Journeys in the Back of Beyond: Wait, This is a National Park?

 

Pack up your stuff kids! We're going to a NATIONAL PARK!

Cool! Does it have big mountains?

No.

Oh, does it have deep canyons?

No.

Can we go swimming in a lake or river?

No.

Oh, will rangers give an interesting talk around a campfire?

No, there's no campgrounds.

Does it have trees at least?

Well, yeah, but they're all dead.

What kind of a national park is this???

It is of course the national park dedicated to a bunch of long dead trees, Petrified Forest in Arizona. It was the third day of our recent exploration of the Back of Beyond, the vast geological wonderland of the Colorado Plateau. We had traveled east of Flagstaff to explore the prairies and badlands that make up much of that strange landscape. 

To most folks it's all about the petrified wood. Some might even think it's a one-note kind of place, of some interest maybe, but not worthy of a full exploration. They couldn't be more wrong! The park is a showcase of geology, archaeology, and paleontology. And it has some unique and dramatic scenery to boot.

The wood was discovered first by indigenous people thousands of years ago (evidence indicates a human presence in the region for at least 12,000 years). They made use of the petrified wood as projectile points, knives, scrapers, and even building materials (there is a reconstructed pueblo in the park made almost entirely of the agatized wood).

Petroglyph at Newspaper Rock in Petrified Forest National Park

The European colonists who always get credited for their "discoveries" came along in the 1850s. The military investigated the region first, followed by ranchers and homesteaders. The area became better known as railroads were built through the region, taking advantage of the relatively flat terrain and availability of water along the Puerco River. A hotel stop at Adamana allowed passengers to tour what was then known as Crystal Forest, and walk off with tons of petrified wood samples. Later on a stamp mill was constructed to grind up the wood to be sold as an abrasive. It concerned some people.

Often the creation of a national monument, which can be established by presidential proclamation, is a controversial affair. Such actions were taken by presidents to protect endangered resources and archaeological sites that locals were often profiting from. It's only as tourism follows that proclamation that local folks begin to accept the presence of a monument in their midst. The story seems to be somewhat the opposite in this case, as the Arizona legislature unsuccessfully proposed a Petrified Forest National Park as early as 1895 in response to local concern about the disappearance of vast amounts of petrified wood. The passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906 gave Theodore Roosevelt the power to designate Petrified Forest as the nation's second national monument that same year. Congress waited until 1962 before "upgrading" the monument to national park status (monuments have the same level of protection that national parks do, although funding sometimes lags behind). Subsequent actions in 2004 more than doubled the size of the park to 341 square miles (884 sq km). 

Despite the protective actions, it's estimated that 12 tons of petrified wood disappear from the park every year (the thieves need to read up on the curse of stolen wood). It's ironic that so much is stolen, since it can be purchased legally just outside the park.

Being petrified is not the normal fate of most trees. Most of them decay and are destroyed, but in just the right circumstances petrifaction can happen. The tree has to be isolated from the atmosphere and destructive microorganisms by being buried quickly in fine mud and clay. There needs to be a source of silica (silicon dioxide), and the movement of groundwater. At Petrified Forest, the trees were ripped from distant forests by muddy flashfloods and volcanic mudflows and transported many miles, coming to rest in river floodplains and swamps. Layers of volcanic ash provide the silica and the swamps and rivers provide the groundwater. Over time the silica fills in the cells of the wood, preserving it. Oxides of iron and other metals provide the bright coloration.

But that's not what I'm really here to talk about!

The real value of Petrified Forest National Park lies in the story contained in its multicolored strata, the Chinle formation. It records a tumultuous period in Earth's history, the middle to late Triassic Period from about 225 to 208 million years ago.

When the Chinle formation is exposed to the elements, the mud and clay is easily and quickly eroded, preventing the development of soil and inhibiting plant growth. The resulting barren desert badlands hardly look like the remains of a tropical environment of large rivers and lakes, but that is what it is. And those barren sediments hide a wealth of paleontological remains (that's short for "fossils").

Exposures of the Chinle formation in the northern portion of the park

The Mesozoic Era (252-66 million years) is often called the Age of the Dinosaurs, and of its three periods, the Jurassic is best-known (perhaps because of a certain film series), and the Cretaceous only slightly less-known, since no one ever made a movie called "Cretaceous Park". It did however gain notoriety as the ending curtain-call on the reign of the diverse and occasionally gigantic reptiles, due to a massive asteroid strike in what is today the Gulf of Mexico.

But the Triassic Period gets less attention. There are few if any dinosaurs from the Triassic in children's plastic toy collections, and yet the Triassic is the period in which the dinosaurs appeared on the planet for the first time. Few of them were large, and they didn't dominate their habitat the way their progeny in the Jurassic and Cretaceous did. There were other creatures inhabiting their world, all of whom were survivors of the greatest extinction event ever to strike our planet. And from within their ranks the first mammals emerged.

The Permian-Triassic mass extinction event was the worst devastation ever visited upon life on planet Earth, wiping out as much as 80-90% of existing species. The cause is not precisely known, but a vast outpouring of lava and ash in Siberia is thought to be a main contributor to a sudden change in the climate that caused a spike in temperatures and acidity in the oceans (carbon dioxide rose from 400 to 2,500 ppm, compared to our current historical rise from 280 to 420 ppm). A total break-down in ecosystems followed, both on land and at sea. It took millions of years for the survivors to rebuild any kind of stability (only to be disrupted again at the end of the Triassic).

And this is why Petrified Forest is so important. It gives us a picture of conditions in the middle and late part of the Triassic when some semblance of stability had returned to the world. The Chinle formation, which is exposed over most of the park, has yielded up to 200 species of plants and around 60 species of animals. Nearly a hundred of them were first discovered at Petrified Forest National Park.

The Triassic world looked little like the subsequent Mesozoic era. The Jurassic and Cretaceous periods saw the dominance of terrestrial habitats by hundreds of species of dinosaurs big and small, plant-eaters and meat-eaters alike. Mammals and smaller reptiles scurried in the underbrush while small amphibians continued to thrive in rivers and streams. 

Diorama of animals and plants of the Chinle formation, Petrified Forest National Park

The Triassic was characterized by several animal groups that competed with each other in the aftermath of the great Permian extinction. There were still large predatory amphibians up to 10 feet long, including Metoposaurus. Many years ago, one of my students found an odd specimen in the Chinle (outside the park, for the record). It looked so odd that my guesses ran the gamut from coral to alien, but it wasn't until I saw this exhibit at the park museum that I thought of Metoposaur (see a picture here and here). To be fair, some paleontologists thought of phytosaur scutes as another possibility (see below).

There were some "not-quite-reptiles" called therapsids that were once called "mammal-like reptiles" but they actually represent a distinct group of organisms that shared a common ancestry with the reptiles. They were destined to become the ancestors to the first mammals later in the Triassic. In Permian time, the Therapsids and their related groups dominated terrestrial environments with hundreds of species, but they were decimated during the extinction. A few survived into the Triassic, including the Placerias hesternus, seen below. It was a plant-eater which at up to 11 feet and a ton in weight, was one of the larger creatures of the time.

Placerias hesternus, a dicynodont therapsid, a large plant-eater

The pterodactyls made their first appearance (and no, they aren't dinosaurs either; they had a common ancestor with them). There were in fact some dinosaurs too, but they were mostly small, and most certainly didn't dominate their ecosystem. Some found in the park, like Coelophysis and Chindesaurus, were predators but being 3 to 7 feet long they were hardly the gigantic terrifying creatures of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

Artist: Dr. Jeff Martz, NPS

The creatures that brought terror to the ecosystem were the Archosaurs, the reptilian line that led to the crocodiles, birds and dinosaurs. The sediments of Petrified Forest National Park have yielded up specimens of Postosuchus, which at upwards of 23 feet in length, was gigantic by Triassic standards. It was a formidable predator.

Artist: Dr. Jeff Martz/NPS

Another member of the archosaurs found in the park are the Phytosaurs. They strongly resemble the crocodiles, but are not that closely related. They are instead a marvelous example of convergent evolution, by which different lineages evolve to similar shapes (think sharks and dolphins).

Artist: Dr. Jeff Martz, NPS

Petrified Forest is far more than a collection of petrified wood pieces lying around. It's a very different world and a fascinating place to visit and explore. It's one of the best places in the world to understand the time that gave rise to the mammals, and as such, to us.

A Look Back at Ten Years of Geotripping: I toured a marble quarry on Vancouver Island; It's almost as if they didn't want us to see the rocks.

I've been digging through the archives of Geotripper on the occasion of my tenth anniversary of geoblogging, looking for some of my favorites. In 2015 I spent a lot of time in the Pacific Northwest, resulting in several blog series, but a favorite moment was my tour of this "quarry" which some of you may recognize as something else. This blog appeared on July 13, 2015...

So, I'm out on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, enjoying my vacation with Mrs. Geotripper, and we're casting about trying to figure out what to do on this 300-mile long island. I'm doing some reading and find out that there is this place called the Saanich Peninsula Marble Quarry that offers tours. That sounds great to the geologist in me, so I talk Mrs. Geotripper into checking it out. It turns out that when you are touring an island that is mainly rainforest, rock exposures are in short supply.

I figure that a rock quarry isn't going to have a whole lot of visitors on a given day, so imagine my surprise when we reach the end of the road, and find out that the place has a parking lot, and charges admission! It was pretty steep, too, about $30 Canadian for each of us. But hey, it's rocks, and I haven't seen a lot of rocks on this trip. We pay and go on in. I'm astounded by how many people are here for the tour of the quarry.

I did some research on the rocks. The marble of the Saanich Peninsula is part of the Wrangellia terrane, rocks that formed far out in the Pacific Ocean during the Triassic Period. Around 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period the rocks plowed into the west coast of North America and became part of the continent. The rocks were originally limestone that formed in coral reefs and along tropical island beaches. The heat and pressure of the collision with North America caused the rock to recrystallize into marble. Today it is called the Quatsino formation.

So I follow the map, my anticipation rising as we reach the edge of the quarry, and I looked in. I was kind of shocked. There was vegetation everywhere! There was barely any rock to be seen at all! I did notice the smokestack from the smelter almost hidden in the forest beyond the quarry. How could they let this happen? Didn't they care enough to keep the rock exposed for us geologists? 

The hundreds of people around me didn't seem to mind all the vegetation. As far as I could tell, they were actually paying more attention to the flowers and stuff and pretty much ignoring the rock. I was a little confused. But at least the people that run the place have a sense of history. They put up some interpretive signs that showed the raw beauty of the rock before all the vegetation was allowed to grow over it.

The quarry was active from the late 1800s to around 1905 or so. I guess in this temperate rainforest environment the plants can take over pretty quickly. I was kind of surprised by how colorful the flowers and other plants were. I thought that at this latitude, the species diversity was on the low side. I guess not.

I finally found some rock exposures at the lower end of the quarry. The flowers hadn't yet covered everything. Water had filled the lowest part of the quarry, and I guess they were using a fountain to aerate the water or something.

It's almost as if they were ashamed of the rocks. Look at the picture above to see how the plants covered almost every part of the marble. I just didn't get it. In any case, we finished up our tour and found some gelato being sold at a stand in what looked like an old mansion of some sort, so we had a bit of dessert before heading back to Victoria.

So what did I think about the marble quarry tour? I was surprised by how popular and expensive it was, and how easily the visitors were distracted by the vegetation covering all the rocks. The pathways were well done, and there were lots of interpretive signs showing the glory of years past when plants didn't cover every rock, so one got a sense of history, and of loss. On the whole, it wasn't too bad, especially if you like plants and stuff like that. I don't recommend bringing a rock hammer. They got pretty upset when I starting taking rock samples.

If you want to check it out, don't go by the old name of Saanich Peninsula Quarry. They changed it, I guess when it got all overgrown. Nowadays the place is called Butchart Gardens.

The glories of the old days before plants covered everything.

Dreams of Summer: This is Where and When...Wait, They Made a National Park Out of This?

Why, yes. Yes they did. About two posts ago, I pointed out that there are some places where the geology is kind of...monotonous. One of those places is the vast sage plain east of Grand Canyon and Flagstaff, around the towns of Holbrook and Winslow (yes, that Winslow). The land is flat, windy and barren, hardly looking like a place of geological inspiration. And yet it is.

In the last post, we were stuck in a wayward time machine, emerging in a nightmarish swamp and river floodplain populated by strange and frightening reptiles and other creatures. I asked for help in explaining where and when we were, and the readers responded quickly and accurately (strangely enough, a bunch of readers share the same name: Anonymous!). We had landed in the Triassic Period, about 225 million years ago, in Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona.

Barren plains may be uninteresting to look at and explore, but they make for great transportation corridors, and the land that eventually would become Petrified Forest National Park was the site of a road in the 1860s, a railroad in the 1880s, and a national highway (the legendary Route 66) in the 1920s. The petrified wood was discovered by surveyor Amiel Whipple and geologist Jules Marcou, during explorations in the early 1850s (discovered by Europeans, anyway; there are ruins in the park made hundreds of years ago out of petrified wood!).

Once the railroad was constructed, travelers began to visit the area, and many removed huge amounts of petrified wood. There was even a business at one time that was prepared to ground up the "wood" for use as an abrasive. Local people began to fear that the precious mineral would disappear, and they began efforts to establish a national park to protect the resource. The first effort failed in 1895, but the passage of the National Antiquities Act in 1906 led to the proclamation of Petrified Forest National Monument the same year (Congress can establish parks, but the President can proclaim national monuments). It wasn't until 1962 that Congress established the area as a national park. In 2004, the size of the park was more than doubled, to 341 square miles (884 square kilometers). Despite the legal protection, it is estimated that tons of petrified wood are stolen every year. This, despite hefty fines and the easy availability of petrified wood outside the park boundaries.

I called the park plain and barren, but that's not at all true. The rocks here have been gently lifted and erosion has exposed the underlying shale, siltstone and mudstone layers into rapidly eroding badlands. Metals in the rock have oxidized into a veritable rainbow of colors. The northern regions of the park are known as the Painted Desert. The rocks are almost exclusively part of a single formation, the Chinle, representing a complex of river channel and floodplain deposits dating from the Triassic. Variations in the rocks have led researchers to organize the rocks in the park into four members: Mesa Redondo, Blue Mesa, Sonsela, Petrified Forest, and Owl Rock. The Chinle (or equivalent rock) is found throughout the southwest. There are something like 50 members identified, and the precise definition of the unit is controversial. To get a sense of the conflict, check out this overview: http://chinleana.fieldofscience.com/2008/11/chinle-confusion.html 

Petrified wood is one of the prettiest of Earth's minerals and rocks. The wood was originally buried in mud and volcanic ash. As the wood slowly decayed away, it was replaced by silica (the mineral quartz, SiO2), and stained by oxides of iron, manganese, copper, and other metals. The trees, some of which reached heights of 200 feet, are classed into at least three species, and as many as nine. Araucarioxylon arizonicum is the most common, and as such has been designated as Arizona's state fossil.

It turns out that Petrified Forest National Park preserves far more than fossilized wood. The extensive exposures of the Chinle have provided not dozens, but hundreds of fossil species, and not just plants. The Triassic Period was a pivotal time in the history of the Earth. It was established on the basis of a mass extinction that wiped out some 90% of the species living on the planet. The extinction decimated the dominant reptiles at the time, the mammal-like reptiles, allowing a group of diminutive archosaurs to gain ascendance in the ecosystem. The archosaurs include today's crocodiles and birds, and some relatively famous animals called dinosaurs. The late Triassic deposits of the Chinle contain some of the earliest dinosaurs known, including Coelophysis and Chindesaurus bryansmalli, a small carnivorous dinosaur found for the first time at Petrified Forest.

The rich fossil record and incredible exposures of the rocks of Chinle provide an important look at a time when the planet was getting back into some kind of ecological balance after the greatest catastrophe of all time. Petrified wood was the original attraction, but the park preserves a significant part of Earth's history.

The protection of the park has revealed another important resource. The explorations of the 1850s were hardly the first incursion of humans into the region. The presence of a secure source of water (the Puerco River) and a prairie environment populated by numerous grazing animals meant that people have lived in the region since the end of the last ice age 13,000 years ago. The park preserves hundreds of archaeological sites, including the ruins of entire villages.

The 2004 additions to the park didn't add all that much in the way of wood resources, but it did include a significantly large area of badlands wilderness in the Painted Desert. It used to be that no camping was allowed in the park, but there is a trackless region in the northwest part of the park now where one can got lost in the past.

So yes, they made a park out of this. For so many good reasons.

I Toured a Marble Quarry on Vancouver Island: It's almost as if they didn't want us to see the rocks

So, I'm out on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, enjoying my vacation with Mrs. Geotripper, and we're casting about trying to figure out what to do on this 300-mile long island. I'm doing some reading and find out that there is this place called the Saanich Peninsula Marble Quarry that offers tours. That sounds great to the geologist in me, so I talk Mrs. Geotripper into checking it out. It turns out that when you are touring an island that is mainly rainforest, rock exposures are in short supply.

I figure that a rock quarry isn't going to have a whole lot of visitors on a given day, so imagine my surprise when we reach the end of the road, and find out that the place has a parking lot, and charges admission! It was pretty steep, too, about $30 Canadian for each of us. But hey, it's rocks, and I haven't seen a lot of rocks on this trip. We pay and go on in. I'm astounded by how many people are here for the tour of the quarry.

I did some research on the rocks. The marble of the Saanich Peninsula is part of the Wrangellia terrane, rocks that formed far out in the Pacific Ocean during the Triassic Period. Around 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period the rocks plowed into the west coast of North America and became part of the continent. The rocks were originally limestone that formed in coral reefs and along tropical island beaches. The heat and pressure of the collision with North America caused the rock to recrystallize into marble. Today it is called the Quatsino formation.

So I follow the map, my anticipation rising as we reach the edge of the quarry, and I looked in. I was kind of shocked. There was vegetation everywhere! There was barely any rock to be seen at all! I did notice the smokestack from the smelter almost hidden in the forest beyond the quarry. How could they let this happen? Didn't they care enough to keep the rock exposed for us geologists? 

The hundreds of people around me didn't seem to mind all the vegetation. As far as I could tell, they were actually paying more attention to the flowers and stuff and pretty much ignoring the rock. I was a little confused. But at least the people that run the place have a sense of history. They put up some interpretive signs that showed the raw beauty of the rock before all the vegetation was allowed to grow over it.

The quarry was active from the late 1800s to around 1905 or so. I guess in this temperate rainforest environment the plants can take over pretty quickly. I was kind of surprised by how colorful the flowers and other plants were. I thought that at this latitude, the species diversity was on the low side. I guess not.

I finally found some rock exposures at the lower end of the quarry. The flowers hadn't yet covered everything. Water had filled the lowest part of the quarry, and I guess they were using a fountain to aerate the water or something.

It's almost as if they were ashamed of the rocks. Look at the picture above to see how the plants covered almost every part of the marble. I just didn't get it. In any case, we finished up our tour and found some gelato being sold at a stand in what looked like an old mansion of some sort, so we had a bit of dessert before heading back to Victoria.

So what did I think about the marble quarry tour? I was surprised by how popular and expensive it was, and how easily the visitors were distracted by the vegetation covering all the rocks. The pathways were well done, and there were lots of interpretive signs showing the glory of years past when plants didn't cover every rock, so one got a sense of history, and of loss. On the whole, it wasn't too bad, especially if you like plants and stuff like that. I don't recommend bringing a rock hammer. They got pretty upset when I starting taking rock samples.

If you want to check it out, don't go by the old name of Saanich Peninsula Quarry. They changed it, I guess when it got all overgrown. Nowadays the place is called Butchart Gardens.

The glories of the old days before plants covered everything.

Bizarro Rocks Day and a Roadrunner

We were on the road this weekend, attending the fall meeting of the Far Western Section of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers. When geologist-teachers get together, we may talk about teaching, but we make sure our activities revolve around geology. We explore.

The sponsor of our meeting was Copper Mountain College, which serves the towns of Yucca Valley and Twentynine Palms. The towns are right next to Joshua Tree National Park which sits astride the boundary between the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts in Southern California. One group explored the scarps produced by the 1992 Landers Earthquake, a 7.6 temblor that produced a prominent scarp that is still visible today. The other trip was a tour of a park named for an odd tree, but whose other distinction is the bizarro rocks it has. Joshua Tree is a showcase for plutonic processes, with thousands of acres of weirdly weathered granitic boulders.

This is a brief post before I hit the long road home, but here are a smattering of photos of my favorite outcrops. They include the very colorful lichens I found in sheltered spots. Lichens are an entire ecosystem of lifeforms in miniature, a symbiotic relationship between algae and fungi.

And then there was the Triassic megacrystic Twentynine Palms quartz monzonite. I've seen plenty of porphyritic granitic rocks before, but a canyon filled with giant boulders of this stuff was just extraordinary.

I could swear I heard a little "beep-beep", and there it was, a little roadrunner wondering what we were up to. More pics later!

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: The Real Jurassic Parks

As we move forward in time, we reach the geologic period called the Jurassic, one of the few units of the geologic time scale that is familiar to many laypeople. We have Steven Speilberg and Michael Crichton to thank for that, and yes, dinosaurs rose to prominence in the terrestrial landscape, but lots more was going on as well, including a lot of interesting non-dinosaurs, including our own small furry predecessors creeping about in the underbrush (the mammals first appeared in the late Triassic, about the same time as the first dinosaurs).

So what are the real Jurassic Parks? In the movies, the park was an island populated by reconstituted dinosaurs that ate people and each other. The Jurassic Parks of the Colorado Plateau are the ones in which the most dramatic scenery is provided by Jurassic-aged rocks, which include the Wingate, Kayenta, Navajo, Carmel, Entrada, Summerville, and Morrison formations. The parks include the familiar Zion, Arches, Capitol Reef, and Canyonlands national parks, and the less familiar Grand Staircase-Escalante, Navajo, Rainbow Bridge, Vermilion Cliffs, and Colorado national monuments. Notable state parks include Kodachrome, Goblin Valley and Dead Horse Point, all in Utah. Many of the dramatic cliffs included within the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area are also made of Jurassic rocks. And let us not forget the actual Dinosaur National Monument, the one that actually has dinosaurs (although at last report, they did not eat park visitors).

Today's photos include a parting shot of the Chinle Formation at Petrified Forest National Park, simply because I came across it in a lost file and liked it, and a picture from near the head of the Schafer Trail in Canyonlands National Park, which is cutting across ledges of the Kayenta Formation as it prepares to plunge down the Wingate cliffs to the White Rim, discussed in a previous post.

The Schafer Trail leads to the White Rim Trail, which winds for a hundred miles or so through the heart of Canyonlands National Park. It is one of the life-list goals that I haven't accomplished yet. It pretty much requires at least two days to travel, and three or four days by bike. The Schafer Trail was originally carved by cattlemen and improved by uranium miners (they worked pretty hard...).

So, why the dramatic colorful cliffs? Something important had changed, causing the Triassic floodplains to disappear. The silts and clays and river channels were replaced by desert dune sands, which quite often form prominent cliffs when hardened into solid rock. The deserts formed because Pangea had begun to break apart, and North America was now moving northwest, into the subtropics where the prevailing air circulation results in dry conditions. We see a similar situation in the Middle East and Sahara Deserts today.

Time Beyond Imagining - A Brief History of the Colorado Plateau: Into the Triassic

The first period in the Mesozoic Era is the Triassic, which lasted from about 245 to around 200 million years ago. The world's continents had been combined into the supercontinent Pangea, and the biosphere had just been subjected to the worst extinction event ever recorded in earth history, with something like 95% of all species wiped out. It is as if the world were starting over, with a new cast of characters, and new landscapes. In the Colorado Plateau region, two formations were laid down: the Moenkopi Formation, and the Chinle Formation.

The Moenkopi was formed in river floodplains and shallow lakes, the shales and sandstones stained bright red by iron oxides. Distinctive ripplemarks, channel deposits, and mud cracks attest that the environment was in turns wet and dry, under either arid or subtropical conditions. The source of the sediments was from mountains far to the southeast, sloping towards a northwest shoreline near present-day Nevada and western Utah. Numerous trackways attest to the presence of numerous small reptiles and amphibians, but bones are rarely preserved. Great places to see the Moenkope? Try the western and southern part of Zion National Park, the basal cliffs of Capitol Reef National Park, at Cliff Dwellers near the Navajo Bridge downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, the region near Tuba City and Moenkopi, and along the Colorado River near Moab, Utah, which is the subject of today's photograph.

I am kind of cheating with today's picture. It shows the Fisher Towers along the Colorado River near Moab, Utah, along Highway 128. The La Sal Mountains form the backdrop. The Moenkopi Formation is in fact visible in the picture, but only as the darker tops of the towers, and the red slopes to the left. I consider this road to be one of the most spectacular drives in North America, especially in the evening light. I just happen to really love the picture and was looking for an excuse, any excuse, to use it!