Two Bridges: down into the hoodoos

Welcome to Bryce Canyon. I'll walk with you down the Two Bridges side of the Navajo Loop, from Sunset Point to the canyon floor, a little over half a mile and about five hundred feet down.

The other side of the loop, the narrow slot called Wall Street, has been closed since summer storms damaged it, so this is the way in.

I'll tell you a story at each spot and stay quiet in between. When you reach the bottom, there's a second tour for the climb back up, with different stories. You'll want them: the trail back starts at about eight thousand feet.

This is Sunset Point. Here's the first surprise: Bryce Canyon isn't a canyon at all. No river carved it. It's a series of huge natural amphitheaters bitten into the edge of a high plateau, the Paunsaugunt, a Paiute word that means home of the beavers.

Long before anyone called it Bryce, the Paiute people knew this place. In 1936, a Paiute elder told a park naturalist the old story of how the hoodoos came to be. Before there were any Indians, he said, the Legend People lived here. They were bad, so Coyote turned them all into rocks. You can see them now: some standing in rows, some sitting down, some holding on to others. You can see their faces, with paint on, just as they were before they became stone. The Paiute name for this place, he said, means red painted faces.

Look out over the amphitheater now and see if you can find them: the rows, the families, the painted faces.

That's Thor's Hammer. The block on top is harder rock, a cap that shields the softer stone underneath, a bit like an umbrella. That's why the column below it survives while everything around it wears away.

The tool doing the carving is ice. Here, on more than half the nights of the year, the temperature swings above and below freezing. Water seeps into cracks by day, freezes at night, and expands by about nine percent, prying the rock apart a little more each time.

One day the neck will get too thin and the hammer will fall. Nobody knows when. That's the life of a hoodoo: born from a wall, shaped by frost, and finally brought down by it.

Around fifty million years ago, this was the bottom of a lake. Geologists call it Lake Claron. Mud, sand and lime settled on the lakebed, layer by layer, and hardened into the pink and white rock around you.

Then, over millions of years, the whole region was pushed up. The old lakebed now sits about eight thousand feet above the sea.

And it's still changing. Rain here is slightly acidic, just enough to dissolve the calcium carbonate that binds the grains together. That's why the hoodoos look rounded and lumpy, like melting candle wax. You're walking down through a lake that hasn't finished leaving.

Here are the Two Bridges: openings in a thin wall of rock where daylight shines through.

No river made them. Here, the rock forms long, thin walls called fins. Frost and rain find the weakest spots and work through them until a window opens. Windows widen into bridges. Eventually the bridges collapse, and what's left standing becomes a row of hoodoos.

So you're looking at the whole life story of Bryce in one place: fin, window, bridge, hoodoo. These bridges are somewhere in the middle of that story.

Welcome to the canyon floor. Down here, tall Douglas firs and ponderosa pines grow in the shelter of the walls.

Just past here is the bottom of Wall Street, the narrow slot on the other side of the loop. In a normal year, people climb up between walls hundreds of feet high, past Douglas firs that have reached for that thin strip of sky for centuries. This year it's closed: storms in late July damaged the trail, and in August a flash flood stranded hikers on several trails here. It's a good reminder. If storms build overhead, head back up.

This is your turnaround. When you're ready, open Two Bridges, the climb back, and press play. Take it slowly. The air is thin up here, and the stories are worth the stops.