Day 17: Bryce Canyon, or, things start to go south

Seeing as how we had some extra time that would otherwise have been wasted driving across Nevada on deadly-boring I-80, Alex and I remapped our trip to include a dip across part of the American southwest--Bryce, Zion, Las Vegas, LA, and, via HW 1, SF. If we stick to our plan, we'll arrive in SF on May 14th, exactly the latest we can possibly arrive. If we run into any problems, we have a couple of options for saving a day or two (e.g. skipping a night in Vegas). With this new plan, we spent today in Bryce Canyon National Park and then drove over to Zion. 

If the Badlands are a moonscape, Bryce is a terraformed version of Mars. Everything is red, red, red, dry and dusty. The vistas from the overlooks are jaw-dropping:

The most interesting features of Bryce are the hoodoos, windows, spires and other erosion features lining the canyon. Let's take a look at them!

Here's a hoodoo:

A hoodoo is a particular columnar rock formed not by running water erosion but by ice erosion. What happens is that the limestone has microfractures (often caused when impurities such as clay create plans of weakness that then are expressed by thermal fracturing) that fill with water. Bryce is quite high up, so the water turns to ice at night, forcing the microfracture further apart, eventually carving off a shaving of rock. Over time this splits walls of stone into the individual columns known as hoodoos, and later it eventually turns those hoodoos into dust. The top of the hoodoo is often made of material more resistant to erosion than the material below it--this is, apparently, one reason the hoodoo formed where it did, because the cap protected the softer stone below it.

By the way, don't hoodoos kind of look like people? The Paiute people thought so too, and incorporated that into their mythology. Personally, I don't think it's true.

Here's a picture of a window:

In Bryce, I'm pretty sure that this forms because the stone above and below the window is more resistant to erosion than the stone that was removed, although as we learned in the ranger evening program tonight at Zion, windows and arches can also form when water seeps through the limestone and reaches harder rock, such as shale, that is not permeable to water, and the water then erodes the base of the rock, causing it to fall away and reveal a window or arch. (This same presentation involved a multi-minute music-backed slideshow of arches. People are really into their arches. There's even a society: http://www.naturalarches.org/ This society hired climbers to settle "open" (haha) issues such as the pressing question of which arch is the biggest.)

A spire is a place where the hoodoo cap has been eroded away and the hoodoo is beginning to erode itself: 

Finally, here's a really sweet looking hoodoo called Thor's Hammer that we saw when we descended a trail into the canyon:

Isn't that awesome? Yeah, I thought so too.

Oh, one more thing: it turns out that Bryce Canyon isn't a canyon, as we learned in today's ranger talk on geology (led by an awesome ranger who has an equally awesome url: http://www.iamthedarkranger.com). Apparently canyons are formed by rivers and, as you learned earlier, Bryce canyon is all about snow and ice erosion. Apparently when you tell the Zion rangers that you're going to Bryce Canyon, they scoff and say, "it isn't even a canyon!" Now you know!

Bryce (not-really-a) Canyon is also probably the highest we've been on the trip, with an elevation over 8000 feet (high enough to cause altitude sickness if you went straight up). For us, though, it was only a couple thousand feet higher than previous locations--much of Yellowstone is between 6000 and 8000 feet. From some overlooks (which we didn't go to), you can reach 9000 feet and see over 110 miles on a clear day. How's that for a great view?

Bryce isn't a huge park, and we didn't feel the need to explore the farthest recesses just to see what it's like to look 100 miles (given that we just looked millions of miles in the night sky program the day before), so we headed over to Zion National Park.

Wow!!

There are two striking things about Zion.

The first is that its landscape is even more badass than Bryce, with what can only be described as giant mountain fortresses:

Apparently these fortresses are the result of litholized sand dunes (as we've learned on this trip, the rocky mountains used to be a sea; but before they were a sea, they were a desert. Isn't geology great?) that got extruded as part of some complicated geologic process that involved magma. (As if that tells you anything. Heck, I might not even be right about that.)

Anyway, however they got here: wow, they are impressive.

The second striking thing is that Zion is in its high season right now and OMG there are lot of people here. It's actually kind of cool because there are ranger led activities all the time, and our experience so far has been that ranger led activities are pretty great. (It's kind of like going to camp, except without the awkwardness of having to shower with people you don't even know.)  Incidentally, there are also a lot of little kids at the ranger talks, since going to ranger talks is a requirement for getting your Junior Ranger badge.  (At the geology talk in Bryce, the ranger asked a little girl to write down something she learned from the talk, but it turned out she didn't know how to write yet.)  It also means that all of the hotels and restaurants are open--so instead of dead Gardiner, Montana we have lively Springdale, Utah, and the nicest (and, okay, most expensive) hotel room of our trip to boot.

A few more short notes on Zion--more tomorrow after we've experienced more of the park.

1) They have this huge--like 1 mile+ tunnel--that you use when coming from Bryce. It's built into this enormous rock face, and it's completely terrifying--one lane in each direction, totally dark, directly into a mountain, with no idea how long it will take when you first enter it.

2) Zion is way lower elevation that Bryce (about 4000 feet), and you can tell; it's much warmer. It also feels more lush; Bryce is totally arid, covered with bristlecone pines and sagebrush. Zion has its share of this stuff, but we saw some 'real' cactuses and what look to be green trees and grass.

Tomorrow we find out what Zion is really like!