The Beauty of Bryce

So there’s these big, colorful rock thingies around here. Apparently, they’re quite famous. Perhaps the only ones like them in the world. They are rather beautiful and it is hard not to be entranced by the hoodoos. The rock here is mainly limestone, which can absorb water, and is topped by a harder dolcomite. This area has on average 200 days a year where the temperature dips below 32 degrees at night and rises above that during the day. This leads to a type of erosion known as frost wedging, which shatters and breaks the weak rock apart. Eventually, holes form, called ice windows. The holes get larger and larger until they can no longer support the rock above them. This rock collapses, forming a notch. As the notch deepens, the spire lengthens, forming the hoodoo. The colors come from different iron (yellow and red) and manganese (pink and violet) deposits in the stone.

(Hint: clicking on the photo below will lead you to some others we took at Bryce Canyon.)

Bryce Canyon