Travels with Lois and Jason

The Grand Staircase of National Parks:  

Bryce, Zion and Grand Canyons

May 2013


 

We had visited Bryce National Park about thirty years ago on a fantastic camping trip with our kids, and spoke of the wondrous "fairy land" of rock formations ever since.  So we decided to return to see if the reality was as good as the memory.  We were not disappointed!   We had been to the Grand Canyon a few times, but always to the South Rim, so going to the North Rim would be a whole new adventure.  And, we wanted to see if any of the rocks had changed at Zion.

We selected a geology oriented bus tour with Road Scholar to facilitate our visit, and that was a good decision:  we had an excellent itinerary which included a geologist explaining the processes that created the incredible views that dazzled our eyes. There were a few really big geological ideas which we took from our trip and we'll try to explain them below.  But it's the visual images that are so awesome (and so difficult to capture in a picture, but we'll try since Lois takes such incredible shots!)  First, however, a little geology lesson.

The Geological Story Very Simplified

A major aspect of what makes these three parks so spectacular is the rock formations.  As our guide said, there are bigger and deeper canyons in the world, but the arid desert location of these parks inhibits plant growth so the layers of rock with their varying colors and configurations are visible.  These three national parks form a staircase, with Bryce at the top, Zion in the middle and the Grand Canyon at the bottom.  Geologically what this means is that the rock layer at the bottom of Bryce is the top rock layer at Zion, and the bottom rock layer at Zion is the top rock layer at Grand Canyon.  In other words, all the sand and stone below Bryce has been washed away and all the sand and stone below Zion has been washed away.  Then within each park, different erosion processes occured to create the incredible views we have today.

We need to remember that the events occurring in this story are measured in years that are really almost impossible for humans to comprehend.   If we want to watch our thumb nail grow, it would be really tough.  We know it gets longer, but at a rate which is too slow for us to see.  That's what geological change is like;  its happening ALL THE TIME, most of it at a speed we cannot watch.

The three parks are part of an area of the United States referred to as the Colorado Plateau.  We can think of the plateau as a large sheet cake with dozens of layers which were built up over a few hundred million years.  Once that area was an inland sea.  (We need to remember with plate tectonics, landmasses were in different positions hundreds of millions of years ago, and the United States didn't look like nor was it in the position it is today.)  This inland sea filled, dried up, filled and dried, over and over again countless times, creating layer upon layer of seabed, or in terms of our cake analogy, creating a huge multilayer cake.  As each layer was added, the material making up the layers had different minerals.  Sometimes there was more iron in the seabed which later rusted and gave the layer a red color.  Sometimes there was more mud in the seabed, which dried and gave the layer a chocolate color.  Sometimes  there was more calcium carbonate (baking power) which gave the layer a white color.  Different mixtures of all of these and other minerals gave each layer a different color.   And it is all these layers that are now exposed and are so spectacular.
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Rock with seashells found at North Rim Grand Canyon, elevation 8000 feet above current sea level

The big question is "how did all these rock cliffs get exposed?"

About ten million years ago the entire Colorado Plateau, our big multilayer cake, was uplifted
and tilted thousands of feet by tectonic forces.  (Mount Everest has been lifted to almost 30,000 feet, so lifting something 10,000 feet isn't that big a deal!)  The north end of the plateau, which is in Utah, remained about 10,000 feet and the south end, in Arizona, is about 6,000 feet. 

Next, the weather played its part:  water water everywhere, freezing, thawing, moving, puddling.  Rivers created canyons and washed away sand and rocks to reveal spectacular vistas.  Where the rock was harder, cliffs formed.  Where the rock was softer, slopes formed.  Wind and water act like fine chisels, refining the landscape to create columns and arches and bridges, putting the beautiful finishing marks on nature's sculpture.  

The result, just a feast for our eyes!

Bryce's Rock Sculptures

iceberg Bryce Canyon National Park is an amphitheater, extending about 12 miles along the northern end of the Colorado Plateau.  There is no river which runs through Bryce so technically it is not a canyon.  The spectacular odd-shaped pillars of rock are called hoodoos.  The hoodoos are primarily created by a process called frost wedging.  Frost wedging is where rain water gets into cracks, freezes and expands chipping off pieces of rock.  In other words, the rocks are sculptured by the ice into the beautiful and enchanting fairyland columns around which we can walk.  The process has been repeated countless times over millions of years, resulting in what we see today.  Of course the process is still happening, so when we return in a hundred years or so, the hoodoos will have pushed back into the upper wall of the amphitheater another foot or two and new ones will have been created!!!

Hoodoos at sunrise

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Hoodoos from the rim

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Queen's Garden Trail from the rim

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Queen's Garden Trail Hike

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Zion's Parallel Cracks

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Zion National Park was carved by the very innocent looking Virgin River, which is neither wide nor deep, as seen in the pictures


When the Zion region was up-lifted a series of parallel cracks a few miles apart and many miles long occurred in the rock.  Over the next few million years the Virgin River deepened and widened the cracks, creating the incredible cliffs and vistas we see today.  

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Grand Canyon's "Exotic" River


iceberg Geologist define an exotic river as one that runs through a desert with the water source not in the desert but somewhere else.  The Colorado River is an exotic river:  Its origin is high in the Rocky Mountains and it runs through the desert of the southwest, creating one of the world's greatest canyons in the process!  When the uplift and tilting occurred, the Grand Canyon was at the bottom of the sheet cake of rock layers, so the Colorado River ran fast and furious, carrying away several thousand feet of dirt, sand and rock exposing what we see today.  The fact that the area is a desert means that massive plant growth, like a forest, has not hidden the awesome canyon from our view.  On the other hand, Hells Canyon on the border of Washington and Oregon is deeper than the Grand Canyon, but the wet climate of the northwest enables dense forests of vegetation to "hide" the beauty of the canyon from our view.  Our trip took us to the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, which is about 1000 feet higher than the South Rim, and thus wetter and "greener."

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June 24, 2013