Framedlight

As we were on the road to Tropic we decided to carry on, through the little town surrounded by green pasture and out on Highway 12 until we came to a signpost to Kodachrome Basin State Park. This looked sufficiently inviting, so we took the detour. Kodachrome Basin was named by the National Geographic Society and with good reason. There are red sandstone cliffs and strange towers known as sedimentary pipes, the origin of which is uncertain. The place is classified as semi desert and is home to rattle snakes, coyotes and mountain lions. Exciting. Kodachrome is a lot lower than Bryce and I certainly felt the heat. There are several paths that you can follow. We set out to see the rock arch first and then went to see a couple of the pipes. After we had walked for a while we saw a storm was brewing over the mountains and so we made a dash back to the car before we got soaked. Although it never really came to anything. We s...

We drove back into Bryce Canyon the next morning and down the rim road to Swamp Canyon, which was the next overlook we would have seen if we had carried on the previous evening. The sky was overcast, but this only served to bring out the wonderful warm tones of the rock. Next we drove to Paria View which lies up a small side turning off the main road. With each successive stop the hoodoos were becoming more plentiful and prominent. These are the spires of rock that are so distinctive in Bryce. The Bryce area was once populated by the Paiute Native Americans whose mythology said that the hoodoos were people turned to stone by coyotes. They were called  Anka-ku-was-a-wits,  meaning  'red painted faces'. In the 5th picture down you can see Yellow Creek which is one of the creeks that take the water from the streams flowing down the side of the Canyon. This flows into the Paria River which the Mormons followed into Bryce in the 1850's to settle the area. The ...