In this month’s Canyon Commentary, author Scott Thybony recounts his many adventures on the rugged Arizona Strip. To the human imagination, the wind-carved Navajo sandstone near the Utah border can take on familiar shapes and likenesses. But Thybony resists the urge to name the features, instead enjoying these geologic anomalies for their haunting and mysterious beauty.
A chain of storms has ended, giving us a chance to head north to the border of Utah and Arizona, a landscape of possibilities.
Within a few hours we’re walking across a sandstone expanse where knobbly mounds of pale rock resemble clouds fallen to ground.
Geologists have become inventive when describing this type of rock, whose origins are still disputed.Some have called the repetitive polygonal pattern “tortoise-shell weathering” and “bulbous cauliflower relief.”
Others have gone with culinary metaphors such as “pans of giant bread muffins.”
Similar polygonal patterns have been found on Mars, and I once began referring to an otherworldly landscape nearby as Planet X, but caught myself. Giving it a name has consequences.
Some of us remember when Coyote Buttes was a closely guarded secret. The word started getting out and within a couple of years a pocket of swirling sandstone became known as “The Wave.” And the crowds descended. People were dropping dead on the three mile walk into it during the summer heat, and the Bureau of Land Management began requiring permits. Now they have a lottery system where the chances of getting drawn are slim. Instead of rolling the dice, the three of us have chosen a longer, more difficult approach to less-crowded parts of the plateau.
In case the deep sand causes trouble we carry shovels, recovery boards, and tow straps. To navigate we have the National Geographic map of the area, topo apps, and satellite imagery. In the past when conditions were right, I would come out here with a two-wheel drive pickup and the only map I used was a 15-minute quad.
Now, with generally drier conditions and more traffic, the ruts have deepened and the sand traps have softened.
To reduce risk, each of us carries a satellite-linked emergency locator.Just in case.
The route passes outcrops of Navajo Sandstone showing long, sweeping layers formed in a vast Jurassic desert 195-million years ago. Once an immense sand sea, it’s the most characteristic rock of the Four Corners country, and at Zion Canyon it forms cliffs more than 2,000-feet thick.
The outcrops on the plateau have a tendency to weather into a hundred unfamiliar shapes resembling turtle shells and toadstools, beehives and even human brains. In some areas the sandstone erodes into parallel ridges much like ripples on a washboard road.
A stunning rock formation lies down miles of branching, sand-choked roads beyond an unnamed mesa, and screened by sandstone outcrops reached by foot. A perfect cone, shaped by a vortex of spinning wind tapers upward twenty-five feet to a point capped by a flat rock.
With smooth sides layered in soft reds and yellows, it blends the shape of a classic tepee rock with a hoodoo. The first sight of it comes as a surprise since it’s a stand-alone formation, an outlier. Nothing similar lies close.
When facing a rock feature for the first time, one that doesn’t fit into normal categories, it’s natural to reach for the familiar to make sense of it. The name given to it often comes from what it resembles.
A vaquero wrapped in a colorful poncho comes to mind as I stand next to the smooth cone.
But the visual image created by a name diminishes the essence of the rock itself.
It’s enough to stand before a beautiful, wind-carved rock and be content with a beautiful, wind-carved rock.
Leaving it unnamed, the three of us turn back and follow a track deeper into the Sand Hills.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio and air on the last Friday of each month.
