Who Do the HooDoos?
The landscape and topography of Southern Utah never ceases to amaze. I think that has to be one of the biggest reasons why this area has always attracted me, year after year. From one time to the next, I seem to both forget and remember its majesty. I remember how much I love the area, but I forget the feeling the visions invoke in me. I am reminded of William Wordsworth and his immortal poem:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
Natural piety exists everywhere in all manner of forms, but we each are most affected at the primordial level by different types of landscape. I grew up in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica and therefore know the tropical jungle and its beauty. I have gone on as an adult to revisit that tropical environ in its most extreme form in places like the Amazon, deepest, darkest Africa and places in the Asian Southeast like Malaysia. What I come away with is a very distinct feeling that I don’t like the tropics so very much. I appreciate its beauty and grandeur and perhaps have most enjoyed it from a distance as I flew the many miles over the jungles of Brazil on my way to places like Brazilia or Manaus. But the tropics generally make my skin crawl and it is literally the last place I would want to spend my life amidst the mildew and the moist.
I spent many years in the alpine regions. When we lived in Wisconsin, I recall a summer camp (Camp Red Arrow) up north near Lake Superior that seemed to go on and on. I then moved to Maine and began to understand the alpine regions even more because rural Maine is about at ruggedly beautiful, especially in the fall, as anywhere I can imagine. I’ve also visited the extremes of alpine variety in places like northern Norway, parts of Russia and Alaska and from my two years of living in Canada and traveling in the far reaches of the Eastern Provinces, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and even spending the time to ride the Rocky Mountaineer across the Canadian Rockies to the mighty forests of British Columbia. But the alpine areas, as much as I appreciate their magnificence, always struck me as a place where little no-see-um bugs would bother you in the evening and end up in your morning “bug juice” no matter how careful you were to cover the stuff overnight.
I know there are many other subtypes of natural landscape than tropic and alpine that appeal to me more than the extremes do, but for some reason, the third major category of desert with its dry and sparse way, seems to appeal to me the most. For some reason, my travels to the Middle East, North Africa, Australia and the Great West of the United States have taught me that there is something about the desert and especially the high desert that resonates with my being. When I specify the high desert, I mean the areas like we are in right now where there is a mixture of desert, red rock, prairie with sage brush and alpine areas with meadows that stretch as far as the eye can see. These are the areas that take my breath away with their beauty.
We spent the second of our four days here in Southern Utah by driving from the Lodge at Red River Ranch on the banks of the Fremont River and at the base of the Capital Reef Plateau south on Route 12 (the route that BMW Motorad declares to be one of the top 10 motorcycling roads in America), through Teasdale and over Boulder Mountain (with its lovely high mountain meadows at 9,600 feet of altitude), into the village of Boulder (the last incorporated community in the continental United States to be electrified…after WWII), onto the Escalante Staircase with its scary roadway and spectacular views in every direction, and finally into the Bryce Canyon Basin. That drive took almost three hours including two stops, so we were already at lunchtime. Not everyone in the family gathering group decided to join us for the day. Between those of advanced age and those with young kids without the patience for such a long drive, we had a modest caravan of four cars and about two dozen people of mixed age range.
The trip through Escalante is about as spectacular scenery as you can imagine with a road that is all about twists and turns. Luckily, I have driven or ridden the route countless times, so I could focus my eyes on the road, which was useful, given that I was driving a 15-passenger dirty white church van that handles less like a car and more like a bus. The Escalante Staircase seamlessly turns into the Bryce Canyon Basin with its distinctive cliffs that are both the product of water erosion and a lot of surface wind. The nature of the soft sedimentary sandstone of all manner of striated coloring is that that they get worn away in a cylindrical pattern creating layers of irregular spires, which are colloquially known as hoodoos. I heard Kim describe them to someone as stalactite-like only to get corrected by someone that they were actually more like stalagmites (which are the cave structures created by dripping water with mineral content that form from the cave floor upward). These are very distinctive rock structures that are not very much or very often repeated in the many other National Parks across Canyonlands. Indeed, it is what makes Bryce Canyon so unique.
After a picnic sack lunch provided by the Lodge and consumed at two large picnic tables along the road in Bryce Canyon, we headed off to the Natural Bridge viewing spot and saw the postcard stone bridge of large proportions, but no hoodoos. I have been through Bryce Canyon more times than I can remember, but most of the other visitors in our group had never been before and one vista was simply not enough, so we went to the Fairview Vista and saw the beautiful cirque with its distant colorful cliffs….but no hoodoos. My dirty white church van group really wanted to see hoodoos, so we made yet another stop at Inspiration Point and at last saw hoodoos as far as the eye could see. What is the point of going to Bryce Canyon and driving 6 hours to see hoodoos and then not seeing hoodoos? What or who do the hoodoos serve? Nothing but sit there in their natural beauty which has taken millennia to create.
We got in the dirty white church van and headed for the exit, but not before a last stop at Ruby’s gift shop before taking the equally lovely straight and narrow road back north to our Lodge, watching the blend of high desert scenery the whole way. No more hoodoos, but for those who had done the hoodoos, there was contentment aplenty.