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Hoodooville


One of the crazier looking hoodoos at Bryce Canyon

I didn’t know what a hoodoo was until our son Cyrus moved to Oregon—the dictionary definition is “a tall, thin spire of rock formed by erosion in dry environments; most feature soft rock columns capped by harder rock.” We saw hoodoos first in the Cascade Mountains and surrounding area; Smith Rock in Terrebonne, close to where Cy first lived out there, has some impressive hoodoos.


Smith Rock hoodoos along the Crooked River

But Bryce Canyon National Park is on a whole other level. There are hoodoos as far as the eye can see in the numerous “amphitheaters,” or basins, that make up the park. They are big, small, enormous, and multiple. So many hoodoos! We were not completely over our illness, colds and/or weird pollen we were not used to; whatever it was, we were moving slow and feeling sluggish, but we still managed to wander through Bryce Canyon and take a whole lot of photos.


Just a few of the many, many hoodoos at Bryce Canyon National Park

We camped just outside the park at a nice commercial campground; the one nearer to the entrance to the park was full so this was second choice, but in retrospect we probably lucked out, as it was not crowded at all. And we found out that Bryce is one of those national parks, it’s always busy. I don’t think we noticed it as much at Grand Canyon because we took the train and packed our lunches; we didn’t have to wait in line to get in because our pass information had already been entered when we bought our train tickets.


Hoodoos, hoodoos, as far as the eye can see

Bryce Canyon, on the other hand, did offer shuttles, but we thought, oh, it’s only mid-May, we’ll drive and stop as we want. (Especially since we were still coughing and sneezing.) Bryce Canyon is not one of the top ten visited national parks, but it must be close. It was more crowded than we expected, for sure. However, it worked out fine; the viewpoints closest to the park entrance and the visitors’ center were all jam-packed, but as we proceeded through the park, the rest of the overlooks almost always had parking until the end, at the highest point in the park, Rainbow Point and Inspiration Point. But even there, they had two ladies directing traffic, and we did get a parking space.

I can understand the appeal of Bryce Canyon, the endless rock spires are otherworldly, something out of Edgar Rice Borroughs’ imagination as he wrote books describing the Barsoom civilization on what we call Mars. I’m glad we saw it, but I do like the places that have less visitors.




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