East out of Zion and north on 89 before turning east again on Highway 12, a Scenic Byway. The pink cliffs of Bryce loomed high in the distance, draped in snow and looking spectacular. Someone up there must have been getting some lovely pictures. But that someone would have been cold, as Bryce was recording nighttime lows in the 20s. I would be putting that park off until June. My strategy of timing parks to weather would mean a lot of circular driving on the Colorado Plateau, but I was basically living out doors and not inclined to be any less comfortable than necessary.
My goal was Kodachrome Basin State Park, its name and reputation promising beautiful color. The weather wasn’t very good, a fact that likely helped me get a site at the popular park on a Saturday afternoon, the day before Easter. Given the threatening weather I kept to short hikes, starting with the mostly flat, three-mile round trip Panorama Trail, which I hiked in intermittent hail. The dark skies accentuated the color somehow, rendering it, well, not only far more fantastical than Zion but probably the strangest coloring I would see my entire trip. Colors you just don’t see in nature, except here they were.
According to Hiking the Southwest’s Geology, my primary guide for Colorado Plateau geology, Kodachrome Basin was carved from “the wind-blown dune sands of Jurassic Entrada Sandstone.“ Replace the word “Entrada” with “Navajo” and the description fits Zion. But these cliffs didn’t look anything like Zion. The formations seemed wildly different. Navajo Sandstone forms sheer solid cliffs, these cliffs seemed soft, almost soapy, and had eroded into an ornate, carved architecture filled with pointed pinnacles and statuesque appendages. The cliff bottomed out in erosive features closer in appearance to badlands than to Navajo Sandstone. Not that I worried too much about it, my interest being more aesthetic than scientific, and these were some beautiful cliffs.
Still, I like to learn, and eventually I came upon some helpful writings on Entrada Sandstone by Donald Baars, a leading geologist of the Colorado Plateau. He said that where the Entrada Sandstone outcropped in the San Rafael Swell region it was “composed of a pale reddish-brown earthy sandstone and siltstone…undoubtedly formed in an aqueous environment.” Not wind-blown at all! Further east and south, though, the Entrada “grades rapidly into a massive, cross-stratified sandstone of prominent proportions…generally thought to have been deposited as sand dunes much like the Navajo below.”
When the sediment that would become Entrada Sandstone was laid down, the land that would one day be called Utah was a coastal and near-coastal environment, with the coast fluctuating eastward and westward through time. The sediment that accumulated to the east formed dry, wind-blown sand dunes similar to Navajo Sandstone. Sediment that accumulated nearer to the western sea were mixed with muddier siltstones in a more “aqueous environment”. This would seem to be a better description of the Entrada Sandstone of Kodachrome.
How an earthy siltstone that formed in water and a sandstone that formed in dry sand dunes could both be Entrada Sandstone eluded me. It struck me as more a geologist vagary than a character of rocks, but perhaps a perfectly good explanation was buried more deeply in the literature. As a state park encompassing a relatively small basin, Kodachrome doesn’t get the scientific attention of the region’s national parks. But I did locate a publication on Kodachrome, which without discussing the formation of Entrada Sandstone in the text, did provide a table that listed the three “members” of Entrada Sandstone: the Escalante, the Cannonville, and the Gunsight Butte. And according to the table, each of the members formed in a shallow marine environment. No more sand dunes! Science marches on.
Actually geologists do pay attention to Kodachrome Basin, but not to the fine points of Entrada Sandstone. What attracts their attention is the “enigmatic sandstone pipes”, - 67 of them to be precise - “towers of light-gray to white rock” that stand in isolation throughout the park. Clearly these towers were contained by the Entrada Sandstone and being harder and more resistant were left standing when the encompassing sandstone eroded away. Geologists have yet to come up with a winning explanation of what theses pipes were doing there in the first place, and continue to float hypotheses. I’m not that drawn by the discussion. The pipes are an anomaly, and I’m trying to get my head around the basics. Plus the pipes aren’t anywhere near as attractive as the formation they have emerged from. They may intrigue geologists, but do little for the aesthetics, at least after a few laughs. For one thing the geologists scrupulously avoid mentioning is that some of these pipes are hilariously phallic.
In late afternoon the sun finally emerged beneath the cloud bank and began casting low-angle light on the cliffs. I hustled up the short but steep Angel Trail and spent an hour or two reveling in the dramatic views.
I only quit after sunset and didn’t get back to my site until 8:00PM. After dinner and cleanup I got into bed and listened to Sufjan Stephens Illinois to drown out the Saturday night noise. Kodachrome campground gets high marks for its well separated sites, but I have found that while people tend to keep a respectful quiet when they are huddled together in cramped campgrounds, more spacious sites tend to elicit louder behavior, as if 20 yards and some light brush would serve as a useful sound break. They can’t see me so I must not be able to hear them.
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