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    Insight Guides USA Southwest: Travel Guide eBook
    Insight Guides USA Southwest: Travel Guide eBook
    Insight Guides USA Southwest: Travel Guide eBook
    Ebook768 pages7 hours

    Insight Guides USA Southwest: Travel Guide eBook

    By Insight Guides

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    About this ebook

    This USA Southwest guidebook is ideal for travellers seeking inspirational guides and planning a more extended trip. It provides interesting facts about USA Southwest’s people, history and culture and detailed coverage of the best places to see. This USA Southwest travel book has the style of an illustrated magazine to inspire you and give a taste of the USA Southwest. 

    This USA Southwest guidebook covers: Phoenix, Tucson, Arizona Border Country, Southern New Mexico, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Abiquiu, Taos and the Santa Fe Trail, Southern Utah, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Northern Arizona.

    In this USA Southwest travel guidebook, you will find:

    • Unique essays – country history and culture, and modern-day life, people and politics
    • USA Southwest highlights – Pipe Spring National Monument, San Xavier del Bac Mission, El Presidio Historic District, Tucson, International Museum of Folk Art, Santa Fe, Museum of New Mexico, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, wildlife viewing, Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West, Meow Wolf Haunted House, Tombstone, San Luis Valley
    • Practical travel information – getting there and around, budgeting, eating out, shopping, public holidays, information for LGBTQ+ travellers and more 
    • When to go to USA Southwest - high season, low season, climate information and festivals 
    • Insider recommendations – tips on how to beat the crowds, save time and money and find the best local spots
    • Main attractions & curated places – narrative descriptions of where to go and what to see, covered geographically
    • Tips and facts – interesting facts about USA Southwest and useful insider tips
    • High-quality maps of USA Southwest – must-see places cross-referenced to colourful maps for quick orientation
    • Colour-coded chapters – each place chapter has its own colour assigned to aid easy navigation of this USA Southwest travel guide
    • Striking pictures – rich, inspirational colour photography on all pages, capturing attractions, nature, people and historical features 
    • Fully updated post-COVID-19

    This USA Southwest guidebook is just the tool you need to get under the skin of the destination and accompany you on your trip. This book will inspire you and answer all your questions while preparing a trip to the USA Southwest or along the way.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInsight Guides
    Release dateAug 1, 2024
    ISBN9781839054105
    Insight Guides USA Southwest: Travel Guide eBook
    Author

    Insight Guides

    Insight Guides wherever possible uses local experts who provide insider know-how and share their love and knowledge of the destination.

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      Book preview

      Insight Guides USA Southwest - Insight Guides

      How To Use This E-Book

      Getting around the e-book

      This Insight Guide e-book is designed to give you inspiration for your visit to USA Southwest, as well as comprehensive planning advice to make sure you have the best travel experience. The guide begins with our selection of Top Attractions, as well as our Editor’s Choice categories of activities and experiences. Detailed features on history, people and culture paint a vivid portrait of contemporary life in USA Southwest. The extensive Places chapters give a complete guide to all the sights and areas worth visiting. The Travel Tips provide full information on getting around, activities from culture to shopping to sport, plus a wealth of practical information to help you plan your trip.

      In the Table of Contents and throughout this e-book you will see hyperlinked references. Just tap a hyperlink once to skip to the section you would like to read. Practical information and listings are also hyperlinked, so as long as you have an external connection to the internet, you can tap a link to go directly to the website for more information.

      Maps

      All key attractions and sights in USA Southwest are numbered and cross-referenced to high-quality maps. Wherever you see the reference [map] just tap this to go straight to the related map. You can also double-tap any map for a zoom view.

      Images

      You’ll find hundreds of beautiful high-resolution images that capture the essence of USA Southwest. Simply double-tap on an image to see it full-screen.

      About Insight Guides

      Insight Guides have more than 40 years’ experience of publishing high-quality, visual travel guides. We produce 400 full-colour titles, in both print and digital form, covering more than 200 destinations across the globe, in a variety of formats to meet your different needs.

      Insight Guides are written by local authors, whose expertise is evident in the extensive historical and cultural background features. Each destination is carefully researched by regional experts to ensure our guides provide the very latest information. All the reviews in Insight Guides are independent; we strive to maintain an impartial view. Our inclusions are carefully selected to guide you to the best places in the destination, so you can be confident that when we say a place is special, we really mean it.

      © 2024 Apa Digital AG and Apa Publications (UK) Ltd

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      Table of Contents

      USA Southwest’s Top 10 Attractions

      Editor’s Choice

      Sustainable travel

      An Ancient Land

      A Geologist’s Paradise

      Decisive dates

      In Ancient Times

      Spanish Exploration

      Arrival of the Anglos

      Contemporary Times

      Insight: The Military’s Place in the Sun

      The American Indians

      The Pueblo People

      The Navajo

      The Hopi

      The Apache

      Tohono O’odham and Pima

      Insight: American Indian Art

      The Hispanics

      The Anglos

      Art in the Southwest

      Literature

      The Southwest on Screen

      Southwest Cuisine

      Flora and Fauna

      Places

      The Border

      Phoenix

      Tucson

      Arizona’s Border Country

      Southern New Mexico

      Insight: Life in a Dry Land

      Pueblo Country

      Albuquerque

      Santa Fe and Abiquiu

      Taos and the Santa Fe Trail

      Four Corners

      Canyon Country

      Southern Utah

      Grand Canyon

      Insight: Rafting the Colorado River

      Northern Arizona

      Las Vegas

      Transport

      A-Z: A Handy Summary of Practical Information

      Further Reading

      USA Southwest’s Top 10 Attractions

      Top Attraction 1

      The Grand Canyon. Words cannot easily express the scale and grandeur of one of the world’s greatest natural wonders, millions of years in the making. For more information, click here

      Al Argueta/Apa Publications

      Top Attraction 2

      Monument Valley. The backdrop of countless Western movies, this is one of the iconic landscapes of the American West and an epicenter of traditional Navajo culture. For more information, click here

      iStock

      Top Attraction 3

      Santa Fe. Lovely old adobe homes, intriguing museums, and world-class cuisine and art markets make Santa Fe, the country’s oldest state capital and first designated American Unesco Creative City, a must. For more information, click here

      iStock

      Top Attraction 4

      Taos Pueblo. Iconic and inspiring, this thousand-year-old pueblo is one of the country’s oldest continuously occupied communities. For more information, click here

      iStock

      Top Attraction 5

      Sedona. Set within stunning red rock formations, this town has a lively arts scene, lots of shopping and dining, and a reputation for New Age vibrations. For more information, click here

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      Top Attraction 6

      Kartchner Caverns. A rare wet, living-cave system in the Whetstone Mountains, the beautiful caverns below a former ranch make this Arizona’s top state park. For more information, click here

      Shutterstock

      Top Attraction 7

      The Sonoran Desert. Symbolized by the endemic saguaro cactus, an iconic presence, and sky island mountains harboring unique wildlife, the sweeping Sonoran Desert surrounds the cities of Phoenix and Tucson and invites exploration. For more information, click here

      iStock

      Top Attraction 8

      Utah’s Grand Circle of Parks. Carved into labyrinthine canyons by the Colorado and Green rivers, Canyonlands is a highlight of a park circuit that also includes visits to Arches, Capitol Reef, Bryce, and Zion national parks. For more information, click here

      iStock

      Top Attraction 9

      Mesa Verde National Park. Cliff Palace is one of the most impressive Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings at the nation’s favorite archeological park, in the Four Corners region of southwestern Colorado near Durango. For more information, click here

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      Top Attraction 10

      Chaco Culture National Park. Haunting great house and kiva ruins in a remote canyon in northwestern New Mexico are still revealing the extraordinary story of ancient North America’s most powerful civilization. For more information, click here

      iStock

      Editor’s Choice

      Image.jpg

      Tombstone actors.

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      BEST FOR FAMILIES

      Meow Wolf. Santa Fe’s top visitor attraction is a mind-altering Victorian haunted house with experiential rooms envisioned and created by an imagired artists collective. For more information, click here.

      Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. Not really a museum but a huge zoo outside Tucson celebrating animals of the Sonoran Desert, which are housed in naturalistic enclosures and star in well-conceived presentations. For more information, click here.

      Tombstone. The Town Too Tough to Die now offers staged gunfights, stage coach and wagon rides, live music in some of the saloons, Boot Hill Cemetery, and a museum with exhibits on the Shootout at the OK Corral. For more information, click here.

      New Mexico Museum of Natural History. Exploding volcanoes, towering dinosaur skeletons, and other interactive exhibits attract kids of all ages to this popular downtown Albuquerque museum adjoining the children’s museum, Explora! For more information, click here.

      Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. Ride to Silverton and enjoy views of Mount Sneffels and the glorious Animas River valley, preferably during the fall when the aspens turn golden. For more information, click here.

      BEST SCENERY

      Grand Canyon National Park. One of the must-see wonders of the world, the Big Ditch delivers sublime scenery and glimpses of 2 billion years of Earth’s history. For more information, click here.

      Canyonlands National Park. A 100-mile bird’s-eye view of mountain ranges, buttes, canyons, and human history awaits visitors to Canyonlands’ spectacular Island in the Sky near Moab. For more information, click here.

      Rio Grande Gorge. Protected within one of New Mexico’s newest national monuments, the gorge cut by the Rio Grande through a dark lava escarpment northwest of Taos is an awesome sight. For more information, click here.

      Monument Valley. Its iconic red rock monoliths, arranged across sandy desert flatlands deep in the Navajo Nation, not far from Canyon de Chelly, are the epitome of the Wild West. For more information, click here

      Zion Canyon. The Virgin River, a tributary of the Colorado, has carved through sedimentary rocks to create a deep, narrow canyon hemmed in by sheer red rocks at this scenic Utah park. For more information, click here.

      San Luis Valley. Combining traditional Hispanic culture, New Age retreats, hot springs, high peaks, America’s tallest sand dunes, and overwintering sandhill cranes, this valley surrounding Alamosa is unique. For more information, click here.

      BEST HISTORIC SITES

      Pecos National Historical Park. Ruins of an important prehistoric pueblo and Spanish Colonial church are protected at this Pecos Valley site, alongside a Civil War battlefield, an historic ranch, and Santa Fe Trail ruts. For more information, click here.

      Bandelier National Monument. Cave-like cliff dwellings and a large pueblo ruin are protected deep in Frijoles Canyon in this lovely Jemez Mountains park, along with WPA-era art and architecture. For more information, click here.

      Pipe Spring National Monument. A restored 19th-century fortified Mormon pioneer dairy ranch and ancient pueblo ruins sit on permanent springs on Paiute Indian land in the Arizona Strip surveyed by explorer John Wesley Powell. For more information, click here.

      San Xavier del Bac Mission. A stunning 18th-century Spanish Catholic mission church built to minister to the Tohono O’odham Indians near Tucson, the White Dove of the Desert still serves the reservation and is open to visitors. For more information, click here.

      El Presidio Historical District. The Old Pueblo of Tucson’s most fascinating historic adobes, clustered around the old Spanish presidio, include modest pioneer homes and Nob Hill mansions now housing cafés, bed-and-breakfasts, and stores. For more information, click here.

      Taliesin West. Frank Lloyd Wright’s lovely, low-slung Southwest home and famous school in the Scottsdale hills offers daily tours and fascinating insights into organic architecture and Wright’s work in Phoenix. For more information, click here.

      Image.jpg

      Snow geese take flight in Bosque del Apache NWR.

      Shutterstock

      BEST WILDLIFE VIEWING

      Bosque del Apache NWR. Overwintering snow geese and sandhill cranes are the draw here on the Rio Grande. For more information, click here.

      Willcox Playa. A wetland for overwintering migratory waterfowl in southeastern Arizona. For more information, click here.

      San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. The San Pedro River is an international flyover river for numerous bird species. For more information, click here.

      Ramsey Canyon. Seven species of migratory hummingbirds are the big attraction here in the Huachuca Mountains of southeastern Arizona. For more information, click here.

      Grand Canyon South Rim. Visitors to the South Rim can view released endangered condors. For more information, click here.

      BEST MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES

      Museum of New Mexico Palace of the Governors. Overlooking Santa Fe Plaza, this venerable adobe has witnessed over four centuries of New Mexico history and is part of the History Museum. For more information, click here.

      International Museum of Folk Art. Santa Fe’s most popular museum displays a large and unusual collection of folk art from all over the world in dioramas and special exhibits. For more information, click here.

      Heard Museum. The perfect introduction to Arizona’s Indian cultures through an award-winning multimedia presentation, special collections, contemporary exhibits, and Indian arts and crafts festivals, all in historic downtown Phoenix. For more information, click here.

      Museum of Northern Arizona. Founded in Flagstaff by archeologist Harold Cotton, MNA is the major repository for artifacts unearthed at nearby Wupatki Pueblo and other digs and holds exhibits on northern Arizona’s geology, history, and cultures. For more information, click here.

      Phoenix Art Museum. After a major expansion, PAM has augmented its own excellent collections with international traveling art exhibits and a restaurant that serves artistically presented local foods. For more information, click here.

      Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. The only museum dedicated to an American woman artist, this delightful gallery displays revolving selections of O’Keeffe’s work and offers lectures and special tours to the artist’s home in Abiquiu in the lovely Chama River valley. For more information, click here.

      Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. Private collections of extraordinary cowboy and Indian art tell the story of the Western states in a beautifully designed, sustainable museum building in Old Town Scottsdale. For more information, click here.

      SUSTAINABLE TRAVEL

      Awed by nature at its rawest, confronted by the all-too-conspicuous impact of humans, visitors to the Southwest share a responsibility to safeguard its fragile environment.

      Life is precarious in the dry-as-dust Southwest, and survival depends on the careful harvesting of scant resources; above all, water. Modern megacities like Phoenix and Las Vegas only exist by diverting vast quantities of water from the region’s rivers, and the ongoing droughts of the 21st century make the challenge greater than ever. Tourism may help wean the economy off extractive industries, but can also waste precious water and energy.

      Urban realities

      Towns and cities all over the Southwest are increasingly adapting to the changing realities of life in the desert. Urban residents, who may have arrived from wetter parts of the nation and the world, have learned to minimize water consumption, and plant desert species in their yards rather than lay lush green lawns. In public spaces, lurid roadside verges, ornamental fountains and water features, and over-manicured golf courses have been slowly disappearing. Tourist-dependent communities like Moab and Flagstaff, in particular, promote initiatives to minimize visitor impact, from clean-air campaigns to dark-skies schemes, while individual hotels and B&Bs encourage guests to monitor their own water usage.

      Transportation

      For the traveler, there’s scope to make a real difference by cutting down on how much you drive, especially on cross-state adventures. Public transit options have been making something of a comeback, in such forms as the expanding light-rail network in Phoenix, and the scenic and inexpensive RailRunner line that connects Albuquerque with Santa Fe. Individual national parks, including Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce Canyon, have introduced free visitor shuttle buses in an effort to reduce congestion and pollution. Another option is to consider scaling down your itinerary; it can be every bit as rewarding to spend five days exploring one national park on foot as it is to drive for five successive days to get brief glimpses of five separate parks.

      Navajo guide in Monument Valley.

      Shutterstock

      American Indian traditions

      The original stewards of this land have endeavored to live in harmony with the desert for countless centuries already. Visiting the American Indian reservations and associated sites of the Southwest offers an unparalleled opportunity to learn the secrets of this superficially forbidding environment, and to contribute towards the enduring presence of its first peoples. There can be few more extraordinary experiences than touring the Puye Cliff Dwellings, at Santa Clara Pueblo northwest of Santa Fe, with a guide whose ancestors were living here when the Spaniards arrived, or riding through Monument Valley on horseback with a Navajo cowboy. Several spectacular sites also cater to low-impact overnight stays, camping beside the turquoise waterfalls of the Havasupai Reservation for example, or sleeping in a Navajo hogan at the Canyon de Chelly.

      New Mexico Rail Runner Express passing near Santa Fe.

      Shutterstock

      Crafts and culture

      Buying American Indian crafts is another way to connect with traditional culture, whether that be cottonwood kachinas direct from the carvers at the Hopi mesas, exquisite ceramics at San Ildefonso Pueblo, a Navajo rug from the celebrated auction at Crownpoint in New Mexico, or jewelry and other artifacts from the Pueblo vendors outside the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. Whatever your interest, bear in mind that only the phrase Authentic Indian Handmade carries any guarantee that a Southwestern Indian actually crafted a particular item.

      Other communities in the Southwest celebrate their own craft traditions. In northern New Mexico, for example, the Hispanic weavers of the Tierra Wools cooperative in Los Ojos continue to work with the wool from the churro sheep introduced by Coronado almost five centuries ago.

      Wilderness and wildlife

      Wilderness enthusiasts planning to hike and/or backpack in the Southwest will already know they should leave only footprints. It matters where you leave them, though. Stick to established trails rather than forging your own, and take care not to tread on the all-important cryptobiotic crust. What looks like a dark-brown stain on the sand is the crucial building block of desert life; crushed by an errant step, it can take centuries to grown back.

      Camping in the backcountry, use existing campsites rather than creating new ones; bury human waste four to six inches deep, at least 200ft from the nearest water; and pack out all rubbish, including toilet paper.

      Take time, too, to learn about the region’s wildlife, and support its conservation, by visiting such sites as the Bosque del Apache refuge on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, or Ramsey Canyon in southern Arizona.

      The Wave is a unique sandstone formation shaped by wind and rain in the Coyote Buttes area of Arizona.

      Shutterstock

      White Mountain Apache dancers at Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

      SuperStock

      Horses at Rancho de los Caballeros, Wickenburg, Arizona.

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      AN ANCIENT LAND

      Numerous Indian cultures mingle with a rich Spanish Colonial legacy to create an alluring experience in the American Southwest.

      Makers of maps like to keep things orderly and will define the American Southwest in terms of state boundaries. But those who live there know that another boundary must be applied. The Southwest begins where the land rises out of that vast ocean of humid air that covers the American Midwest and makes it the fertile breadbasket it is. And it ends along that vague line where winter cold wins out over sun and even the valleys are buried under snow. There is one ever more essential requirement. Wherever you stand in the Southwest there must be, on one horizon or another, the spirit-healing blue shape of mountains. Thus you have Arizona and New Mexico, a slice of southern Colorado, much of southern Utah, and parts of Nevada and Texas.

      Antelope House ruins, Canyon de Chelly National Monument.

      Shutterstock

      The Southwest is high – an immense tableland broken by the high ridges of the southern Rocky Mountains – and dry, with annual precipitation varying drastically with altitude. This highness and dryness affects the air, making it exceptionally transparent and adding clarity to everything one sees. The few minutes required to travel from the Rio Grande to the top of the ski basin in Albuquerque’s Sandia Mountains traverses five of North America’s biological life zones, from the Upper Sonoran Desert to the cool spruce forests of the Arctic-Alpine zone.

      In northern New Mexico, culture as well as beauty attracted scores of artists to Taos. This is Indian Country. The complex culture of the Pueblo Indians has survived in centuries-old adobe villages scattered along the Rio Grande and inland at Zuni and the Hopi Mesas. And so has America’s largest tribe, the Navajo Nation, or as they call themselves, the Dineh. Some 200,000 strong, they occupy a vast reservation that sprawls across the heart of the Southwest in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. These first Americans occupy a sacred land of shrines and holy mountains.

      A Navajo man tries to explain why he has returned to this empty land from a lonely, crowded California city. He looks down into the immense valley that spreads below the southwest slope of the Chuska Mountains, and surveys a harsh but hauntingly beautiful land of sun-baked stone stretching into the distance. Gray caliche, wind-cut clay as red as barn paint, great bluish outcrops of shale, and cracked salt flats where mud formed by the violent male rains of summer tastes as bitter as alum. Everything is worn, eroded, and tortured. The desert teems with life, but to the naked eye, nothing seems to be alive. European mapmakers might call it Desolation Sink, but this prodigal son returning home smiles affectionately. The Navajo name for this place, he says, is Beautiful Valley.

      The iconic landscape of Monument Valley.

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      A GEOLOGIST’S PARADISE

      Don’t discount the desert as an empty, boring place. The geology of the American Southwest is highly complex, both mesmerizing and enriching in what it reveals.

      Few places in the world can rival the desert of the American Southwest for its striking geological structures. It is a geologist’s paradise, but it is also a fine place for non-geologists to make a foray into the subject. The rocks are beautiful, and the stories they tell are easy to learn. In addition, there is no need to contend with those intrusive green things called trees, which so often prevent an observer from seeing rocks.

      As the great explorer of the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell, wrote a century and a half ago, Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks, deep gorges where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction, and beyond them mountains blending with the clouds.

      John Wesley Powell also was the first person to compare the geology of the Southwest to a vast book waiting to be read. Like all good stories, this one is best told from the beginning.

      Beginnings

      The oldest rocks in the Southwest, and some of the oldest rocks on the planet, rest in the depths of the Grand Canyon. Known as the Vishnu Schist, these 2-billion-year-old rocks consist of sediments originally deposited into a sea that washed onto a shore at the edge of a continent. They were then uplifted and folded into a mountain chain, injected with veins of molten rock and then uplifted and folded again. And possibly yet again. This created a rock that today is banded and contorted in some places, and platy and shiny in others.

      The next oldest rocks in the Grand Canyon, which rest directly on top of the Vishnu Schist, are only 545 million years old. Did no deposition occur in the intervening 1.2 billion years? Or were rocks deposited and then beveled away by erosion? No one knows. Geologists call a feature like this, where two rocks of vastly different ages are in contact, an unconformity. Unconformities are more the norm in geology than the exception to the rule. No matter where one looks in the rock record, more pieces are missing than are present. Erosion sometimes complicates the matter.

      Antelope Canyon, Arizona.

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      A BRIEF HISTORY OF EARTH

      Years Ago: Event of Some Significance

      4.6 billion: Formation of Earth

      4.3 billion: The crust, ocean, and atmosphere form

      3.96 billion: The oldest known rocks (Yukon, Canada)

      3.9 billion: End of the major meteorite impacts

      2.4 billion: Large continents develop

      2.0 billion: The atmosphere becomes oxygen-rich

      1.45 billion: Single-cell organisms develop

      680 million: Multi-celled animals develop

      290 million: Dinosaurs begin their dominance

      100 million: Flowering plants take root

      The 500-million-year-old sandstones of the Grand Canyon were deposited at the edge of another sea that left behind sediments from Arizona to Canada. It remained in the region for many millions of years, depositing additional sediments. Geologists find fine examples of fossil trilobites intriguing because they were one of the first organisms on the planet to contain a skeleton. The Grand Canyon trilobite fossils range in size from 0.25in (0.6cm) to around 3ins (7.5cm) in length.

      Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      Trilobites, an extinct order of woodlouse-like animals, were one of the first animals to form a protective casing. Nowadays, fossils of trilobites are common.

      A time of fish and tropical seas

      Trilobites became extinct 220 million years ago, followed by yet another period of missing time, but only the small amount of a mere 100 million years. At this point in time, the North American continent, which was slowly moving northward, straddled the equator.

      With a warm, tropical sea covering much of the Southwest, a new group of creatures had begun to make their appearance – fish – although we might not recognize their profile, since a hard coat of bony armor protected their heads. Fossilized scales from these fish occur in a few places in the Grand Canyon.

      This span of time, known as the Devonian Period (408–360 million years ago), is often called the Age of Fish. In the next period, the Mississippian (360–320 million years ago), another sea spread over the Southwest and deposited a thick blanket of limestone from Canada to Mexico. Small and poker-chip shaped discs, known as crinoid stems, are one of the most commonly recognizable fossils in the aquatic graveyard of this rock layer, known as the Redwall Limestone. Crinoids were small invertebrates related to sand dollars and sea urchins. They resembled plants, with a base, a stem, and a flowerlike top. Other fossils are solitary corals, looking like a horn or ice cream cone.

      Although this fossil-rich period has a red face in the Grand Canyon, it is actually a gray rock covered by a coat of red. The red comes from red sediments washing out of the rock layer directly above the Redwall.

      Iron is the principal coloring agent of sedimentary rocks in the Southwest. Oxidized iron, which is similar to rust produced on a nail left out in the rain, gives rock its characteristic red color. Sandstone consists of approximately 3 percent iron, mostly as a surface coating on individual grains of sand.

      Green layers of rock, especially the ones found in Utah’s Arches National Park, contain iron that was altered in a low oxygen environment, such as a shallow lake or mud flat.

      Dark brown to black streaks, known as desert varnish, cover many southwestern rock surfaces. This micro-thin coating receives its color from manganese oxides (black) and iron oxides (reddish brown). Geologists argue as to how the manganese and iron – which are derived from sources outside the rock – become bonded to the rock surface. Some believe the process involves bacteria that oxidizes the minerals and cements them to the rock, while others believe that a purely chemical reaction occurs among iron, manganese, and water. The latest evidence points to a combination of both.

      Formation of a restricted basin in what is now southeastern Utah was the dominant event of the next geologic period, the Pennsylvanian (320–286 million years ago). Known as the Paradox Basin, this northwest-to-southeast trending trough allowed water from an ocean that lay to the west to flow into the area. This oval-shaped basin extended from northwest New Mexico through Moab up to Price, Utah, 120 miles (193km) south of Salt Lake City.

      Eagle Point overlook at Grand Canyon West.

      Al Argueta/Apa Publications

      The Paradox Basin sea probably looked something like the modern Mediterranean Sea, with its narrow connection to the Atlantic Ocean. This thin neck created a restricted environment where evaporation of the closed-in Paradox waters left behind vast beds of salt. Evaporation occurred because the North American continent lay in a warm climatic zone, slightly north of the equator. Episodic flooding and evaporation of this sea produced a mile-thick layer of salt.

      Salt has an unusual property: put enough weight on it, and it contorts like Silly Putty. Salt is also less dense than the surrounding sandstone, so it has a tendency to rise when it is forced to move. Under the intense pressure of thousands of feet of rock, produced by sediments washing out of nearby mountains, the salt in the area around Moab and Arches National Park began to move and bow upward, creating mile-long ridges capped by a rock unit known as the Entrada Sandstone. Salt movement continued for about 100 million years.

      Now jump forward to about 10 million years ago, when water began to percolate into and dissolve the beds of salt, which led to collapse of salt-created ridges. As the sandstone folded into the void, it stretched, cracked, and produced a series of parallel cracks, which eroded into a system of parallel canyons and fins, or narrow ridges of rock. Good examples include the Devil’s Garden and Fiery Furnace in Arches; fin and canyon formation created a perfect environment for the formation of arches in the park. Arches form when water mixes with atmospheric carbon dioxide to form a weak acid, which first weakens the fins and then erodes them. In addition, during winter, water may seep into fractures in the rock, freeze, expand, and crack the fins open, thus forming an arch.

      THE FINE STUFF OF SAND

      Deserts are often associated with sand, and a visitor to the American Southwest will encounter countless varieties of the stuff, from the fine white gypsum of White Sands to the vibrantly burnt orange of Monument Valley. Sand, as intuition might suggest, is the result of weathering on rock. Wind, water, and abrasion grind down rocks into smaller particles that, when windblown, must eventually gather in deposition, often as sand dunes, the most recognized symbol of the desert, yet covering only 20 percent of the planet’s deserts. Under the right conditions of time and geology, sand dunes may be subject to forces that turn them into sedimentary stone.

      Double O arch in Arches National Park.

      iStock

      Advancing and retreating seas were common across the Southwest during the period following the deposition of salt below what is now the town of Moab. This resulted in intermixed layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone. One of the most interesting limestone regions is southeastern New Mexico.

      Two hundred and fifty million years ago, a constricted sea covered what is now the area of Carlsbad Caverns National Park and adjoining Guadalupe Mountains National Park. The warm waters were an ideal spot for the formation of a reef resembling Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, except that algae and sponges built the 400-mile (640-km) -long by 4-mile (6.4-km) -wide complex, as opposed to corals, which make up modern reefs.

      The caverns at Carlsbad started to form roughly 12 million years ago, during the uplift of the entire reef complex that formed the Guadalupe Mountains. Uplift allowed groundwater to percolate down into the limestone and dissolve it. Dissolution of the rock created passageways and caverns, while deposition of the dissolved elements formed stalactites, which hang down, and stalagmites, which rise upward from the cave’s floor.

      Petrified trees and uranium

      Throughout the time of advancing and retreating seas, the North American continent continued to move north. The climate was generally warm, with monsoon rains and intermittent dry seasons. During one of the periods when no sea covered the land, a purplish, yellow, and brown mottled rock, the Chinle Formation, was the most important unit deposited, at least from an economic viewpoint.

      The Chinle contains huge reserves of uranium, produced from groundwater and most likely leached out of volcanic ash. As it moved through the rock, the uranium-rich water encountered plant remains and replaced the organic material with uranium minerals, which settled out of the water. The Chinle is also the rock unit where one finds the petrified logs at Petrified Forest National Park. Petrified wood formed as a result of a similar process to the uranium but now the groundwater was silica-rich, so quartz precipitated out instead of uranium. The logs originally came from streams carrying material from nearby highlands.

      One non-geologic feature at El Malpais National Monument is a 960-year-old Douglas fir, which must have started to grow within decades of the cooling of the site’s lava.

      Deserts and dinosaurs descend

      By 200 million years ago, the southwestern portion of the continent had drifted into a climatic zone governed by dry, hot conditions. Deserts began their 40-million-year reign over the northern portions of the Southwest. The sand dunes of these early deserts have been preserved today as the 200–2,000-ft (60–600 meter) -high cliffs of red and tawny sandstone found in the national parks and surrounding lands of southern Utah.

      Non-marine or continental conditions have mostly dominated the Southwest since the time of the deserts. Volcanoes at the edge of the region periodically spewed ash and lava into the lakes and streams. Alteration of these ashes created the green rocks found at Arches National Park. Other rock layers across the Southwest are tan, red, or grayish.

      It was during this era that dinosaurs roamed the streams and lakes. When the dinosaurs died, some fell into the streams and washed down into the lowlands, where their bones collected. There’s a good fossil locality just outside Grand Junction in northwestern Colorado. Near here, paleontologists found the bones of Utahraptor, a 20-ft (6-meter) -long animal with a 12-in (30-cm) -long killing blade growing out of its foot. Utahraptors were a relative of the cinematic velociraptor.

      When Steven Spielberg made his movie Jurassic Park in 1993, he enlarged the velociraptors, which were actually about the size of a golden retriever, to create a more dramatic beast. Coincidentally, Utahraptor, which was indeed about the same size as Spielberg’s velociraptors, but on steroids, was discovered the same summer the movie was released, thus adding a bit of credence to Spielberg’s fantasy world.

      Utahraptor was excavated from the Morrison Formation, the fossil-rich rock unit that makes up Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado. The extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago occurred as the Rocky Mountains began to be uplifted.

      Rise of the mountains

      Additional mountain-building events have occurred several times in the past 66 million years. Numerous small ranges, such as the La Sals, Henrys, Abajos, Sleeping Ute, and Navajo mountains, dot the Southwest and were all formed in this period. Geologists call these mountains laccoliths, while some less serious folk call them hot humps between the sheets.

      Fossilized tree trunk in Petrified Forest NP.

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      Laccoliths like these formed when molten rock or magma cooled within the earth. As the magma was rising it reached a zone of weakness and began to spread laterally between sedimentary layers (the sheets). Continued pulses of magma bowed up the sheets and formed a mushroom-like structure (the hump). Over time, the softer sedimentary rocks eroded away, leaving behind rounded mountains that glaciers would eventually carve into jagged peaks.

      In some places, though, the magma pierced the surface and erupted. One such volcanic event occurred in southeastern Arizona 27 million years ago, when six incandescent ash flows shot out of a crater near present-day Chiricahua National Monument. Eruption of the Turkey Creek caldera produced a 2,000-ft (609-meter) -thick layer of dark volcanic rock, known as rhyolite. Subsequent erosion by water, ice, and wind sculpted the rhyolite into columns, balanced rocks, and hoodoos.

      Between 5 million and 13 million years later, lava and ash spewed out of a volcano at the southwestern corner of the state. The light and dark rocks make up the Ajo Range and Bates Mountains of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. At roughly the same time, another flow of lava spread across the Verde Valley in central Arizona. This was followed by eruptions 2 million years ago in New Mexico. Pumice (a rock that is light in weight and color and able to float in water), tuff (solidified ash flows), and obsidian (volcanic glass) from these explosions are found in Bandelier National Monument, in northwestern New Mexico.

      Valley of Fires Recreation Area, Carrizozo, New Mexico.

      Shutterstock

      ALL ABOUT MINERALS

      While rock and stone are often used interchangeably, one can’t use mineral in the same way: in fact, rocks and stones are usually made from minerals, which are inorganic substances with very specific chemical and crystalline structures. Most minerals are either pure deposits called ores or are blended with other minerals in rock. Many minerals are formed volcanically when magma surging up through the earth’s crust forms deposits. The magma then cools, and the heavier basic minerals crystallize first and sink. Minerals may also form because of chemical action – heat causes reactions on surrounding rocks, resulting in mineral changes.

      The most recent eruptions of black lava (basalt) occurred within the past 1,000 years. Known in New Mexico as malpais – Spanish for bad country (anglicized to mal-pie in Arizona) – the jagged, fractured flows spread across the northwestern corner of the state. El Malpais National Monument is a good place to see these flows. The extensive Raton-Clayton Volcanic Field in northeastern New Mexico contains Capulin Volcano National Monument, the easternmost young volcano in the western United States. It was last active 40,000 years ago. Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument in northern Arizona, which first exploded in either 1064 or 1065, is the westernmost and youngest volcano in the United States. It is part of the large San Francisco Volcanic Field around Flagstaff.

      The other mountainous terrain in the American Southwest, the Basin and Range province, can be found in southern Arizona and New Mexico and westward into California. It did not involve dramatic volcanoes. Instead, movement of the North American plate starting about 20 million years ago caused the crust to stretch and crack along a roughly north–south trend. When the land spread, some blocks of earth started to break and tilt like a stack of upright books tipping over. This forced some chunks of land to rise and others to drop. The ones that dropped formed the basins and began to fill with sediments washing out of the blocks that rose, which are now the mountain ranges. Some basins contain 15,000ft (4,600 meters) of fill. Crustal movement along these faults continues to the present day.

      Big Bell Rock and Courthouse Rock, Sedona.

      Nowitz Photography/Apa Publications

      Erosion of the Grand Canyon occurred even more recently than the Basin and Range, beginning about 6 million years ago. Surprisingly, the significant downcutting by the Colorado River that created the canyon took place somewhere between 4.7 and 1.7 million years ago, which works out to a rate of about 1.2 to 3.2 feet (0.4–1 meter) per 1,000 years. All of that material was transported away from the canyon by the Colorado River and ended up in the Gulf of California. Downcutting still occurs in the Grand Canyon, but at a much reduced rate.

      In his classic tome on the region, The Colorado, writer Frank Waters sums up the place of geology in the life of the desert. Geology here forever dominates life and gives it its ultimate meaning. This is an eloquent way of pointing out the interrelationships of plants, animals, humans, and geology. Soil types affect where plants grow, and elevation differences create climatic variation, with precipitation that varies across the region from less than 5ins (13cm) to over 30ins

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