America’s Western Canyon Lands

By Debra Tash

From sea to shining sea, America’s landscape includes some remarkable places.  One such area stretches over four states, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, and though arid now it holds a record testifying to eons of a changing climate and Providence’s hand in sculpting some of the most impressive scenery on the planet.  Ancient seas used to roll over the area, evidence of seven such incursions just in the Grand Canyon.  Through time the plateaus rose, pushed upward by plate tectonics.  Rivers and wind have carved away soft sedimentary rock, such as sandstone, limestone, and shale along with tougher volcanic material evidenced by granite, for example, chewed away by rivers swollen with rain and snow-melt.  The area boasts of ten National Parks and eighteen National Monuments, interrelated by geological features, yet still unique.

I recently had the good fortune to visit three of the National Parks along with spending time in the Glen Canyon Canyon National Recreation Area. You are invited to come along on this journey.

The Grand Canyon National Park:

There’s evidence the first human habitation of the Grand Canyon dates back over 10,000 years.  From the park’s website: “Based on archeological evidence, hunter gatherers passed through the canyon 10,000 or more years ago. The ancestral Puebloan people have lived in and around the canyon for several thousand years, leaving behind dwellings, garden sites, food storage areas, and artifacts. Modern tribes still consider Grand Canyon their homeland.”

Due to a rugged passage along the Colorado River the area remained relatively unexplored by Europeans.  A party of Spaniards led by Don Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas in 1540, though not confirmed, is said to have passed along the Canyon’s rim.  The exploration and extensive mapping of the area was done by John Wesley Powell, who took boats down the Colorado several times between 1869 and 1872.  You can read about these explorations: HERE.

From the National Park Services’ website: “The Grand Canyon itself is a late Cenozoic feature, characteristic of renewed erosion during this time. Vigorous cutting by the snow-fed Colorado River carved the Canyon’s depth. Canyon widening is held in check by the region’s dry climate. The asymmetry between rapid downcutting and slow widening results in the Grand Canyon rather than a more typical broad (and nondescript) river valley. Although violent storms may send flash floods gouging down narrow side canyons, the lack of steady moisture has created a stark landscape of mostly naked rock. Harder, erosion-resistant rocks such as the Coconino Sandstone and the Redwall Limestone have eroded into bold cliffs. Softer layers melt into slopes like the Tonto Platform (Bright Angel Shale) and the Esplanade (Hermit Shale). The oldest, crystalline rocks are chiseled into the craggy cliffs of the Granite Gorges.”

View from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, Debra Tash

Elk, Grand Canyon, Debra Tash

Glen Powell Recreational Area:

This area lies along the Colorado River and is noted for Lake Powell.  Wikipedia: “The 710-foot (220 m) high dam was built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) from 1956 to 1966 and forms Lake Powell, one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the U.S. with a capacity of 27 million acre feet (33 km³).^[2] The dam is named for Glen Canyon, a series of deep sandstone gorges now flooded by the reservoir; Lake Powell is named for John Wesley Powell, who in 1869 led the first expedition to traverse the Colorado’s Grand Canyon by boat.”

Lake Powell is the second largest reservoir in the United States. It provides water to a thirsty west, having the capacity to store up to 24,322,069 acre feet of water along with generating hydroelectric power which supplements the energy created at the nearby Navajo Generating Station.  That Generating Station is fired by locally mined coal. Lake Powell is a favorite vacation spot that supports the small town of Page, Arizona. Visitors can explore the incredible landscape which includes the Rainbow Bridge, a natural arch carved out of the soft sandstone by the Colorado River and later whittled away by the arid winds. It is the highest natural land bridge in the United States.

Below the dam petroglyphs can be seen.  Unlike pictographs, these images were not painted onto the rock surface but carved through the layer of iron oxide by Native Americans.

Rainbow Bridge, Debra Tash

Glen Dam

Petrographic left by an ancient hunting party…prehaps, Debra Tash

Bryce Canyon National Park:

By far this is one of the most spectacular place we visited.  From the NPS website: “Bryce Canyon. located in southwestern Utah, became a national park in 1928.” Wikipedia: “The national park lies within the Colorado Plateau geographic province of North America and straddles the southeastern edge of the Paunsaugunt Plateau west of the Paunsaugunt Fault (Paunsaugunt is Paiute for “home of the beaver“). Park visitors arrive from the plateau part of the park and look over the plateau’s edge toward a valley containing the fault and the Paria River just beyond it (Paria is Paiute for “muddy or elk water”). The edge of the Kaiparowits Plateau bounds the opposite side of the valley.“   

When the park’s namesake, Mormon settler, Ebenezer Bryce was asked what it was like living next to the canyon with its forest of sculpted pillars, the cattle rancher is rumored to have answered, “It’s a helluva place to lose a cow.”

The most notable formations are the hoodoos, the stone pillars, {“brown, pink and red in color are from hematite (iron oxide; Fe2O 3); the yellows from limonite (FeO(OH)·nH 2O); and the purples are from pyrolusite (MnO2) Wikipedia} which the ancients believed were trapped souls imprisoned by trickster coyotes. It is a mystical place and well worth the visit.  If you can stay in the lodge, which has no internet or television, even without, and maybe because, you have no distractions, you will definitely not be disappointed. It provides you with easy access to the park and a star filled sky, both unbelievably beautiful.

Hoodoos of Bryce, Debra Tash

Hoodoos of Bryce, Debra Tash

Zion National Park:

The last canyon land we explored on our journey was formed in part by the desert waters of the Virgin River, a tributary of the Colorado River named after Thomas Virgin, one of the first Americans to see it. Wikipedia: “It is located on the Markagunt and Kolob plateaus, at the intersection of three North American geographic provinces: the Colorado Plateaus, the Great Basin, and the Mojave Desert.”  Wind and seasonal rain, in this otherwise harsh arid region, helped form the blind arches and cliffs of Zion. Native hunter gathers had passed through the area for over 8000 years.  

Wikipedia: “In 1909 the President of the United States, William Howard Taft, named the area a National Monument to protect the canyon, under the name of Mukuntuweap National Monument. In 1918, however, the acting director of the newly created National Park Service changed the park’s name to Zion, the name used by the Mormons. According to historian Hal Rothman: “The name change played to a prevalent bias of the time. Many believed that Spanish and Indian names would deter visitors who, if they could not pronounce the name of a place, might not bother to visit it. The new name, Zion, had greater appeal to an ethnocentric audience.” The United States Congress established the monument as a National Park on November 19, 1919. The Kolob section was proclaimed a separate Zion National Monument in 1937, but was incorporated into the park in 1956.”

A blind arch, Zion National Park, Debra Tash

Zion National Park, Debra Tash

I would encourage you to visit the Canyon Lands of the west.  There is so much to see and explore there, and all are a rich and varied part of our true national treasure.

• Arches National Park, Utah
• Aztec Ruins National Monument, New Mexico
• Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Colorado
• Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah
• Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona
• Canyonlands National Park, Utah
• Capitol Reef National Park, Utah
• Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah
• Chaco Culture National Historical Park, New Mexico
• Colorado National Monument, Colorado
• Curecanti National Recreation Area, Colorado
• Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado & Utah
• El Malpais National Monument, New Mexico
• El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
• Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona & Utah
• Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
• Hovenweep National Monument, Colorado & Utah
• Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, Arizona
• Lake Mead National Recreation Area, Arizona & Neveda
• Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
• Natural Bridges National Monument, Utah
• Navajo National Monument, Arizona
• Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona
• Pipe Springs National Monument, Arizona
• Rainbow Bridge National Monument, Utah
• Sunset Crater National Monument, Arizona
• Walnut Canyon National Monument, Arizona
• Wupatki National Monument, Arizona
• Yucca House National Monument, Colorado
• Zion National Park, Utah

Debra Tash is Editor-in-Chief of Citizensjournal.us, past president for Citizens Alliance for Property Rights, business executive and award-winning author, residing in Somis.