One of the really interesting things about living in the southwest are the really strange geological formations that can be found here. Last weekend I got another taste for how strange it can really get. Traversing amongst these bizarre fingers of rock, I was once again awed by the audacity of nature. It would be hard to think this stuff up, so thanks to nature for proving once again that weird can be natural.
The hoodoos of Bryce Canyon are 60 million year old sculpted claron rock formations which consist of limestone, dolomite and siltstone. Trace amounts iron and manganese oxides in the limestone create the fantastic pink and orange colors in rock formations. The white hoodoo layers are free of iron oxide. A unique combination of limestone sedimentary layers and weather patterns create these unusual geological structures. Long ago, Bryce Canyon was once covered by sea, mountains, desert and coastal plain. Over millions of years, the land was subject to violent storms and severe changes here. Earthquakes, mudslides and volcanoes transformed the earth, forcing, molding and reshaping it. Seas and streams came and went, moving sediment and depositing it in layers. In Bryce Canyon it freezes at night approximately 360 days of the year. The freeze and thaw cycle loosens the slope surface, allowing debris to wash away. Patterns form through a process of freezing and thawing. When water seeps into the fractures of the rocks, it dissolves the calcium carbonate that holds the small rock particles together. In cold weather, the water turns to ice as temperatures drop, then the ice expands pushing the fractures open.
The Anasazi peoples once lived nearby in the Zion and Escalante areas, and perhaps even around Bryce Canyon. Over the past 1500 year the Paiutes have lived around the Bryce area. The word "hoodoo' come to us from the Paiutes. in Paiute, the hoodoo means "stone man." The legend of Bryce Canyon was explained to a park naturalist in 1936 by Indian Dick, a Paiute elder who then lived on the Kaibab Reservation:." Before there were any Indians, the Legend People, To-when-an-ung-wa, lived in that place. There were many of them. They were of many kinds--birds, animals, lizards and such things, but they looked like people. They were not people. They had power to make themselves look that way. For some reason the Legend People in that place were bad; they did something that was not good, perhaps a fight, perhaps some stole something….the tale is not clear at this point. Because they were bad, Coyote turned them all into rocks. You can see them in that place now all turned into rocks; some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding onto others. You can see their faces, with paint on them just as they were before they became rocks. The name of that place is Angka-ku-wass-a-wits (red painted faces). This is the story the people tell."
Click here, look at the pictures and see what you think. Stone men, or stoned nature?
You decide.
