Journey to Utah in 2013, part 7: arriving at Bryce Canyon National Park

This post is part of a series. Click here to read the first post. To see the gallery, click here.

EXPERIMENTAL LIVING

We left Coral Pink Sand Dunes SP around mid-morning, driving north on Utah State Route 89, a road that took us past idyllic scenes of farmhouses framed by cottonwoods against a rocky backdrop. Orderville (pictured above) looked especially charming that day, nestled beneath cliffs of Navajo Sandstone and exposures of Mancos Shale where Route 89 crossed over the Virgin River. The Mancos Shale, a deposit of shale and sandstone that was laid down between 94 and 85 million years ago, marks where the Cretaceous Seaway advanced and retreated over the land. Also known as the Western Interior Seaway, this relatively shallow inland sea once divided the continent of North America in half. Things have changed a lot since those days. 

I was curious about the towns we passed on Route 89. My research led me to Orderville’s unusual history. Brigham Young, the famed Mormon leader, asked church members everywhere to form what he called “United Orders.” Following his recommendation in 1875, a group of impoverished people from other failed Mormon settlements came together to create Orderville, a town in which everyone who worked received equal pay, and all citizens shared property communally. More than 200 Mormon settlements pursued principles of United Order, and Orderville became one of the best known, for its success and duration.

The community grew quickly in size and scope, and for ten years Ordervilleans enjoyed peace and prosperity, using their talents to benefit the community out of a belief that all of God’s children are equally entitled to the gifts of the earth. Groups of young girls, for example, used their flower-picking talents to procure wild roses, which they laid at each person’s plate for the communal meals – a lovely detail I found in a 2009 Salt Lake Tribune article (link here: http://www.sltrib.com/News/ci_13318751). The experiment at Orderville ended when changes in society and the LDS church gradually shifted the community away from practices of cooperation. The collectivist ideal was lost.

I’m intrigued by the United Order vision and what it shows about the Latter-Day Saints during this period in history. Plenty of non-Mormon groups were also experimenting with collectivist living during this time. How did the church fit into this broader movement? Mormon leaders insisted that United Order differed from Marxist Communism and Utopian thinking in its commitment to respecting the free agency of its members. Participation in the system was always completely voluntary; private property was never abolished, so the emphasis was on the individual to even things out by giving. It’s this concept of voluntary participation that fascinates me the most, and the fact that so many people were willing to do it.

Not that any of this was in my thoughts as we passed through Orderville; at the time, I was only aware that this was Mormon country, and I wondered about the relationship between earlier inhabitants of this region and its unusual terrain. Perhaps human interactions with a place can lay down their own intangible imprints on the land, and vice versa. What did early settlers think of Southern Utah’s geological wonders? Did they project their secret wishes onto the landscape back then as much as I do today? Or were they too distracted by the harshness of pioneer life to think about the scenery? Life's harshness certainly hadn't stopped Mormon settler Louis Crawford from appreciating Zion Canyon, as you might remember from my last post about Zion National Park. But he had a camera, which may have made a big difference.

ACCIDENTAL FAULT PHOTOGRAPHY

Route 89 took us alongside the Sevier River in its floodplain. The valley is naturally arid, but irrigation has made it green. Driving along slowly, our lives full of ease the Mormon settlers could never have even hoped for, we passed farms and ranches, and human figures walking next to ribbons of water that flashed under the bright sky. Thirty-odd miles later, we turned east onto Highway 12 and were soon approaching Red Canyon.

Shooting through the RV windows as usual, I managed to capture the edge of the Sevier Fault zone, though I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time. The Sevier Fault is part of the fault system created by the Sevier thrust belt, which you might remember from Valley of Fire State Park. You can see the fault’s edge in the large photo above, though it’s somewhat obscured by the overhanging roof of the RV. It’s where the gray rocks end and the pink ones start, and I only shot it because I found the transition to be odd and abrupt. That spot, it turns out, is where basalt from the Marysvale volcanic field is juxtaposed with conglomerates of the Claron Formation. The volcanic rocks used to sit 900 feet higher, but tectonic activity has caused them to slip down along the Sevier Fault’s edge to rest next to the much older Claron rocks.

Part of the transitional zone between Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, the Marysvale volcanic field is one of several volcanic fields surrounding this area. Ash and lava was deposited around here between 27 and 19 million years ago. By that time, the Claron Formation had been laid down, so the volcanic material was deposited on top of that, according to the Law of Superposition. That material still covers and protects the Claron Formation rocks outside of Red Canyon. Though we wouldn’t be seeing this basalt inside Bryce Canyon National Park itself, it’s likely that it was once deposited on top of the Claron there too, and has simply eroded away.

Soon we were passing through the gates of the park. At first, it just looked like a pine forest in the high desert. We picked a campsite and put the RV in it, walked down the road a bit, and still there was no sign of the dramatic geology I’d seen in photos. But then we reached the rim of Bryce Amphitheater, and I gasped as I looked down at it. Bev looked at me and smiled; she’d known how impressed I would be.

SPEECHLESS ON THE RIM

I’d never seen anything quite like Bryce Canyon before. I stared at its bulbous spires of orange, pink, and red, aflame in the afternoon sun. The view was complicated. There was a lot of detail to take in. I wanted to gaze at it for hours, to touch every single shape and color and texture with my eyeballs. Somehow, looking at it made me feel hungry, even though I’d just eaten lunch. This place was more surreal than Death Valley’s Badwater Basin or the rocks of Joshua Tree. It was somehow similar to – but definitely stranger than – the Valley of Fire. I am going to photograph the hell out of this canyon, I said to myself. Over and over again, with all the lenses I’ve got.

How in the world did this bizarre landscape come into existence? The star of the show at Bryce Canyon (which is not actually a canyon, but rather a series of amphitheaters along the eastern edge of a plateau) is the Claron Formation. That’s the deposit that makes up these colorful stone sculptures, called hoodoos. As I mentioned above, I’d seen some of this formation as we drove through Red Canyon, a small roadside preview of the hoodoos at Bryce. I was completely in favor of it.

The Claron Formation is the relic of a period in the Eocene, between 60 million and 40 million years ago, when this area was covered by a vast, shallow freshwater lake known as Lake Claron. This lake spread over much of present-day Southern Utah; its size fluctuated, as it expanded and contracted in response to climate changes. The mudflats around this lake, together with its basin, made an enormous flat floodplain across which slow streams flowed, bringing sediment into the lakebed. During this 20 million year period, every thousand years or so, huge floods deluged the plain and left layers of rocks, silt, and mud. When the floods receded, the streams would carve channels in these muddy flood deposits. Erosion from weather shaped them further.

These stream deposits were rich in iron and manganese. When they oxidized, they turned various shades of red, orange, pink, and purple, depending on the amount of each oxide present. The colorful soil was cemented together over time and became stone, and thus the Claron Formation, the raw material for the sculptures I saw at Bryce, was created.

FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS FOR THE CLARON FORMATION

There’s more to the Claron than the colorful part, which is known as the Pink Member (yeah, I know). The Claron Formation is made up of all the different layers of limestone-forming sediment left in this region during that period in the Eocene. Some sediments, having been deposited in the deeper waters of a lake, were more calcium-rich and less oxidated than the Pink Member deposits. These layers became a purer siltstone and limestone, now known as the White Member of the Claron Formation, visible at the higher elevations of Bryce Canyon. The Pink Member is the layer that forms those fantastical hoodoos. The White Member erodes differently, creating crumbly cliffs and monoliths instead of hoodoos.

How did the Claron Formation’s 700-foot-thick Pink Member evolve from flat rock layers into amphitheaters full of uniquely shaped hoodoos? The answer shows how complex the geological history of Bryce Canyon really is. Both physical and chemical erosion are at work here, as well as millions of years of tectonic activity.

Around 15 million years ago, long after the Claron Formation was laid down by rivers and lakes, the Earth’s crust to the west began to stretch out, forming the Basin and Range Province (a complicated story in itself). The forces that caused this east-west extension also pulled on the north-south-running faults throughout the Colorado Plateau, causing the region to segment into nine separate plateaus. Each plateau was bounded by faults and valleys. Once the plateaus had been raised, the entire region began to uplift even more, a phenomenon investigated and explained through the USArray project, as you may remember from this earlier post.

During the time of plateau creation, movement along the Paunsaugunt Fault to the east dropped down the Paunsaugunt Plateau side of the fault. In yet another headward erosion situation, the Paria River ran roughly parallel and east of this fault line, eroding the Paunsaugunt Plateau’s eastern edge, as well as the neighboring Aquarius Plateau's western edge. It's the Paunsaugunt Plateau's eastern escarpment where Bryce Canyon is found.

All of this stretching and raising displaced the Claron Formation thousands of feet from its original position, exposing it to the elements. Stretching also caused the formation to develop a pattern of joints (fractures) that would greatly accelerate the rate of erosion once it began. Adding to the complexity of the hoodoo-shaping process here, the Claron Formation is full of rock types: layers of siltstone, mudstone, and limestone alternate in the Pink Member, and these layers do not all erode at the same rate or in the same manner. Some dissolve faster than others, leaving protective caps of one type of material on top of thin spires of another type, a process called differential erosion.

Each hoodoo at Bryce Canyon began its life as a small plateau, then got eroded into a long, narrow wedge of rock, called a fin. Weathering caused the fin to develop windows. When the roof above a window broke off and caved in, the supporting walls on either side of it would be left standing, and soon these supporting walls were thinned and sculpted into hoodoos. The process is ongoing today; the hoodoos erode at a rate of 2-4 feet every hundred years.

When considered while gazing at the strange shapes of the hoodoos, this sequence of events seems almost magical. It took millions of years and unpredictable twists of geological fate to make this landscape, which resembled on that day a watercolor illustration of a fantasy world. I was completely enchanted by it. I could hardly wait to come back to the rim after dinner and photograph the hoodoos at sunset. 

SPEECHLESS ON THE RIM, SUNSET EDITION

As soon as the dishes from our evening meal were dried, I grabbed my camera with the Canon 70-200mm L lens attached and rushed to the amphitheater for a few hours of awestruck shooting. This vista was multifarious, many smaller pictures hidden inside the larger one. Shapes and colors became more surreal and lovely as the sun disappeared and the sky changed. It was impossible to take everything in at once. I was deeply grateful for the camera that allowed me to preserve this complex beauty for later investigation, and for the telephoto lens that made it possible to zoom in on objects too far away to see with the naked eye.

Sharing the trail with me was handful of hikers who spoke German among themselves while they pointed out the radiant colors of the hoodoos. We all smiled at one another in mutual acknowledgement of the magnificence, no need to use words to communicate what everyone obviously felt about this sunset. The hoodoos of Bryce Canyon seemed to lead outward and dissolve into a valley full of trees beneath striped cliffs. We tourists stood together on the rim at Sunrise Point, gazing at the play of light and shadow on the slowly darkening landscape. Closer to us were some intriguingly tilted rocks which kept changing color as the sun’s rays slanted further. What, specifically, am I looking at? I wondered.

What I was looking at, I later learned, were the effects of tectonic activity and headward erosion. The tilted mesa – which you can see in the lower middle section of the photo below – is known as the Sinking Ship. It’s inside the boundary of the park, and it was displaced and turned by movement along the Paunsaugunt Fault around 15 million years ago. Earlier that day I'd snagged a shot of the Sevier Fault, and now I had a photo showing the location of the Paunsaugunt Fault. Two faults in one day! I didn't realize the significance of either picture when I took it, but later, when the geology obsession took hold, I'd be grateful for my tendency to over-photograph.

In the background of that photo, much further away, are the Table Cliffs of the Aquarius Plateau. At 10,000 feet, the Table Cliffs are taller than any point at Bryce Canyon. Made of the same Claron Formation deposit as the hoodoos at Bryce but jolted 2,000 feet higher in a tectonic spasm, the Table Cliffs are another illustration of the power of the Paunsaugunt Fault. The layers of gray rock you see beneath them are part of the Dakota Formation, which underlies the Claron Formation in the Aquarius Plateau and here at Bryce Canyon. This formation is covered up in the park, but it’s visible under the far-off Table Cliffs because of the erosional action of the Paria River, which exposed the Dakota sandstone as it made the Paria River Valley. 

THE TOP OF A GRAND STAIRCASE

The Claron Formation and the Dakota Formation, as well as the formations I described in my posts about Zion National Park, are all part of what's known as the Grand Staircase. I'd been traveling up the Grand Staircase ever since I passed through the Virgin River Gorge, and now I'd reached the top step.

The Grand Staircase is a way of visualizing the sequence of sedimentary deposits that has its lowest layer – the Kaibab Limestone – in the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and its highest layer – the Claron Formation – here at Bryce Canyon. (That bottom Kaibab Limestone step also appears in the Virgin River Gorge; you may remember that I said the gorge contains the same group of rock units as the Grand Canyon.) Zion's layers are in between these top and bottom steps. The staircase concept was introduced in the late nineteenth century by a geologist named Clarence Dutton, who declared the steps to be five sets of cliffs: Pink Cliffs, Grey Cliffs, White Cliffs, Vermilion Cliffs, and Chocolate Cliffs. Later on, geologists found dozens more layers within those sets of cliffs.  

What makes the Grand Staircase an unusual geological feature is that it preserves over 600 million continuous years of Earth's history mostly unbroken by major tectonic events. During the past week of traveling northward from the lowest step to the highest, I'd traversed over 6,000 feet of cliffs, each telling a different, inconceivably long chapter of our planet's story. Now I was standing on the most recent development in that tale.

Astonishing visions lay before me. Each melted into another in the darkening twilight as I walked on the Rim Trail. Many places in the world offer up gorgeous sunset views, but I'd never seen one with such intricate shadows and subtle gradients; my 70-200mm lens was capturing the most beautiful colors it had ever shown me. Zooming in on the hoodoos made me want to get closer to them. Well, that's what tomorrow is for, I told myself, yawning and suddenly consumed with exhaustion. The air was pure and sharp up here at 8,000 feet, and I wasn't yet accustomed to the lower oxygen content. I breathed in deeply as I gathered in more shots, and carried that thin air with me into dreams of painted spires.  

To see lots more photos of Bryce Canyon, click here.