Close Up View of a Hoodoo at Bryce Canyon National Park
If there is one word you learn here at Bryce Canyon National Park, it is “hoodoo”. The hoodoo is the defining feature of Bryce Canyon National Park. I think it is easier to see than describe what a hoodoo is. My first stop at Bryce Canyon National Park is Sunset Point. From the viewing area, visitors get a great view of a natural amphitheater. You can see that there are hundreds of these sandstone columns just from this view point alone. Those columns are called hoodoos. Hoodoos are also formed by forces of erosion but in the case of Bryce Canyon, because of particular composition of the rock layers here, erosion produced as large number of these sandstone columns. Imagine a layer of soft rock which is topped by a thin layer of harder rock. The harder rock acts a some sort of protection to keep the rest of the rock below from eroding away. Over millions of years of erosion, it produces the thin columns we see now.
Hoodoos at Bryce Canyon National Park
It can be a little eerie to see these hoodoos in such large concentrations. It didn’t see any of these in Zion National Park nor at the Grand Canyon since one would naively think that this is all part of the same land. I think it is a very localized concentration of material that happened to be in Bryce that help produce this incredible landscape. While hoodoos are not unique to Bryce Canyon, they can be seen in other parts of the world, Bryce Canyon National Park is considered to be the largest concentration of hoodoos on earth. While this is not the first sandstone pillar I have seen, to have so many of them all in one place boggles the mind.
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