The Lighthouse

You made it — and there it is. The Lighthouse: a great tower of rock standing free and alone against the sky, near three hundred feet from its base to its tip, tall enough to shame a twenty-story building. It's what geologists call a hoodoo — a pillar of rock left standing when everything around it wore away. Take a good long drink of your water, find a bit of shade if there's any to be had, and just sit and look at it a while. You earned this.

Here's how a thing like this comes to be. That soft red rock erodes away fairly easily under wind and rain. But the Lighthouse wears a cap of harder, tougher stone right on top — and that hard cap acts like an umbrella, sheltering the softer rock directly beneath it from the weather. So as the whole landscape around it slowly washed and blew away over the ages, this one protected column stayed behind, standing tall while its surroundings dissolved into the canyon. It won't stand forever — one day that cap will crack and fall, and the Lighthouse will go with it — but that day is likely thousands of years off. For now, it's yours to marvel at.

Look out from up here, too, at how the whole canyon spreads around you — sheltered, watered, hidden below the plains. Sit a while in the presence of this old stone tower, and let Boone tell you about all the people who found refuge in this canyon, long before it was ever a park. Rest those legs; you've got the walk back yet.