The Colour of Sandstone
The Colour of Sandstone (A Series); 23 & 24 January, 2021
What is the colour of sandstone?
The short answer is: Brown. Sandstone is brown. It’s all just shades. of. brown.
But that’s just not what my eyes saw as I wandered throughout Coyote Buttes, a big chunk of landscape that was nothing but sandstone, in every colour I could think it would be and more.
I didn’t expect purple sandstone. I didn’t expect pink and yellow. Orange? Sure. Red? That’s the characteristic sandstone of the Southwest, amirite? White, sure, I’ll give you that. But I even saw bits of green and blue muddled into the sandstone when it was wet. I mean, they weren’t the prettiest blues and greens…but they were there. I swear they were there.
And yet, as I pulled my images onto the computer to process them, in trying to bring back the colours I saw, I inevitably hit a wall after staring at the photos for hours on end where they just looked brown. Because they are brown. What the h*ck. Doin me a bamboozle, sandstone. I don like it.
Rewind.
We’ve all seen images of The Wave, right? That infamous little spot in the middle of trailless nowhere, Arizona with notoriously restricted access but an excess of applicants to see it, all because someone took a picture and another person shared it to the right (?) place. And I can’t blame anyone; it’s an enchanting spot, stripes that go on forever in fantastical twists and turns, in a surreal landscape that doesn’t look like it belongs on planet Earth.
Well, I was one of the applicants in January. Two, actually, because I lost the permit lottery the first time. But on the second round, I just so happened to land a permit for a Saturday, and as their lottery changes in the winter—where you can apply for three days’ lotteries with one application, on Fridays for Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—I also put in for the other restricted-access location and scored that permit for the following day, Sunday.
Now, Husband and I are no strangers to off-trail hiking. I wouldn’t say we’re advanced, but we’ve got experience, and tested ourselves in the desert with a trip to the Ashtray about a week prior to scoring the Coyote Buttes permits. So we weren’t intimidated with the notion that there were no trails in these areas. And we made good time to the Wave. The Wave was everything we anticipated and more. It had snowed the night before, so all that snow was melting. A group was already at the Wave, a couple and their guide, and the guide told us all we were lucky to see it while it was wet—it saturated the colours in the sandstone, made them more vibrant and clearly separate.
If you explore the wave for any longer than a minute, you’ll find “The Wave Slot”, a teeny little “slot canyon”-esque section (read: it’s a thin section between walls) of the formation with darker sandstone. That should have been my first clue. But I was simply fascinated with the endless compositions, and didn’t really realize what I was seeing.
But the Wave wasn’t enough. We had a list of things to see in Coyote Buttes beyond just the Wave. So we took our photos, ate our lunch, enjoyed the view, and made our way out to the less-populated places of the area.
And that was when things got weird. Really surreal; Dr. Seuss-meets-Salvador Dali odd. As we climbed higher up the butte, the landscape below began to show us just how funky it was. Have you ever been to Devils Postpile? Pretty cool, right? Hexagonal columns of basalt, fascinating from the ground; but get on top of the formation and it’s like being on a turtle’s back, the shapes simply etched into the rock at your feet, hexagons and hexagons and hexagons.
Well, sandstone can do that too, apparently. It’s all lumpy and not as clearly defined as most columnar basalt, but the shapes are there.
And then I really started to see the colours. Yeah, we saw the colours at the Wave, but that was a very close and concentrated view. From above, the landscape was rife with colours. Creamy and saturated, soft and hard, I could think of a hundred adjectives for the colours of the sandstone I saw in the landscape below us. And after some time of being up close, I finally began to notice the details.
At our third location for the day, I noticed the sandstone was freckled. Moreover, though, it was not just striped along its layers—the small ridged sections where erosion gets a little chunky—but striped through the layers, and I got really confused. Don’t clear up this mystery for me, though, because I’ll just revel in its beauty.
Somewhere between our fifth and sixth location for the day, I must have suffered some sort of subconscious overload. After snapping several art shots, marveling at the dark purple splotches in the sandstone, I caught up to my husband and burst out incredulously, “Mother Nature was tripping balls when she made this place. I feel like I’m walking on tie-dye! THE GROUND IS TIE-DYED. WHAT.”
And things only continued in the strange vein the next day. In the second section the colours were even more obnoxiously mixed, three, four, five colours packed together in a small one-foot section of sandstone, swirls through layers going crazy. Dark purple tinged with vibrant orange, a smouldering coal jutting out from the wall; pastel pinks and oranges and yellows snaking around each other while all I could think was, “Oh, the places you’ll go.”
So what is the colour of sandstone?
Let’s be real; it’s just a pigment of the imagination. Because it’s all brown. But I swear it was purple. It was creamsicle orange. It was peach and pink; it was a live coal; it was rust; raspberry; boysenberry; lemon, banana, it was eye candy to an extreme.
And don’t even get me started on the texture.