Goosenecks: Three Hundred Million Years Written in Stone
Near Mexican Hat, Utah
A few miles northwest of Mexican Hat, the San Juan River performs one of the most extreme geological displays in the American Southwest. The river curves back on itself in a series of tight, looping bends called entrenched meanders, where the water has cut more than a thousand feet down into the mesa while twisting through curves so tight that the river travels six miles of channel to advance less than two miles in a straight line. Geologists call these goosenecks, and Utah has set aside a small state park on the canyon rim where visitors can look down at the river far below and see the whole braided pattern spread out at once.
The goosenecks exist because of a geological coincidence. The San Juan established its winding course millions of years ago when it flowed across a flat plain. Then the Colorado Plateau began its long slow rise, lifting the landscape upward.
Rather than finding a new path, the river simply cut downward, preserving its ancient winding course in solid stone. The canyon walls now lining the river represent three hundred million years of geological time exposed in cross-section, layer after layer of sandstone, shale, and limestone deposited when this desert was a shallow sea. The view from the Goosenecks State Park overlook is one of the quieter spectacles in Utah, not as famous as the Grand Canyon or Arches, but in some ways more clarifying: a thousand feet straight down, and the river going nowhere fast, having carved its slow signature into the plateau over an almost unimaginable span of time.
