On August 25, 2016 the National Park Service will be celebrating its 100th birthday and anticipating breaking their recent 2015 annual visitation record of 300 million visitors (Olson). A significant portion of these visitors are visiting the Earth’s mighty canyons, notably the surreal landscape of Bryce Canyon National Park and discovering hoodoos. Bryce Canyon is home of some of the world’s most famous hoodoos. But who knew hoodoos? Most people have no notion of what a hoodoo is or that they wanted to visit one, yet millions of people annually do visit hoodoos (United States National Park Service).
Hoodoos are one of the most spectacular displays of erosion. They are “rocks protruding upwards from the bedrock like some mythical beings, conveying the story of hundreds and thousands of years of weather erosion” (Skorucak). Visitors are amazed as they discover mesmerizing rock formations in brilliant colors forming towering whimsical galleries of Earth sculptures, narrow fins, and natural rock bridges that surround the visitor in a scenic wonder of fantasy and scientific history. This story in the rocks draws people and scientist alike. Taking people back to stories of childhood and into world of fantasy, “…it suggests a playground for fairies. In another aspect it seems a smoldering inferno where goblins and demons might dwell among flames and embers” (The Union Pacific System). A vast array of rock structures form mighty canyons not created by forceful rivers or ancient lakes, but rather the forces of weather, and these rock structures, known as hoodoos, captures the imaginations of people while also serving as the Earth’s gallery of the past into the future.
Hoodoos- Wall Street, Bryce Canyon National Park. United States National Park Service Web.
Hoodoos- What and Where on Earth
Hoodoo is a geological term referring to a column of eccentrically shaped rock, produced by differential weathering. However, there are three definitions of hoodoo: 1. a body of practices of sympathetic magic traditional especially among African Americans in the southern United States; 2. a natural column or rock in western North America often in fantastic form; 3. something that brings bad luck (Merriam-Webster). Likely the geological term is due to the rock structure’s strange and fantasy being form. Hoodoos are also referred to as goblins, fairy chimneys, tent rocks, and earth pyramids.
More specifically, hoodoos are geological formations made of sandstone, sand-sized particles cemented together by calcite, silica or iron oxide, created by erosion and range in size of several feet to several stories high. Most hoodoos have a very hard rock surface top, called the caprock that covers and protects the softer sandstone material beneath it from erosion. The caprock feature is why hoodoos appear as ‘spikey,’ ‘human,’ and ‘imaginative beings’ (Skorucak). The colorful and varied shading is due to different oxidation states of iron (fiery tones) and manganese (cooler tints) in the rocks (Neider 45). While differing deposited minerals in different rock types result in hoodoos varying color throughout their height. Coloring ranges from pastel to intense, from rust red, burnt orange, and gold to pink, lavender, pale blue, and frosty white and dances between and among shades of colors in the changing day light creating a continuous changing sunrise to sunset color scheming.
Hoodoos are found throughout the world, mainly in desert areas- dry and hot areas. Their tall skinny spires of rock protrude from the bottom of arid basins and broken lands- places where the land has risen due to the movement of Earth plates. In North America they are commonly found in the high plateaus region of the Colorado Plateau and in the Badlands regions of Northern Great plains. Nowhere in the world are they as abundant as they are in the state of Utah in the Bryce Canyon area (United States National Park Service). However, in areas around the globe from Turkey to France and Serbia to Canada and even in coastal areas of Taiwan, they are famously known and attract tourists to their distinct iconic formations.
Beyond the scenic wonder, hoodoos provide scientists, especially geologists, a valuable study and Earth history preserved in the sedimentary rock layers. Shaped and sculpted over millions of years, these stunning landscapes and rock formations hold invaluable clues to Earth’s past and future (Dasgupta). In the areas of Bryce Canyon that lead into the Grand Staircase- an immense sequence of sedimentary rock layers ascending out of the bottom of the Grand Canyon, reveals over 600 million years of continuous Earth history. Remarkably valuable and unique is the fact that it preserves more Earth history than any other place on Earth. Geologist often refer to the study of sedimentary rock layers to reading a history book—layer by layer is equated to detailed chapter by detailed chapter. The problem in most places in the world is that the layers, or chapters, have been severely damaged by the rise and fall of mountains, the scouring of glaciers, etc., yet here in this area of Bryce Canyon and the Grand Staircase it is largely intact and revealing 600 million years of continuous Earth history (United States National Park Service).
Hoodoos- Why and How They Occur
The geology of hoodoos is a story rich with change as the result of the exciting interaction between nature’s forces. Whereas, flowing rivers are the usual carvers of grand canyons, two famous examples are the Virgin River sculpting Zion National Park and the Colorado River sculpting Grand Canyon National Park, hoodoo canyons have no river sculpting occurring. In fact, a hoodoo canyon, such as Bryce Canyon, is not a true canyon in the geological sense, rather it is an eroding, retreating plateau margin (United States National Park Service).
Hoodoo are an “uplifting story” of geology (Hoodoos). Basically a plateau- large area of high level ground, is created as a result of uplift- vertical elevation of the Earth’s surface in response to major natural cause event such as with earthquakes and mountain building. Then through time erosion from two primary weather forces- rain and frost, wears away rock and leaves behind a thin rock wall refer to as a fin. Next weathering causes holes to grow in fin creating a window that eventually create the remaining hoodoo.
Hoodoo Formational Process, Bryce Canyon National Park. United States National Park Service Web.
Hoodoo Formational Process, Bryce Canyon National Park. United States National Park Service Web.
Illustrated and updated by Brian B. Roanhorse NPS 2014
Some of the most spectacular hoodoos exist in Bryce Canyon, UT as a result of its location with the right mixture of rock types and weathering. This area serves as an excellent example of how the forces of earth and nature work together to form hoodoos. Specifically, the hoodoos of Bryce Canyon formed in the geologic Claron Formation, an immense region of limestone deposited in an ancient lake system 30-50 million years ago (United States National Park Service). With the uplift of the Colorado Plateau, which is related in both appearance and geological history to the Grand Canyon, a series of parallel fractures cut across the Claron Formation (Neider 3). It was these fractures with the forces of weathering and erosion that formed the fins throughout Bryce Canyon; serving as Earth’s material for the forces of nature’s chiseling of hoodoos.
Particular to Bryce Canyon is the key role frost wedging plays in forming the hoodoos. When water freezes, it expands to about 110% of its original volume resulting in ice that functions as a wedge, pushing rock with great force and causing rock splits from inside out, this process is called frost wedging (Hoodoos). At Bryce the nights are cold with more than 200 days a year with freezing nights and thawing days, and these conditions support the principle form of weathering known as freeze-thaw (Graf and Leggitt 9). There is a continuous cycle where during the day water from the melted snow and frost seeps into the small cracks in the rocks where it freezes during the night. As water freezes into ice it expands and this causes cracks to expand and chiseling off of softer rock-frost wedging. At Bryce Canyon’s hoodoo formation is expansive and sped up as a result of having over 200 freeze/thaw cycles each year; “erosion at the Bryce Canyon proceeds at a rate of 2-4 feet of rock being carried away every 100 years” (Skorucak). Ironically, this means that the conditions that create the hoodoos are the same conditions that will eventually destroy the hoodoos.
Bryce+Canyon+Hoodoo+images - Google Search. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Hoodoos- Scenic Qualities and Interesting Formations
The sculpting by frost, wind, wet-dry cycles, acid rain, salt crystals, and other natural forces results in peculiar and interesting shaped rock formations that geologists have named hoodoos. These geological iconic landmarks are found throughout the world and attracting tourism and enticing destination visits. The scenic qualities of hoodoos are the result of the view of natural elements and characteristics of landscape that are strikingly distinct and offer a pleasing and most memorable visual experience. Well-known world examples include: Wall Street, Queen’s Garden, and Bryce Amphitheater (Bryce Canyon, USA); The Queen’s Head (Yehilu, Taiwan); Fairy Chimneys (Urgup, Turkey); Toadstool (Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, USA); Hoodoos of Drumheller (Alberta, Canada); Devil’s Town (Serbia); Putangirua Pinnacles (Wairarapa, New Zealand); Roque Cinchado (Tenerife, Spain); Cheminee de fee (France); and The Mushroom (Wali Rum, Jordan) (Hoodoo-Geology). Hoodoos are part of the geological features, landforms, and viewsheds that frame the natural and cultural heritage of a region or even a nation (United States National Park Service).
Hoodoos- Shadows of Time Casting Their Spell
Hoodoos reveal Earth’s inventiveness, resourcefulness, and ingenuity to inspire and engage imagination. It is their nature to constantly change and all the while they record and reflect changes in time. Standing as Earth’s gallery of the past into the future, they have and continue to impact humans in many distinct ways. “These whimsically arranged hoodoos remind viewers of church steeples, Gothic spires, castle walls, animals, and even people” (United States National Park Services). Hoodoos with names such a Wall Street, Chessmen, Sentinels, Wisemen, Tower Bridge, Poodle, Turtle, Fairies’ Garden, and Queen Victoria all reflect human reaction and connection to these rock formations with familiar resemblance to our human experience.
Most intriguing, the Paiute Indians, who inhabited the area surrounding Bryce Canyon for hundreds of years before the arrival of Europeans held a legend that claimed the hoodoos are ancient “Legend People” who were turned to stone. The Paiute Indian name of this region is Unka-timp-Wa-Wince-Pock-ish—“red rocks standing like men in a bowl-shaped canyon” (Neider 43).
smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/natural-world/the-legend-people-the-paiute-indians-who-inhabited-the-area-surrounding-bry/Louis Kamler Web. 20 Apr 2016
Kevin Poe, Chief of Interpretation at Bryce Canyon National Park shares the Paiute legend about the hoodoos:
The To-when-an-ung-wa, as they were called, the Legend People, were notorious for living too heavily upon the land. They would drink up all these streams and the rivers in the springtime so there would be no water left for all the other creatures come summer.
And if that's not bad enough, then in the fall, they would gobble up all the pine nuts; there would be no pine nuts for the other animals to eat to help them survive the winters. This behavior by the To-when-an-ung-wa went on for years and years and years, and all the other animals and all the other creatures complained about how rude they were and how reckless they behaved. And they finally got the attention of the powerful god, Coyote.
And because Coyote is famous for being a trickster, he decided he would punish the To-when-an-ung-wa in a very creative way. What he did is he invited them to a banquet and he promised enough food to be able to eat all day long. And, in fact, that's quite an offer. I mean, even in modern times, you know, Bryce Canyon, on this barren desert landscape.
So, of course, all the To-when-an-ung-wa came and they came dressed in their finest, most-colorful clothing or in their most elaborate war paint, and they sat down to Coyote's great big banquet table. But before anyone could take a single bite, he cast a spell on them that turned them to stone. The To-when-an-ung-wa tried to flee up over the top of the canyon rim, and in so doing -almost like a scene from the "Titanic" - you see them trampling on top of each other, writhing bodies trying to escape over the edge of the canyon, and clustered right on the brink.
And so here they stand to this very day stuck like rocks. The geologic forces of weather and erosion have worn them away to the point they just look like towers of rock and no longer like statuesque cursed beings. (NPR).
Tracing the United States history and observance of hoodoos reveals the important impact of Mormon settlers, scientists, government agencies, and tourists. Ebenezer Bryce and his family, for whom the Bryce Canyon was named, were among the Mormons who accepted the challenge to leave Salt Lake City and settle in the hoodoo region in the mid 1870s. “When asked about the spectacular scenery near his farm, Bryce reportedly said on that the canyon was ‘a hell of a place to lose a cow’” (United States National Park Service). In 1872 Almon H. Thompson, a geographer working with the well-known explorer John Wesley Powell, was first to report on the geological features that characterized southern Utah that would include hoodoos. However, it was in 1876 that the government land surveyor T.C. Bailey would document with detail the fanciful shapes of the hoodoos in southern Utah:
…the surface breaks off almost perpendicularly to a depth of several hundred feet—seems, indeed, as though the bottom had dropped out and left rocks standing in all shapes and forms as lone Sentinels over the grotesque and picturesque scene. There are thousands of red, white, purple and vermillion colored rocks, of all sizes, resembling Sentinels on the Walls of Castles; monks and priests with their robes, attendants, cathedrals, and congregations. There are deep caverns and rooms resembling ruins of prisons, Castles, Churches, with their guarded walls, battlements, spires and steeples, niches and recesses, presenting the wildest and the most wonderful scene that the eye of man ever beheld, in fact, it is one of the wonders of the world. (Bailey).
In 1916, Bryce Canyon was promoted as a tourist attraction by J.W. Sevier, Forest Supervisor for the Sevier National Forest in Utah. And in 1923, President Warren G. Harding established Bryce Canyon National Monument in order to preserve and protect it for the public’s enjoyment (United States National Park Service). In sum, Bryce Canyon is a series of fourteen natural amphitheaters that founded and carries on enduring human interest in hoodoos in the United States. It has had countless visitors and many that have described it as a vast and glorious dreamland, a colossal maze of countless brilliantly colored and tightly packed stone pinnacles of unique and bizarre hoodoos (Neider 45). Hoodoos are for the geologist, scientist, historian, and common person a surreal experience that intertwines Gothic spires, castle walls, animals, and people alike.
Enduring Far-Reaching Evidence and Wonder
Hoodoos represent some of the best models in geological formations with a rich geological history that interestingly both deterred settlement due to the harsh living regions that they exist in and more presently encouraged tourism into these unsettled surreal regions. The unexpected reveal of millennia of historic geology through hoodoos has taught us much about Earth’s story and power. Hoodoos are evidence of major events in Earth’s past based on a geological time scale- a system of chronological measurement based on the study of Earth’s rock layers. Hoodoos are national treasures, scenic wonder, and scientific history that individuals, families and groups are visiting in record numbers. Moreover, they can be recognized as Earth’s grand sculpture gallery bridging distant past to present wonders. Literally and figuratively they reveal an experience with the grand natural real world that engages imagination and fantasy into the surreal world. Hoodoos are rocks, sculpted by the earth and its natural forces that time has demonstrated casts spells and captures human imaginations in an ever-changing solid fantasy. Hoodoos infuse the concrete real world and unknown imagination and therefore they themselves hold a more distinct power than we have ever dreamed.
Works Cited
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Dasgupta, Shreya. "The 15 Most Amazing Landscapes and Rock Formations." BBC. 5 Feb.
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NPR (National Public Radio). "A Paiute Take On Bryce Canyon's Hoodoos." NPR. Web. 20
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Neider, Susan M. Color Country: Touring the Colorado Plateau. Guilford, CT: Rainstone, 2012.
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Olson, Jeffrery. "National Park Service Press Release (U.S. National Park Service)." National
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Skorucak, Anton. "What are Hoodoos" ScienceIQ.com. Web. 19 Apr. 2016.
The Union Pacific System, "Zion National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, Bryce Canyon
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