relative to the Sevier River, which drains north towards the Basin and Range and the Sevier Desert. This particular part of Utah is not yet part of the Colorado River drainage, but in a short period of time (geologically) it will be captured by headward erosion, and a new Bryce Canyon will develop.

We headed south. Zion National Park was next on our vagabonding itinerary...

This link provides a nice roadguide to the geology of Red Canyon and Bryce Canyon. It refers to the Wasatch formation instead of the Claron. The two names refer to the same rock layer, but I believe Claron is the currently designated name for the formation.

Vagabonding across the 39th (er, 38th) Parallel: A Hoodoo Homily in Three Parts

For more than two weeks last July we were vagabonds exploring the geology along a route that was mostly near the 39th parallel through Nevada, Utah and Colorado (our last junction choice had landed us south of the 38th). We rarely planned our route more than a day or two in advance, and we made an informal rule that we would make every effort to see something new every day, and if we were in a familiar place, we would try and see it in a new way. And that's what brought us to Bryce Canyon National Park.

Bryce Canyon, you say? Haven't we been there many times? Well, yes, but almost always with a big bunch of students and a highly restricted schedule. We've usually had time for the visitor center, one or two viewpoints, and one quick hike below the rim. It's ok under the circumstances, but I have not had many chances to explore the park more fully. On this trip, we spent a night and spent as much time on the rim as we could. Three parts? The less-crowded south end, a sunset at the north end, and a deserted morning in the most heavily trafficked part of the park. For many hours in the midst of July we had the park to ourselves.

We headed out during the afternoon to the southernmost viewpoints in the park, Yovimpa and Rainbow Points. The long ridge of the Paunsaugant Plateau ends at this point at an elevation of more than 9,000 feet. The two viewpoints have sweeping views of the Grand Staircase off to the south, and north towards the rest of the park and the Aquarius Plateau beyond. I was mostly entranced by the sunlight on the orange and white towers (which are called hoodoos).

When you arrive at Bryce Canyon National Park, you have reached some of the youngest sedimentary rocks on the Colorado Plateau. Below the rim, the rocks are gray shales and sandstones of the Mesa Verde Group, and date from the end of the Cretaceous Period, the last stand of the dinosaurs. The pink and orange rocks of the rim of Bryce Canyon belong to the early Cenozoic Era. The lime-rich shale is called the Claron Formation, and it originated in a vast freshwater lake complex.

 We moved on to Agua Canyon for a new perspective...

I'll bet that the single hoodoo in the image below has a name, but I don't know it. I know I've seen it in a lot of books. Someone fill us in!

A bit further along the road, we found Natural Bridge. Given that a bridge is supposed to have been formed by a river, this should actually be called an arch. It is one of the most striking features we ran across.

 A pair of ravens were having an argument in a nearby Ponderosa tree...

Somehow that reminded us that it was dinner time, so we went to camp and whipped something in a can. We wanted to check out the sunset at Fairyland Point...that will be covered in part two...