Bryce Canyon National Park: This is our third night here, we leave tomorrow for the north rim of the Grand Canyon in that national park. We’ve had a nice time here, at nearly 8000 ft. elevation, although it’s easy to get out of breath.
Bryce is one of those parks which, like Yellowstone, features more of something in one location than exists anywhere else. Bryce features hoodoos: weirdly eroded columns, spires, walls, arches, and the like - in gigantic layers of red, yellow, and white sandstone and limestone.
Hoodoos exist throughout the west in modest numbers, here they exist in profusion. At Bryce you are up on top of the plateau looking down at the decorative erosion of its edge. We “did” Bryce yesterday.
Today we “did” Kodachrome Basin, a nearby Utah State Park. At Kodachrome you are at the base of various erosion features looking up, not down. This state park is particularly known for “pipes,” as they’re called locally.
A pipe is a column of harder rock which somehow formed within a matrix of softer sedimentary rock, likely as the result of a spring or other water-borne sediment. Over time the softer rock erodes away leaving this upthrust column of rock, looking in some cases like a stone totem pole, perhaps 30-40 feet tall.
If you’ve seen the Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford film Cowboys and Aliens, one of the pipes looked like the alien space ship in that film. Another pipe was a dead ringer for a complete set of male genitalia, occasioning much laughter from the mixed group.
