Bryce Amphitheater Red Painted Faces

Red  Painted  Faces

The Paiute Indians were very early inhabitants of the Paunsaugunt Plateau area known as Bryce Canyon, some say as early as the 12th century. The Paiutes called the hoodoos formed at Bryce Canyon the anka-ku-was-a-wits, or "red painted faces". They believed these pinnacles were once  The Legend People  and their fates became sealed when the mythological character and trickster  Coyote  turned them to stone for their bad deeds. The hoodoos consist of over 60 known shades of white, yellow, red, purplish and vermilion colored sandstone and limestone eroded over centuries from water and frost. The whimsical arrangement of these hoodoos reminds us perhaps of Gothic spires, steeples, castle walls, fortresses, sentinels or a forest of figurines.

First discovered by European Americans in the early 1850's, it wasn't until Mormon pioneer Ebenezer Bryce and a few other families moved to the valley just east of the canyon in 1875 that there was truly any year round settlement of this area. Make-shift bridges and irrigation trenches had to be devised to water crops and feed livestock. Ebenezer Bryce was known for saying that the canyon area was a 'helluva place to lose a cow'. Settlers who came to the area after Bryce called it Bryce's canyon. Road access to Bryce had always been difficult and it wasn't until the Union Pacific Railroad got involved in providing accessible transportation and real roads built that it became more popular for vacationers. The park deserves much of its public notoriety and emergence from obscurity to a national forest supervisor named J.W. Humphrey, who in 1915 after exploring the area, promoted it whole-heartedly to Utah State as well as the National Park Service in Washington, D.C.  He developed a series of trails down into the canyon and even led guided tours himself along the system of trails he built.  In 1923, President Warren Harding officially established it as a national monument and in 1928 it became Bryce Canyon National Park.

Bryce Canyon is a series of amphitheaters, 8 all total,the largest of which is shown in this photo, known as The Bryce Amphitheater. These colors are very realistic. This photo looks northeast from atop the Rim Trail which skirts the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau where millennia ago the earth shifted to create these cliffs. This photo was taken from an elevation of 8700 feet in early afternoon with a Nikon D800, 16mm lens set to f/22 at 1/80th shutter speed, ISO250, and polarizing filter.