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| Bryce Canyon National Park |
The hoodoos rise by the tens of thousands, slender spires and stacked pinnacles arranged in amphitheatres that curve like giant bowls scooped from the Paunsaugunt Plateau.
Seen from the air, their geometry becomes mesmerizing: rows and clusters, corridors and cul-de-sacs, each column subtly different, each telling its own long, patient story.
These improbable forms are the product of relentless, delicate violence. Bryce’s hoodoos are sculpted from the Claron Formation, a sequence of sedimentary rocks laid down between about 50 and 35 million years ago, when this high plateau was a landscape of lakes, rivers, and floodplains.
Limestone, mudstone, and siltstone stacked layer upon layer, later lifted skyward as the Colorado Plateau rose. What followed was not a single dramatic event, but millions of freeze–thaw cycles—water seeping into cracks by day, freezing and expanding by night—paired with rain, snowmelt, and gravity’s quiet insistence.
From the aerial view, colour tells the chemistry of the stone. Iron oxides stain the hoodoos in fiery reds and oranges, while manganese adds purples and lavenders that deepen as shadows lengthen.
Pale caps of harder rock perch atop many spires like improbable hats, protecting the softer stone beneath and allowing the columns to stand long enough to earn their fantastical shapes. Where caps fall, hoodoos soon follow—proof that this is a living, changing landscape, not a static monument.
Light is the final sculptor. At sunrise, the amphitheatres ignite, each spire rimmed with gold. By midday, the forms sharpen and flatten, revealing the intricate fluting etched into their sides.
As evening approaches, shadows flood the basins, pooling between the towers until the hoodoos seem to float, suspended in a sea of dusk. From above, those shadows trace the park’s hidden architecture, mapping the slow choreography of erosion.
