Edge of the Colorado Plateau

From where you are right now, you're standing at or near the edge of one of the most extraordinary geological provinces on the continent. The Colorado Plateau stretches across northwestern New Mexico into northeastern Arizona, southeastern Utah, and southwestern Colorado, covering roughly one hundred thirty thousand square miles.

It is a high, thick block of crust that stayed stable as the land around it deformed that resisted the faulting and folding that shaped the Rockies and the Basin and Range to the south. Instead, it was simply uplifted over millions of years, and rivers like the Colorado and San Juan carved down through its sedimentary layers to reveal a billion years of Earth history in vivid stripes of red, orange, and cream. The mesas and canyons you see are not collapsed terrain. They are the landscape that remained after everything around them eroded away.