Southern Utah Geology

Southern Utah is a 270-million-year archive written in stone. The Colorado Plateau preserves geological time in visible layers — each stratum a chapter in Earth’s autobiography.

Zion’s Navajo Sandstone: ancient sand dunes turned to rock. Bryce Canyon’s hoodoos: carved by ice and rain from the Claron Formation. Capitol Reef’s Waterpocket Fold: a 100-mile wrinkle in the earth’s crust. Desert varnish: a bacterial patina that takes ten thousand years to form a single millimeter.