(Please Click to Enlarge) This most of us know from its strange hoodoos and for me also a visit as a child with the family on a long trip from Spokane to Texas. Using Google Earth I lucked out and soon found the proper blue dot to click from hundreds of them. (Much to enjoy.) It brought up another photograph taken like this one by Horace Sykes from a prospect called Sunrise Point, at just under 8000 feet. This is high country in south Utah. You can easily get higher driving the roads west of Bryce and reaching plateau elevations of 10,500 feet and discovering other natural spectacles although at that height hoodoos no longer gather together as they do here like members of several antiphonal choirs in a Queen's chapel. Probably this is also a very good sunset point. Jean has mentioned that here Horace Sykes seems to have had some special performance contract with the clouds, as he does so often.
The Horace Sykes below was most likely photographed during the same trip as the Bryce Canyon view from Sunrise Point printed above. There are hoodoo pinnacles in the second view but they are lower in the frame and perhaps this second scene was also taken from a slightly higher elevation and closer to the clouds – even above them. The elevation is somewhere near 8000 feet and perhaps a little over it. This we note in order to compare this Western scene with another – the one printed below it. It is a view of the Brothers in the Olympic Range photographed by Sykes from the east side of Hood Canal somewhere between, I believe, Oak Head and Tsukutsko Point on the Toandos Penninsula. The “lesson” here is in elevation. The Brothers’ summit is a few feet under 7000 feet, and so a good 1000 feet lower than the position Sykes comfortably took from an as yet unidentified point or prospect and most likely from a spot not too distance from his car. Or we may imagine in the bottom photo Sykes in his post-war Chevrolet reaching for the clouds above The Brothers.
Another scene from Bryce by Sykes.The Brothers over Hood Canal. One (or two) of the highest in the Olympics, the Brothers rise quickly to almost 7,000 feet from the west shore of Hood Canal. The Bryce Canyon recordings, also by Sykes, were taken from prospects with elevations of around 8,000 feet, and a few miles to the east of a Utah plateau that reaches elevations of 10,000 feet and more.