/// Wild Tracks - Landscape Photography by Eduardo Gallo

WILD TRACKS

Passion for Landscape Photography

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Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, UT, USA

October 2011

Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument, UT, USA

Canon 5D MkII & EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM, 1/60s f/11 ISO400 @67mm

Google Earth for this photo
OTHERWORLDLY

Understanding how a hoodoo is created is not a difficult task. All you need are two different rock layers in which the upper one is more resistant to the elements than the one below. Add something to erode the rock (generally water), wait for a really long time, and with some luck a hoodoo may start to appear as erosion slowly chips away the weak rock below leaving a progressively slimmer column capped by the hard rock above. Hoodoos usually fall down before becoming too slender because the balance required to hold a heavy cap standing above a very thin hoodoo is quite high, and the chances of it occuring rather low. All bets are against young hoodoos reaching adulthood. Where there is a hoodoo, the surroundings are generally littered with the remains of others that lost their battle with time. And as the rock layers and the weather do not vary that much in a given area, where there is a hoodoo, there are generally many others with the same general shape and colors.

Hoodoos do not abound, and although they can be found in many desert areas around the world, their scarcity proves that all the ingredients need to be just right for hoodoos to exist. Until here everything makes sense. What is difficult to understand then is how is it possible that a relatively small area in southern Utah, loosely located around US route 89 between the Colorado and Paria rivers, holds hoodoos of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Pick your hoodoo: red, pink, ocre, white, weird, tall, fatty, slender, beautiful, young, old, small, big, enormous, and everything in between. Take your time if you feel overwhelmed by the options, so do I. It seems that in this area no matter how two different rock layers end up, they are just prime candidates to become hoodoos at some time.

A prime pastime for many people visiting this area, and photographers in particular, is what I call "hoodoo hunting", which basically consists on exploring the area trying to find hoodoos, sometimes with previous information of where they are, and sometimes without. As with most activities in life, experience is worth its weight in gold, and I can notice my hoodoo hunting skills improve by the year.

Having arrived in the area just after lunch, for me the afternoon started at the former (with info) and ended up as the later (wandering around in the desert). I was trying to reach a group of hoodoos located above a ledge, near the bridge over the Paria River. Instead of scrambling up to where they are located, I made the error of trying to find an easier way and ended up walking for a few miles in a huge detour that finally brought me, to my dispair, to a ridge just above the hoodoos, which I could see fifty feet below but were completely out of reach. So in my way back I switched strategies and decided to look for hoodoos (or anything else) in the many canyons twists that I had not explored. Finally I found the area shown in this image short before sunset, containing a few rather weird hoodoos and the remains of many similar ones cluttering the ground.

The plan for the next morning was to locate once and for all a spectacular area of hoodoos named the "Towers of Silence", which had eluded me in two previous attempts to reach them over the years. Armed with precise instructions on how to get there, I started walking way before sunrise to try to get there in the early morning light. I already knew that I had to walk slightly more than four miles along a featureless wash to reach the Towers, but I had not anticipated that they would all be through deep sand. So my progress was slow and it took me longer than expected to get there. However, I located the hoodoos with little effort when the sun was not yet too high, obtaining the image above. Silent it was indeed, as nothing moved in miles around. The huge sunlit hoodoos cause a big impression when isolated against the dark cliff behind, and you wonder how in the world can this exist. How many years, how many centuries, how many storms, how many freezing nights, how many scorching summer days are required to create these structures? How many more will they be able to sustain before being beheaded? That thought kept my mind awake while I slowly hiked back to my vehicle under the merciless midday sun.

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