I have been tramping through some of America’s grandest National Parks this week. It was a post-wedding gift I gave to myself, but a gift that will never stop giving (a stock cliché I borrow occasionally). I often give myself gifts after celebratory occasions and the long-awaited wedding of my son to his lovely bride was about as celebratory an occasion as could be, and merited a gift that matched the occasion that prompted it. The choice of such an excursion, especially as the wedding took place in Utah, the location of some of America’s most stunning natural wonders in some of our best and oldest national parks, turned out to match the celebratory nature of the wedding itself. This gift will never stop giving because those natural wonders of the Western regions of the US, as most natural wonders in other parts of the country and the world remind us of the power and unpredictability of nature, in contrast to the limited power and predictability of humans.
Moreover, the excursion through a series of National Parks with really wonderful natural features was in a week of much political activity in both the major US political parties, as new candidates joined their party races for the Presidential nomination. The TV news, at least in the Western US, was dominated by politicians prevaricating and taking cheap shots at each other, and retread political pundits repeating tired talking points as if they were natural wonders themselves.
TV news were dominated by politicians taking cheap shots at each other
I was joined by my brother, Carl, and traveling by auto, we visited 5 National Parks neither of us had seen before in 5 days. Three of the parks are in Southern Utah, one in Southeastern Colorado, and one in Arizona. All of the parks are well known throughout the world — as attested by the surprisingly high proportion of foreign visitors – and one has made at least two of the world’s seven natural wonders lists, The Grand Canyon in Arizona. The other four are Arches National Park, Bryce National Park, and Zion National Park, all in Southern Utah, and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. All in different ways, demonstrated the wonder of nature that left us breathless, not only from the hiking and climbing, but from the complexity and beauty of the natural world. So Carl and I were treated to a contrast of being transformed each day by glorious natural wonders and being subjected each evening to the demagoguery and canards of grubby political aspirants and careerism of political pundits. The contrast between the wonder of nature and the mediocrity of politics could not have been more dramatic.
The story of the Utah/Colorado parks began about 40-50 million years ago. The region was a basin encircled by mountains in which many rivers deposited sediment, mainly limestone, into many large lakes which had begun as an inland sea between the East and the West. The region, about 130,000 square miles began to rise about 20 million years ago as continents shifted and pushed it up, causing the lakes to dry and the sediments they had contained to form layers of dried rock. The earth continued to rise as tectonic plates pushed it about two miles higher and sediment layers of various kinds of rock were formed. These different makeup of the sedimentary layers are the basis of the different stories each Park has to tell.
One of the largest arches at Arches National Park
Arches is about the power of wind as well as water. Early in the period described above, water erosion removed the top layers of rock and uncovered the sandstone which now form the major parts of its landscape. As water seeped into the cracks and crevices and formed ice which expanded and broke off chunks. Wind then eroded what was left, which allowed water and wind to form the arches from those sandstone rocks. There are now over 2,000 such arches.
Bryce Canyon, which forms the National Park is about different forms of water erosion, and about its excavation of giant pinnacles from the harder rock. These are called “hoodoos.” Bryce is a set of amphitheaters caused by backward erosion, ie erosion starting at the head of a stream and eroding the starting areas so that the stream becomes longer as the erosion continues. The hoodoos are formed as the erosion works to take away the softer rock and leaving the harder rock to grow higher as the erosion continues. At Bryce which is higher than the others at about 8,000-9,000 feet, frost erosion, as at Arches, also lends a hand by getting into the cracks and slowly peeling off chunks of the hoodoos. The series of Bryce Amphitheaters is more than 20 miles long. The visitor looks down into these amphitheaters and sees the hoodoos from above.
The Hoodoos at Bryce National Park
Zion Park is primarily about the erosion of running water. It is a good deal lower in altitude and one looks up at canyon walls cut by the Virgin River over the tens of millions of years. The multicolored walls of the canyons are picturesque and harbor a diversity of plant and animal life. One can see in those canyon walls the thousands of feet of sediment that built up on the plateau into which the river cut a deep vertical pathway.
Of course the Daddy of all river eroded canyons is the Grand Canyon. Carl and I visited the North Rim, which was not even accessible, except by foot, when we both visited the South Rim over 40 years ago. Now it is not only very accessible but tells a geologic story that neither of us understood on that long-ago first visit. It is the story of how the two sides of the Colorado Plateau pushed apart over these millions of years – the canyon is the dividing line—and how from the canyon at the bottom to Bryce at the top, this sequence of Parks actually tells geological history over the last 500 million years. All the geological sequences for all that time are visible. This is not so in other parts of the world as the sequences have been interrupted by mountain uplifts or glacial action.
The Grand Canyon from Bright Angel Outlook at the North Rim 2
The inhabitants of the cliff dwellings raised crops, hunted and gathered other food, and survived until the 13th century
But the importance and grandeur of the Grand Canyon notwithstanding, I want to end this piece with an encomium to Mesa Verde National Park in which one finds the dwellings and some of the artifacts of the ancient Pueblo Indian cliff dwellers. This Park is about the struggle of man, not to tame but to live with and in his environment. The inhabitants of the cliff dwellings who had come from predecessors who had lived in the Mesa Verde area for thousands of years, carved great openings in the cliffs of the Montezuma Canyon high in the cliffs above the canyon floor, built their houses in these cliff opening, raised crops, hunted and gathered other food, and survived until the 13th century when these dwellings were abandoned, probably because of drought. There are supposedly about 4,000 different archeological sites and about 600 cliff dwellings though one could not see them all in a month.
