Pandemic Diaries - Year 2, Road Trip to Arizona Part IV

 2 November 2021

I'm currently sitting at the north Tucson Toyota dealership.  Our tough little car, Tiki, is due for his checkup, so we made an appointment for today.  He's in great shape, but just like a human or dog or cat, he needs his occasional checkup.  Based on mileage, rather than age, but still.

Anyway, they have wifi.  So I thought okay, good time to work on another blog.

After we left Wyoming, we got on I-80, drove to I-25 and headed south into Utah.  Our plan was to skirt by the large cities like Salt Lake City and Provo, and head south to all the amazing geological wonders in the national parks.

 

Some of the actual rocks and rock formations found in Utah are unique to this state.  Really, not even the region - some of the rocks are found only in Utah!  There are long and complicated descriptions of the geological eras that led to the development of Utah's landscape, but I'll try to simplify.

 

The oldest rocks in Utah are roughly 2,500 million years old - or actually, 2.5 BILLION years old.  These and other rocks (a mere 16 million years old) were buried so deep in the earth that the extreme pressure turned them into metamorphic rock.   This is the rock that forms most of the North American continent, and is sort of like the basement or foundation layer.

 

Newer rock built up on top of this foundation of ancient rock.  Water deposited thick layers of various sediment above that.  During some periods of time, Utah was under the ocean, or was near enough to the ocean that it would occasionally be flooded.  More rock was deposited in some areas, while other parts of modern day Utah were eroded away.

 

During the time of dinosaurs, the region dried out, and much of the red sandstone built up.  And yes, dinosaur fossils can be found across certain parts of Utah.

 

Plate tectonics caused compression of the sedimentary rock in some areas, so that some parts buckled up and turned into the jutting cliffs and peaks that we see today.  The older rock was lifted up over the younger rock, exposing some of that really ancient basement or foundation rock.

 

HUGE uplifting created the Rocky Mountains, and on the Utah side there was downwarping - meaning low areas and basins were formed.  There was continuing seismic (earthquake) activity, and then a series of volcanic activity occurred, creating igneous rock in parts of Utah.  More earthquakes, more volcanic eruptions, and that all created the basic Utah landscape.

Some of the uplift during earthquakes re-directed rivers, or made steeper inclines, which eroded the rocks into various shapes and forms.  The erosion continues during rainy season, and the wind also erodes some of the softer rocks (such as the sedimentary rocks like the red sandstone).

So, that's a brief explanation of Utah's landscape.  All that geologic activity created a rather crazy and wild visual experience from an artistic point of view - and that is why people flock to the national parks here, to see these dramatic rock formations.

The first set of photos are from the rest area right at the northeast corner of Utah, entering the state on I-80.  I don't know the name of the region, but the rocks were worth photographing.  I've separated the rest of the photos by region, and the map showing our route is at the very end.

 

Kolob Canyon:

Our first day, we drove past the cities and spent the night in the small town of Beaver, Utah - cute small town, friendly people.  But nothing photo-worthy.

 

The next day, we drove to Cedar City, a larger town.  We spent half of the day working on transferring one of Richard's prescriptions from Bellingham to a pharmacy here, so that the scrip could be filled.  Lots of calls and faxes back and forth, but eventually we got the medications.

 

I only mention this because it meant we hung out in the Walmart parking lot for a long time.  We thought a large pharmacy would be more likely to have these meds.

 

And the ONLY reason this is relevant is that we saw sizable groups of women walking through the parking lot, looking like a mash up of pioneer women and Barbie dolls.  I really don't know how else to describe them.  The women looked like they could have been clones of each other at various ages, all with the exact same hair style and dress pattern in different colors.  Each group had one hairstyle for everyone, and one dress design for everyone.  And the dresses all had high necklines, fitted bodices, long sleeves, and long skirts.

 

I did a little research and yes, these were most likely "sister wives" in some of the more religious (or conservative) Mormon groups.  

 

It was eerie, watching these identical women moving around in lock step, looking like Stepford wives.  Really eerie.  Especially all covered up like that on a very hot and dry day.

 

Okay, so after we left, we took a drive through Kolob Canyons.  This is a series of skinny finger canyons through and around looming rock formations.  Dramatic, looking like rock fortresses complete with towers and turrets, rising up out of gentle hills.  Imposing and ominous.  This area runs along part of the Colorado Plateau, the name given to this high flat region encompassing several of the southwest states.  And this is why we were constantly at a rather high elevation.

 

The other national parks we visited were drive throughs, meaning you can drive through the entire park and continue onward at the other end.  (You can also stop and hike, and some have camping permits as well.)  But Kolob Canyons is a one-way drive, with a turnaround at the end.  The scenery is all on the way in - so if you drive there, be sure to stop at the various scenic overlooks.  You really don't have a chance to see much on the drive back out.

Zion National Park:

After visiting Kolob Canyons, we spent the night in Hurricane, Utah.  No, Utah doesn't get hurricanes.  But way back in 18-something-something, there was a very windy storm.  The cover was blown off someone's wagon as they were driving through the area, and they commented that it was quite a hurricane!  So the name stuck, and the town became known as Hurricane.

 

Zion National Park is just outside Hurricane, so we planned to drive through, and then head north toward Bryce.  It was a nice sunny day, not too hot, which seems to be pretty typical weather for Utah.

 

Zion is full of red sandstone structures, often called Navajo sandstone.  Actually, Navajo sandstone is the layered red and tan or beige sandstone built up through eons of sand dunes blowing across the drying land, so that the sand compresses into sandstone.  And as the landscape became more arid, it eventually became desert.

 

The blowing wind and occasional rain have eroded the surface of the sandstone, causing the ripples and striations we

see today.  

 

So the rock formations aren't as smooth as what we saw in Kolob Canyons.  In Zion, the structures are more textured, some even looking like giant stacked building blocks.

Not everyone drives through - Zion provides ample parking at the western entrance so many people take shuttle buses through the park.

  

There are also fun mosaic bases on the lights, featuring colorful bicycles.  We didn't see many bicyclists, but we did see a large group of motorcycles coming through, their engines roaring and echoing through the canyons!

What can I say?  Zion was beautiful and otherworldly.  The landscape looks like something I might expect to see on Mars, the Red Planet - all  the strangely stacked and twisted rocks that somehow don't look earthly, but rather have a strange sci-fi quality to them.  I don't know if any sci-fi movies have been filmed here, but Utah definitely looks like the landscapes from other planet.

It also was easy to image gangs of renegades hiding out among the rocks, cattle rustlers and horse thieves hiding from Doc Holliday or Wild Bill Hickok as they fought for justice.  (And truth.  And the American way.)

 

Or to feel the spirits of the original Native Americans who lived in this area, the Anasazi, the Parowan, the Southern Paiute.  Early Native Americans believed the gods inhabited the canyon, and that it was a sacred place.  They were wary of this canyon, and tried to not remain here after dark.  

 

It is overwhelming, and powerful, to stand and look at these giant natural formations that make our human efforts look insignificant.  It makes me feel small, like an ant.  Or a creature with the lifespan of a butterfly.  It's humbling, to realize that we humans are such a small part of this world.

 

Or as another traveller said, standing looking across the valleys and marvelling at the stone fortresses and rock formations, it makes you want to just stand there and bathe in all the beauty. 

[Sorry about the jump in the narrative.  There's a phantom space that I can't find, so I can't delete it.  I've tried all kinds of things and it won't go away.  Consider it a sign from the ancestors that yes, they live in Zion National Park.]

Bryce Canyon National Park:

We saved Bryce Canyon for last - after Zion, we headed back north to Bryce, because it was either that or zigzag to Bryce after Kolob Canyons, and then zigzag south to Zion.  And then we backtracked south to Kanab for a night before heading to Arizona.

We spent the night in Panguitch, another small town.  (There is a lovely breakfast spot with authentic French croissants - absolutely worth a stop.)

 

Bryce Canyon National Park is sort of but not really a drive-through park.  There's a loop you can drive, so you return to the same place you started; this is the drive-through portion.  The other section is a road that dead ends, because it doesn't connect onward to anywhere; so if you take that route, you need to turn around and come back.

The rock formations in Bryce are totally different from the other national parks we visited in Utah.  Apparently there was a lot more erosion in Bryce Canyon compared to the other canyons and parks.  At Bryce, the erosion was caused by water, ice, and gravity.  Not that there was less gravity here.  But the rock at Bryce Canyon is some of the youngest rock layer in the area, so there was less pressure on this sandstone.  Less pressure (less gravity) means less compression.  So the sandstone is softer, and hasn't had a chance to become metamorphic rock.  And softer rock is easier to erode.

So this softer sandstone was once a huge solid wall of rock.  But between the water and ice, little cracks appeared.  Subsequent rain and winter ice eroded the rock closest to those little cracks, which became larger cracks.  On and on until this was no longer a solid wall of rock, but instead a series of individual pillars, or partial pillars attached to the wall of rock, creating sort of an undulating façade to the wall.

 

The effects of erosion also show in the building block aspect of some of these pillars of rock (though the geologic term for the pillars is hoodoos - yes, silly as it sounds, these are hoodoos).  Again, water and ice carved horizontal lines in the hoodoos, so they look like giant building blocks stacked by child giants.  The erosive effects also sculpted the pillars into odd and sometimes vaguely modernistic human shapes.

Bryce is also the place where it's very easy to see the various layers of sediment that built up here.  The bottom layer is the deepest red, and the middle layer is more of a terra cotta red.  The newest layer is beige and kind of chalky looking, almost looking like thick frosting on the reddish orange cake.

 

Additionally, some of Bryce is at a much higher elevation than the other parks.  At one point, the scenic overlook was at 9800 feet above sea level.  Nearly 10,000 feet!  Yes, that is nearly two miles high, or over 3 km in elevation!!!  (And yes, breathing is not easy at that kind of elevation - the air is definitely thin.)

 

One of the sights everyone wants to see at Bryce is the Natural Bridge.  This is a wall of rock with a hole that slowly eroded away an arch from the base of the wall upward, likely from rain funnelled downslope in the same place, century after century.  It really is a beautiful arched bridge, and the curve of the arch is perfectly formed.

 

Some of the walls of sculpted undulating reddish sandstone looked like photos I've seen of the pink palace in Jaipur, India.  Really, with arched caves mimicking the windows and doors of the palace.  It was amazing to realize that nature looked like something humans built halfway around the world!

 

No wonder the original Native Americans here thought these canyons were inhabited by their gods.  I could feel something spiritual, something beyond our understanding here as well.  Natural forces beyond our comprehension.  Not natural forces such as wind, rain, snow, ice, fire.  But whatever it is that lies beyond these forces that causes them to come together and create this landscape.  The force that orchestrates these natural forces to somehow, together, form such awe-inspiring natural wonders.

 

Given the other-worldly feel of the rocks, hills, winding canyons, it's easy to believe that this land is part of a different realm, the home of gods and spirits and ancestors.  That there is a presence not of this world.  And that maybe we humans don't really belong here.  It feels like the land belongs to the spirits and ghosts who inhabit this place.  The animals who live in the shadows of the mountains, who prowl the rocks at night, or who slink in the shadows, they belong here.  The condors and eagles who soar overhead belong here.

But we humans who drive through, and marvel at the rocks, the mountains, the stone sculpted by time and nature?  Who hike and camp and appreciate the beauty?  No, we're just borrowing this land.  We don't really belong here.  We're interlopers.  We're just a blip on the face of this landscape, this landmark of time immemorial, this testament to the forces of nature.  

 

We pretend to understand, but we really don't.  Instead, we stand in awe, awed by the beauty, awed by the strangeness, awed by the forces that created this land.  Awed by the fact that we feel something we can't name.  Being human, trying to understand, we give it a name - but whatever we call it, whatever we believe, we really cannot understand.

 

That's what these natural monuments do - they remind us that we humans really aren't in control.  We're just living on the face of the Earth, borrowing the environment and the resources.  We're not really living in harmony with the Earth, and we don't really feel part of it.

So we continue to flock to our national parks, hoping to connect with nature.  Maybe we do.  Maybe we don't.  

I hope we continue to revere and honor nature, and our mother Earth.  It really is an amazing place.

 

Grand Staircase from the LeFevre Overlook:

The LeFevre Overlook is actually in northern Arizona, looking back at southern Utah.  But the information here explains some of the geology and geography of Utah, so I wanted to include this info here.

The information signs say:  

"The LeFevre Overlook view of the Grand Staircase is a quick snapshot of the most colorful part of the Colorado Plateau, laid out for hundreds of miles.  The landscape includes a vast array of colors, textures, elevations, and one can see a span of millions of years in geologic time with just one look from this viewpoint.

"You are standing on the Kaibab Plateau, the first step on the staircase.  Once the bottom of a shallow sea, the remains of prehistoric aquatic life can be found all over the plateau.  An undercurrent of geologic forces lifted the entire Colorado Plateau and tilted this section on its edge, providing the view you see before you now.

"The Grand Staircase is a smaller part of the Colorado Plateau, which comprises a major part of the Four Corners region and is composed primarily of high desert areas with unique rock formations like hoodoos, arches, waves, ribs, narrows, and other mystifying geologic features formed by erosion.  These geologic features are found at a greater concentration here on the plateau where the uplift and shifting faults have exposed them to higher rates of erosion than in lower elevation areas.

"The Colorado River flows through the entire Colorado Plateau, exposing the lowest elevation at around 2600 feet at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where high desert temps limit the vegetation to hardy desert survivors like creosote and mesquite.  Meanwhile, within a hundred-mile radius, the highgest portions of the Colorado Plateau surpass 11,000 feet in elevation where are, thousand year old Bristlecone pine can be found."

That's the quick summary of what we saw throughout Utah, and what we see here from the overlook.  The Grand Staircase is an imaginative way of describing the layers building up to the highest part of the Colorado Plateau, and the steps are the various levels created by the seismic forces lifting up different layers of rock.

Who knew that geologists could be quite so poetic?

Map of our route: