Dixie National Forest and the Pink Cliffs: The Color Above Bryce Canyon
Near Bryce Canyon, Utah
Bryce Canyon National Park holds the hoodoos, but the geology does not stop at the park boundary. Dixie National Forest surrounds and extends beyond the park into the Pink Cliffs, the uppermost rung of a geological staircase that descends southward from the high plateaus of southern Utah. The Pink Cliffs formation, technically called the Claron Formation, is the youngest and highest step in a sequence of geological strata that runs from the Kaibab Limestone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon up through the Grand Staircase to the Paunsaugunt Plateau. Each rung represents a different geological period and, in the canyon country's way, a different color: white, gray, red, vermilion, and at the top, pink.
The pink comes from iron and manganese oxide in the Claron Formation's limestone and dolomite. The formations are relatively soft, and water, frost-heave, and dissolution cut into them more readily than into the harder rock below. What results is the hoodoo topography: pillars and spires shaped by differential erosion, where a harder cap rock protects the softer material below and everything unprotected dissolves away.
Dixie National Forest is the largest national forest in Utah, covering almost two million acres of the high plateaus and the country around Cedar Breaks National Monument, which is itself a natural amphitheater in the Pink Cliffs at more than ten thousand feet. Cedar Breaks draws a fraction of Bryce's traffic, is accessible by the same road system, and is arguably more spectacular because the scale is more intimate.
The forest takes the name Dixie from early Mormon settlers who were sent to colonize the desert south, a region the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints called the Dixie Mission.
