Rainbow Point and the Grand Staircase
Near Bryce Canyon, Utah
Drive to the far southern end of the park road and you reach Rainbow Point, the highest overlook in Bryce Canyon at about nine thousand one hundred feet above sea level. From up here the view is not just of hoodoos but of a whole ladder of the Earth's crust. In the eighteen seventies a geologist named Clarence Dutton, studying this region, described it as an immense stairway climbing north out of the Grand Canyon.
He called it the Grand Staircase, and the name stuck. It is a sequence of giant cliffs, each a different rock layer of a different age and color, stepping up across southern Utah. Geologists list the steps by their hue, the Chocolate Cliffs, the Vermilion Cliffs, the White Cliffs, the Gray Cliffs, and at the very top, oldest to youngest, the Pink Cliffs.
Bryce Canyon sits at the top step. Its pink and orange hoodoos are carved from that uppermost Pink Cliffs layer, the Claron Formation, the youngest stone in the whole staircase. So when you look south from Rainbow Point across the fading blue plateaus, you are looking down a stairway of stone that runs all the way to the rim of the Grand Canyon, roughly ninety miles away, and you are standing on its highest tread.
