Red Rock Country: Reading the Sandstone

The landscape surrounding Gallup is geology made visible. The cliffs and mesas to the east and north of town are formed from the Entrada and Wingate sandstone formations, river delta and desert dune deposits laid down between roughly two hundred and one hundred sixty million years ago, during the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Wind and water have spent the intervening ages carving the stone into fins, towers, and amphitheaters colored in bands of deep red, orange, and cream.

Red Rock Park, six miles east of downtown on State Road Five Sixty-Six, sits at the foot of a sandstone escarpment that turns crimson in the afternoon light. The site has been a gathering place for Navajo and Pueblo peoples for centuries before the park existed. Petroglyphs carved into the canyon walls record that human occupation, and the park's ceremonial grounds at its base host the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial.

Farther east and north, the landscape becomes the Navajo Nation in full. Church Rock, a sandstone spire rising high above the desert floor, stands east of Gallup near Red Rock Park and is considered a sacred marker in Diné geography. The Chuska Mountains, snow-capped in winter, run north from the area and form the eastern spine of the Navajo Nation. The Continental Divide runs through the region just east of Gallup, making this a true watershed boundary where water either flows toward the Pacific through the Little Colorado or toward the Atlantic through the Rio Grande.

The beauty of this landscape is genuinely extraordinary, and it is not empty. It is the homeland of nations that have lived here for hundreds of generations, who read the rock formations as landmarks, as spiritual geography, and as the bones of a world their traditions say was made for them.