Bryce Point, Bryce Canyon National Park, UT, 11/9/2006
A short while after arriving at Bryce Canyon National Park late one autumn afternoon, a friend and I enjoyed this beautiful sunset from Bryce Point! Mine is a slow moving camera, and so I prepared to photograph the sky above the canyon ahead of sunset, hoping for pretty colors in the clouds. My patience and preparation paid off! Admiring the rich palette of colors that is Bryce Canyon, it is easy to understand why this place is loved by photographers, painters, and artists of all kinds. Here we are looking into the natural amphitheater surrounding Bryce Canyon. The colorful sandstone pinnacles lining the walls are called hoodoos, formed by wind, water and ice erosion of the river and lake bed sedimentary rocks. The colorful Claron Formation, from which the park's delicate hoodoos are carved, was laid down as sediments in a system of cool streams and lakes that existed from 63 to about 40 million years ago. The hoodoos are up to 200 feet tall. Bryce Amphitheater - the largest amphitheater in the park - is twelve miles long, three miles wide, and 800 feet deep. In the foreground just right of center is a formation called Fairy Castle. Along the rear wall of the amphitheater at left is Sunset Point. In the distance at center are the Pink Cliffs above Campbell Canyon, and to the far right of that is Boat Mesa. Between them is distant Emery Valley. The canyon's namesake, Ebenezer Bryce, settled in the valley just below the canyon in 1870. He lived here only five years, but the place became known as Bryce's canyon. He constructed lumber roads and surveyed the route for a long irrigation ditch that would facilitate further settlements. Regarding the beautiful but labyrinthine landscape here, all he is known to have said is: "It's a hell of a place to lose a cow".
