Horseshoe Bend

This is Horseshoe Bend.

It's part of the Colorado River in Glen Canyon, just five miles downstream from the dam, where the shape of the river resembles a horseshoe. In fact, it's just a particularly picturesque example of a meander, bending approximately 270° around the "horseshoe".

Horseshoe Bend has risen to fame in the last five years as the consequence of popularity on social media, especially Instagram. This is apparently an increasingly common problem in national parks and across the world, as certain images become so popular that previously less well known vistas suddenly attract many more people than ever before. The good news is that the park service is beginning to construct more infrastructure to support the crowds at Horseshoe Bend. The bad news is, of course, the crowds.

If you look carefully at the photo below, you can see a small fraction of the people viewing Horseshoe Bend, seen from the river looking up, as we did when we rafted by. We called up to them and heard both our own echo and, many seconds later, a response.

This is another view of Horseshoe Bend from the river. Although it's not quite as dramatic as from above, I think it's just as pretty, especially with the midday light emphasizing the contrast between the blue sky, red rocks, and green vegetation.

The cliffs along this part of Glen Canyon are approximately 1,000 ft (300 m) tall; the top half to two-thirds is an almost vertical rock wall, while the bottom section juts out into the river where eroded materials have accumulated.

The cliff and surface rock at Horseshoe Bend is a particularly gorgeous sandstone (Navajo Sandstone), partly because of the ripple effects caused by the sedimentation processes that formed it.

Looking towards the cliff from a bit farther back:

Here you can see the fascinating texture of the sandstone, including the slightly harder diagonal bands...

And the cross-bedding, tilted layers that are the result of the depositional processes (in this case sand dunes) rather than post-depositional factors such as uplift (the USGS has a nifty animation of cross-bedding).

Here's one more look, nestled between the cliff walls.