Follow the tour from start to finish: the welcome at the first stop, then for each stop the story you hear on the way there and what you see when you arrive.
Welcome to Kodachrome Basin State Park and the Angel's Palace trail: about a mile and a half, rising onto a sandstone mesa above the basin. It's an easy hike with big views.
I'll tell you stories along the way. A few reminders: stay on the trail, because the dark, crusty soil here is alive and one footprint can undo decades of growth, and keep well back from the cliff edges at the overlooks.
Let's start with the name, because it's a good one.
In 1948, a National Geographic Society expedition came through this country with jeeps, trucks and thirty-five horses. They were so struck by the variety of colors that they named this place Kodachrome Flat, after Kodak's famous color film. Their story ran in the magazine in 1949.
When the state made it a park in 1962, officials worried about using a trademark, so for a while it was called Chimney Rock State Park. A few years later, with Kodak's blessing, the colorful name came back. As far as anyone knows, it's the only park named after a film stock.
The trail climbs through a short, narrow ravine. Look at the colors in the walls around you.
You're climbing between orange cliffs of Entrada Sandstone, the slickrock that holds most of this park's strange spires.
Beneath it lies the older Carmel Formation, laid down around a hundred and eighty million years ago at the edge of an inland sea. Look for its white gypsum stripes in the red cliffs. Higher up are paler sandstones and, at the very top, rock from a much later seaway.
Read the walls from the bottom up, and you're reading time forward: sea, desert, sea again.
You're coming up onto the mesa top. The views open in every direction.
Welcome to the top of the mesa, about a hundred and fifty feet above the basin floor.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, cattlemen from the nearby settlements used this basin as winter pasture. Those towns have their own stories. Cannonville began as a place called Clifton in the 1870s and moved upstream for steadier water from the Paria River. Henrieville was settled from Cannonville in 1878.
It's hard country to make a living in, and beautiful country to look at. Watch for ravens and pinyon jays, and look for mule deer at the edges of the junipers.
Ahead is the overlook this trail is famous for. Stay well back from the edge.
From here you can see what makes Kodachrome unique: its sand pipes. Nearly seventy tall stone spires rise from the basin, some just a few feet tall and some about a hundred and seventy.
Nobody is completely sure how they formed, and that's the fun of it. One idea is earthquakes, which shook water-soaked sand and forced it upward through the rock above, where it hardened. Another is ancient springs, choked with sediment. The newest idea is buried pockets of pressurized water, squeezed upward from salty layers below. Whatever the cause, the sand inside the pipes cemented harder than the rock around them, so when everything else eroded, the pipes were left standing.
When you're ready, the loop continues around the mesa. Near the end, look carefully for the slickrock path that leads back down.