hoodoo? j00doo!

Figured I'd post some pictures from my trip mentioned in my first real post and talk a bit about them.

So break out those notebooks and pencils, it's time for class!

The nifty little formations you see to your right there are called hoodoos. I bet whoever thought of that name was a pretty funny guy. OK, maybe not. Just looked it up! Apparently the term comes from American aboriginals that picked up the term from English-speaking peoples who were using it to refer to evil things. The aboriginal peoples viewed the hoodoos as evil old gods that had been turned into stone and applied the term! I found it amusing that one reason they believed they were evil is that they would "wake up and throw boulders", which was actually just the softer rock/sand collapsing and the boulder on top falling. Old culture beliefs are so cool and interesting!

Oh yeah! Guess I should explain what and how they are! As I hinted at earlier and you may be able to tell, they're made up of a very unresistant material that was lucky enough to get a nice protective top. In the case of the micro ones I found, they were covered by small pebbles (in the top picture) or quartz (in that picture ^). In the case of much larger ones*, they're capped by big boulders that when randomly thrown to the ground by the collapsing underlying material are more than enough to frighten your average aboriginal American! Well these nice resistant caps protect the soft material from rain and such while all the surrounding material gets eroded away, leaving the awesome little sand ones we can admire and enjoy (also stomp on) or the huge ones* we can marvel at and dodge falling boulders from! Yay geology!

*These two pictures came from wikipedia, not my camera.



Wanted to throw in this pretty neat panoramic shot I got from the top of the canyon these hoodoos were found in. (Was lots of fun getting to the bottom! And then finding out we weren't supposed to be down there...) Fun fact: All the different colored sands/materials are all mixed up because they were blown out of the area when a meteor hit and then they were mixed and redeposited by the sea that covered the region at the time as it rushed back in to refill the new gaping hole the meteor had left.

Any questions? If not, class dismissed!