60 pieces · NaturePhoto by Tim Golder on Unsplash (Unsplash License). First light in the Bryce Amphitheatre, Bryce Canyon National Park, southern Utah — ranks of orange and cream limestone hoodoos below the rim of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, with the sun breaking over the eastern ridge and dark stands of pine and fir filling the gullies between the spires.
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Sunrise on the Bryce Canyon Hoodoos
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Sunrise on the Bryce Canyon Hoodoos
Bryce Canyon is not a canyon. No river carved it and nothing runs through the bottom of it. What southern Utah has here instead is a line of natural amphitheatres bitten into the eastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, and this photograph looks down into the largest of them, the Bryce Amphitheatre, in the few minutes after the sun clears the ridge on the far side. The park has protected this edge since 1928, and the rim the camera is standing on is high country — up around eight to nine thousand feet, high enough that the air is thin and cold at dawn even in summer, and high enough that the ponderosas filling the gullies below look like dark scrub from above rather than the full-sized trees they are.
The spires are hoodoos, and they are made rather than left. The rock is the Claron Formation, a soft limestone laid down in lakes and floodplains and then lifted thousands of feet into a climate that freezes and thaws it again and again — roughly two hundred freeze-thaw cycles in an average year. Water slips into a crack overnight, expands as it turns to ice, and levers the crack a fraction wider; the next afternoon it melts and runs deeper. Repeat that long enough and a continuous wall of rock is first notched, then slotted into fins, then broken into separate columns. Mildly acidic rain does the rest, rounding and fluting what the ice has split apart. The colours are iron and manganese in the stone: the oranges and salmon pinks on the sunlit faces, the creamy white bands where the chemistry changed, the lavender tints that show up in shadow. The tall capped spire at centre-right has the classic hammer-headed profile the park is known for — a harder slab of rock sitting on a softer neck, sheltering the column beneath it from the rain that is steadily thinning everything around it.
For the jigsaw, light is your organising principle rather than colour. The whole frame is some version of orange, so sorting by hue will not get you far; sorting by which side of a spire a piece came from will. The sun is low and to the right, which means every hoodoo has a bright flank, a shadowed flank, and a hard vertical line between them — find that line and you have found which way a piece faces. Build the sky first; it grades smoothly from pale gold at the horizon to cool grey-blue at the top and sorts into clean horizontal bands. Then take the foreground walls on the left, where the fluting is coarse enough to give you real landmarks. The dark timber in the middle of the bowl is the hard part and deserves to go last: it is low-contrast, it has no obvious edges, and the only reliable clue is the paler rock showing between the trees. The hazy ridgelines across the top of the frame are easier than they look — they stack in distinct layers, each one bluer and softer than the one in front of it.
How to play
- Tap Play Sunrise on the Bryce Canyon Hoodoos puzzle to open the puzzle board, then choose your piece count and difficulty.
- Drag pieces from the tray onto the board and snap them into place until the full image is complete. Works with mouse on desktop and touch on mobile.
- Use the Preview button on the play screen to peek at the full reference image whenever you need a hint.
- When you finish, check your solve time on the completion screen and share it with friends to see who can beat your record.
Frequently asked questions
- Where exactly is this, and is Bryce Canyon really a canyon?
- It is Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah, in the United States, and no — despite the name it is not a canyon at all. A canyon is cut by a river running through it. These bowls were eroded headwards into the rim of the Paunsaugunt Plateau by frost, rain and runoff working on the cliff edge, so they open outward from the plateau rather than being cut down through it. There are several of these amphitheatres along the rim; the one in this photograph is the Bryce Amphitheatre, the biggest and the one the main viewpoints look into.
- What is a hoodoo and how does one form?
- A hoodoo is a tall, thin column of rock left standing when the rock around it has been removed. At Bryce the sequence runs wall, then fin, then column: water freezes in vertical joints in the soft Claron limestone and wedges them apart, splitting a solid cliff into narrow fins, and continued freezing punches windows through the fins until the sections between the holes stand alone. Many hoodoos are topped by a harder caprock that erodes more slowly than the stone beneath it and shields its own column, which is why so many of them are narrow at the neck and blocky at the head.
- Why is the rock orange, white and purple all at once?
- Trace metals in the limestone. Iron oxides produce the reds, oranges and salmon pinks that dominate the sunlit faces here; manganese oxide gives the lavender and pale purple tones that are easiest to see in shade; and the near-white bands are layers where neither is present in much quantity. Because the Claron Formation was deposited over a long period in changing conditions, those layers are stacked horizontally, which is why a single hoodoo can be banded like a cake from bottom to top.
- Why do photographers go out there at sunrise specifically?
- Because of which way the amphitheatre faces. The Bryce Amphitheatre opens east, so at dawn the sun comes up directly across the bowl and lights the hoodoos face-on from low down, which is exactly the angle that makes the orange glow and throws long shadows into the gaps between the columns. That raking side-light is what separates one spire from the next. Later in the day the sun moves overhead and behind the rim, the shadows shorten, and the whole formation flattens into a single wall of pale rock — the same view, far less depth.