The Paiute Indians, who for centuries lived in and around Bryce Canyon, with its colors that glow like pieces of a broken rainbow. They called it Unka-timpe-wa-wince-pock-ich. ("Red-rocks-many-standing-holes.")

The story they tell about how the canyon was formed begins in the Land Below, where the Paiutes used to live along with many godlike animal spirits. The most powerful of these, Coyote, was a constant troublemaker who one day stole the children of the great Water Monsters. In revenge, the Water Monsters flooded the land, driving all who dwelt there to the Land Above.

Disgusted with Coyote's antics, the Paiutes abandoned him. Only the Queer Ones–toads, lizards, bats, and insects–elected to stay with him in their new world. Coyote built a village for them in a canyon where they would be sheltered from the hot sun and desert winds. But the Queer Ones grew arrogant and lazy; they insulted Coyote, ignored his commands, and lay around all day instead of hunting for food. Coyote called a council. The Queer Ones came in human form, dressed in colorful clothing, and stood or sat in sullen silence, row upon row along the canyon walls. The more Coyote rebuked them the angrier he became, and he began to wave his arms wildly, throwing out a powerful magic. The Queer Ones remained silent; Coyote's medicine had turned them to stone. To this day, still colorfully clad, they line the walls of Bryce Canyon, mute and still.

Such stories satisfy a deep need in all people to understand the world around them. Our modern tale of how the canyon was formed in no less satisfying, though a good deal more complicated. Like the Paiute version, it begins in another land, at a time in the distant past, and it involves flooding on a grand scale.

The Geologist's Song
Once upon a time, 4½ billion years ago or so, all the continents of the world were one. Somehow, this great supercontinent broke apart. About 200 million years ago, the pieces slowly began to move, riding on mobile plates over the earth's molten mantle, propelled by currents that swelled and rolled like the surface of a thick, boiling pudding. The plate carrying North America migrated west and north, eventually crashing into the plate that underlies the Pacific Ocean.

By that time, Utah lay about where Guatemala is today. Its landscape was tropical, a broad coastal plain dotted with swamps and marshes was tropical, a broad coastal plain dotted with swamps and marshes just west of a warm, shallow sea. Meandering eastward across the plain on their way to the sea, wide, sluggish rivers dropped a thick residue of sand and gravel.

The stupendous, multimillion-year collision of the plates warped and buckled the land. Oceans, swamps, and deserts came and went, each leaving a distinctive layer of stone. The Rockies were thrust upward, and in time a series of shallow freshwater lakes formed in basins behind them. Spiraling down through the water were sediments that came to form the layers of soft stone: mud was compressed into mudstone, sand into sandstone, the limy remains of water life into limestone, mixed materials into conglomerate. Various minerals added colors. Together, these contrasting layers make up Bryce Canyon's most distinctive feature–the multicolored Claron Formation.

Meanwhile, the continental plate was sliding westward over the edge of the oceanic plate and, as it continued to move northward, grinding upon it. By 15 million years ago, responding to the immense pressure of plate upon plate, the basin had begun gradually to rise. It was to become the Colorado Plateau, covering about 150,000 square miles of what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. It began rising in the south, with the result that all the sedimentary layers that had been deposited by oceans, deserts, rivers, marshes, and lakes came to slope downward form south to north.

At the same time, stress was pulling the land apart. The Colorado Plateau fractured along clearly defined lines, or faults, into a series of individual plateaus, each rising as the whole did, south side first. As the rake of the land increased, sluggish streams became roaring agents of erosion, scouring canyons out of ravines and gullies, undercutting and stripping away whole layers of sediment, and eventually carving a series of cliffs that geologists call the Grand Staircase. On the face of each step are exposed deep layers of long-buried stone from a different period in the past. Because erosion began earlier in the south, more layers were lost there, and so on the southernmost plateau, called the Kaibab (from a Paiute word meaning "mountain lying down"), no rock younger than 225 million years remains. The northernmost and youngest step of the Grand Staircase we call the Paunsaugunt Plateau–also from the Paiute, for "home of the beaver." Bryce Canyon is cut into the Pink Cliffs on the eastern side of this step.

Bryce Canyon is actually not a single canyon, but a series of amphitheaters faced by countless little canyons. Each was cut by a trickle, stream, or rivulet as it sliced through the Pink Cliffs, joining the others at the base to make the Paria River. This river is constantly growing longer, chewing its way backward into the soft rock of the Paunsaugunt Plateau to meet the streams that are its source. It is this process, called headward erosion, that formed the amphitheater and continues to steepen the cliffs, giving the water more power.

This is today's story of what happened, and is still happening, in Bryce Canyon. Fingers of trickling water have shaped some mighty sculptures. The soft rock was sliced into narrow blades. These were pared to slender fins by the relentless abrasion, and then to spires and pillars. Each was further chiseled by frost wedges, thunderstorms, snowmelts, the roots of plants and trees, into the "hoodoos" and other strange configurations that line the canyon today. Some of these forms, like the famous spire called Thor's Hammer, are capped by hard layers that have resisted erosion. Thor's heavy hammerhead stands upon a slender handle that will eventually be eaten away–as, in time, will the whole of Bryce Canyon. For the story of erosion is never finished, and it is only by luck that we find ourselves on earth at the right moment to see this remarkable place.