GRAND STAIRCASE

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If you’ve ever stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon, driven through Zion National Park, or hiked the strange rock hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, you’ve actually been traveling across one of the most extraordinary geologic wonders on Earth—the Grand Staircase.

     But don’t let the name fool you. This isn’t a man-made monument or a hidden cliffside path. The Grand Staircase is a massive sequence of colorful cliffs and plateaus that rises step by step from the north rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona all the way up through southern Utah. Each “step” represents a different time in Earth’s history—like flipping through a 500-million-year-old photo album made of stone.

     Imagine a staircase where rock from a different era forms each step. That’s precisely what the Grand Staircase is: a series of cliffs and terraces, each built from ancient rock layers deposited over hundreds of millions of years. From bottom to top, we identify each step by its color:

  • Chocolate Cliffs
  • Vermilion Cliffs
  • White Cliffs
  • Gray Cliffs
  • Pink Cliffs

 

     Both the above images are from the National Park Service Website at https://www.nps.gov/brca/learn/nature/grandstaircase.htm — I added the colors of the cliffs to the photograph. The diagram below the photo provides a 3-D drawing and labels Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, and Bryce Canyon, as well as the Cliffs and some plateaus.

 

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These colors aren’t just pretty—they come from the minerals and conditions in which the rocks were formed. For example, the red and brown hues of the Vermilion Cliffs come from iron oxide (rust), which tells us the rocks formed in an oxygen-rich environment.

     The story begins hundreds of millions of years ago when what’s now Arizona and Utah was under a shallow sea, then later covered by coastal plains, deserts, and rivers. Over time, these environments laid down layer upon layer of sediment—sand, mud, and lime—which eventually hardened into rock.

     Fast forward to around 70 million years ago. That’s when mountain-building forces beneath the Earth’s crust began lifting the entire region in an event called the Laramide Orogeny (don't worry, there’s no quiz). This uplift gave us the Colorado Plateau — a high region stretching across four states, roughly centered on the Four Corners region, where Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico meet:

This image is from Wikimedia.Org. It is based on a work of a National Park Service employee, created as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, such work is in the public domain in the United States.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colorado_Plateaus_map.png

As the land rose, rivers, wind, and rain began to erode the landscape, carving deep canyons and exposing the ancient rock layers like a peeled-back onion. What remains is the Grand Staircase—an exposed geological timeline, with the oldest layers near the Grand Canyon’s base and the youngest at the top of Bryce Canyon.

     Each “step” of the staircase tells a story. In the lower steps near the Grand Canyon, rocks date back over 500 million years, to a time when marine life was just beginning. Climb up to Zion, and you’re walking on what used to be a vast desert of sand dunes. Higher still at Bryce Canyon, you’ll find lake and swamp deposits from about 60 million years ago, not long after the dinosaurs vanished.

     And speaking of dinosaurs—yes, dinosaur fossils have been found in these layers, especially in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. This place is so rich in fossils that paleontologists are still discovering new species.

     The Grand Staircase isn’t just beautiful—it’s a scientific treasure. Because the rock layers are so well preserved and so widely exposed, they give scientists an unusually clear look into the Earth's deep past.

     It’s like a history book written in stone: from ancient oceans to deserts to forests, from trilobites to dinosaurs to mammals, from continents drifting to mountains rising. And we don’t need a time machine to see it. We just need a good pair of hiking boots.

GRAND STAIRCASE CONNECTION TO THE WILD WEST — The Grand Staircase–a vast geological formation in southern Utah—remained among the last truly unexplored areas of the contiguous United States during the Wild West era. It was mapped only gradually during expeditions like those led by John Wesley Powell in the 1870s, who surveyed the Colorado Plateau and documented the region’s dramatic landscapes and river systems. Powell’s explorations were part of the broader effort to understand and develop the West after the Civil War. The region’s inaccessibility made it ideal for both outlaws seeking to disappear and Mormon pioneers looking to establish remote settlements. The town of Escalante, founded in 1875, became one of the last outposts of frontier settlement in the American West.

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