Snowshoeing below Sunset Point in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. The 8,000-foot elevation at the rim of Bryce Canyon receives enough snow in a typical winter to provide good snowshoeing along the parks trails through a maze of bizarre pinnacles and hoodoos. Established as a national monument in 1923 and upgraded to a national park in 1928, the pink sandstone cliffs of Bryce Canyon are part of the geologically recent Claron Formation. This layer of brightly-hued ancient lakebed sediment was formed on the floor of a large freshwater lake which covered this region approximately 50 million years ago in the early Tertiary period.