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.

Dreams of Summer: Your Time Machine Malfunctioned. Where and When Are You?

The DeLorean was working just fine when you entered Oct. 21, 2015 and hit 88 miles per hour, but you must have hit one of the gravitational waves they just discovered (that's the rumor anyway), and the car went careening through time and space. You land and when you open the door, this is the scene that greets you. And there's no Yoda, and no Luke Skywalker either (how many movie references can I squeeze in tonight?).

So, where and when are you?

A few clues: It's an American national park, and the park doesn't look much like this at all any more...

We are continuing on our journey of last summer...answers will be forthcoming!

Dreams of Summer: The Bad Star Strikes! What happened at Canyon Diablo 50,000 Years Ago

It might be heresy for me to say it, but there are some places where the geology appears to be kind of...monotonous. Flatlands covered by soils are sometimes not all that interesting. I can even be accused of thinking this way about my very own home valley, the Great Valley of California. I've spent a long time teaching my students that our valley isn't actually boring at all. It's just that the best parts are beneath the surface.

Just the same, parts of the Colorado Plateau can be a bit monotonous too. The region between Flagstaff and Holbrook is a case in point. There just isn't much to see as you travel east on Interstate 40 except for the San Francisco Peaks Volcanic Field receding in the distance. The sage and grass-covered plains don't offer much in the way of interesting sights. But there is one really big exception. At Canyon Diablo there are some hills visible south of the highway that seem a bit out of place. They aren't high, but there is nothing like them elsewhere in the area.

Disasters happen. Sometimes, the nature of the disaster is predictable, as when one sees a river rising prior to flooding. A volcano that is shaking and producing ash suggests that an evacuation might be smart. We had just left such a place a few hours earlier, at Wupatki and Sunset Crater National Monuments. Sometimes disasters happen, and there's simply no way to be warned.

50,000 years ago, this barren plain was slightly less barren. The region was a savanna/woodland populated by horses, bison, antelope, sloths, and mammoths. They were hunted by American Lions, Sabertooth Cats, Dire Wolves and Cave Bears. The sky lit up, maybe for a moment brighter than the sun. The incoming meteor would not have appeared to move across the sky, because it was headed directly at this spot, at a speed estimated between 28,000-45,000 mph. Maybe the light would have grown in brightness and in size, but there were only a few seconds to respond. And what to do? There was nowhere to run. The chunk of rock was about 160 feet across when it impacted with the surface. The explosion was comparable to a large atomic explosion. The resulting crater was about 3,900 feet (1,200 meters) in diameter, and some 570 feet deep (170 meters). The chunk of iron and nickle was obliterated into small bits (in the early years efforts were made to drill for the large chunk thought to be buried within the crater). The largest piece found so far is the Holsinger Meteorite, which weighs 639 kilograms (1,409 lb).

The Holsinger Meteorite at the Meteor Crater Museum

The word "disaster" has an interesting etymology. It literally translates as "bad star". Meteors may be called falling stars, but they are made of the leftovers from the formation of the Solar System. On the other hand, the raw materials of meteorites, the iron, nickle and other elements, were forged in the core of gigantic stars, so in a sense it is fair to think of a meteorite as a "bad star".

A large impact can be a horrific disaster. A few years back in 2013, astronomers were monitoring an asteroid chunk that was going to make a close pass by Earth, but that same day a different chunk several yards across hit the atmosphere from another direction. It exploded with the strength of a large atomic bomb, shattering thousands of windows in the Russian town of Chelyabinsk. It was about 65 feet (20 meters across). If such a chunk hit the surface near a city, the effects would be incalculable. A large strike in the oceans has the potential to produce destructive tsunamis. A meteorite several miles wide probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and around 60% of all species of life known from 65 million years ago.

In the big picture, Meteor Crater was a localized event. It destroyed life over an area of 100 square miles (260 square kilometers) or more. And yet the scale of the hole is hard to appreciate. Look at the white patch in the bottom of the crater in either of the pictures above. The spots are fenced off, and the owners have placed a life-sized astronaut for scale. Can you see the astronaut below?

The crater is privately held, but the owners have done a nice job of preserving the crater and have constructed an extensive museum and viewing area. They are very accommodating for geology field trips if you contact them in advance. For more information about visiting the crater, check out http://www.meteorcrater.com/.

Unexpected Events of the Day: Floods and Foxes

There were some pleasant sights to be had today. They didn't seem at all related at first (foxes and floods), but in a way they were.

We've had rain, finally, in amounts that might make some small dent in the drought that has plagued California for nearly five years. I was headed into work and crossed Dry Creek in the Waterford area. Something was different: the creek was flooding. Not a vast flood, not one likely to produce widespread damage, but still, the banks and some of the oak tree trunks were underwater. It was a shock to see so much water after literally years of dry channels under this bridge.

Dry Creek (who comes up with these imaginative names?) heads in the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevada, so it is never fed by melting snowpack. Peak runoff occurs instead during intense rainstorm events. The creek flows into the Central Valley near Waterford and eventually joins the Tuolumne River at Modesto, for a total length of about 60 miles. It no doubt earned the name "Dry" a century ago, but in more recent years water flowed in the creek most of the time due to irrigation runoff. And during the drought of the last four years, it has been dry for months at a time, once again earning its name.

There have not been many floods during the drought years. The soil has been so parched that what little rain fell soaked into the ground, leaving little for surface runoff. The 2015-2016 water year has been different. November and December provided above-normal rainfall (and a Sierra snowpack), so when the January storms hit this week (the first attributed to El Nino), the ground was pretty well saturated. Close to 2 inches fell over the region on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the river peaked today at almost 1,000 cubic feet per second. As can be seen on the flood hydrograph below, the river will recede relatively quickly to tens of cubic feet per second within a day or so.

The last time Dry Creek really caught my attention this way was back in March 2011, when the discharge was around three times higher than it was today, at 3,000 cubic feet per second. Compare the difference in the picture below, taken from the same bridge. The river was even higher in the El Nino year of 1997, and with a probability of once in 500 years the creek may produce flows as great as 18,500 cubic feet per second. That would be something to see, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Dry Creek in March 2011

The other unexpected event of the day was seeing a Red Fox out my office window. The fox lives on our campus so I've seen it two or three times before. It was running through an area slated to become an outdoor educational area for our Great Valley Museum of Natural History. The lab will emphasize the natural vegetation and animals of the valley. It was nice to see nature getting a bit of a head start!

Seeing these two different things reminded me that there is a small remnant of a natural ecosystem left in our valley, one that can never be completely obliterated by dams, farms, and cities. We can never truly control the rivers or droughts, and the tattered remnants of the original ecosystem will for the most part adapt and survive our invasion, albeit in small pockets here and there.

Dreams of Summer: Living Under the Threat of Destruction at Wupatki

The San Francisco Peaks, a gigantic stratovolcano, rises beyond the ruins of the Citadel at Wupatki National Monument.

There is a huge difference between living close to the Earth without advanced technology and living in a highly technological society. Well, lots of differences actually, but today I'm thinking about living in ignorance of geological hazards. The thought arose because of our visit to the rather fantastic pueblos of Wupatki National Monument in the region east of Grand Canyon. There are lots of archaeological remains of the people who lived in the Colorado Plateau over the last 12,000 years, but few of them are as spectacular as the pueblos that were built between 1,100 and 1,285 AD. Many, maybe most, were fortresses. Some of these people seemed to be living in fear.

The Citadel ruin at Wupatki is built on the eroded remains of a basalt lava flow.

There has been a mountain of speculation about why the Ancestral Pueblo people and other cultures took such a defensive posture in their architecture. It is well known that most of the Colorado Plateau was abandoned in the late 13th century, and the hypotheses are numerous. There were a series of droughts, including a 25-year-long monster. These was evidence of warfare in a few places. Soils had washed away in many places. There could have been religious or cultural forces in place that caused migrations. It's an interesting issue that will keep archaeologists busy for a long time.

The view of the San Francisco Peaks from the top of the Citadel ruin.

Archaeology played a special part of our summer field studies journey across the Colorado Plateau. Half our students were majors in the subject (or possessed a lot of interest in the subject) who were learning geology. And our geologists were learning archaeology. I've been doing joint trips with our anthropology professors for a decade now, and we find a lot of common scientific ground as we travel through this fascinating landscape.

The hundred room pueblo at Wupatki

Wupatki National Monument preserves structures and sites of numerous ancient cultures, but the most visible were built by the Sinagua people, whose descendants still live in the region (the Hopi, Zuni,  Pima, Tohono O'odham, and Yavapai people). The region was a crossroads of sorts, and direct evidence suggests habitation as early as 500 AD. People lived at the site for 600 years, perhaps never suspecting that they were living on volcanic ground.

That changed in 1085 AD or so when Sunset Crater, a basaltic cinder cone, erupted, sending out lava flows, cinders and ash over a region totaling about 800 square miles (the longest lava flow was 6 miles long). Lava flows covered several villages.

It's possible that some cultural recognition of volcanism existed in the stories and traditions of the people who lived in the path of destruction, but maybe not. Can you imagine the impact of seeing a volcanic eruption in progress for the first time as a people? What kind of stories would be told explaining the phenomenon? Many of the old ruins are built on older volcanic deposits. Did the logical thinkers among the people recognize in a flash the origin of the ground and rock on which their homes were constructed?

In any case, the region was abandoned for a few decades, but settlers came back, finding that the ash had rejuvenated the soils. A gift of the gods? One wonders. They lived and built homes in the region for two more centuries before leaving the land for other places. Although the abandonment was part of a regional pattern, one can wonder if those two centuries included a healthy fear of the fires from down below in the crust?

Sunset Crater, the youngest volcano in the San Francisco Peaks Volcanic Field. It erupted about 1085 AD

The Sinagua people of Wupatki may or may not have known about volcanoes prior to 1085 AD, but in our highly technological society, we understand a great deal about volcanoes, and geology has provided us the tools to figure out the probabilities of future eruptions. Likewise, we are able to calculate to a reasonable degree the probabilities of earthquakes within given time frames (over a 30 year period, for instance). We can calculate flood probabilities before a particular storm arrives.  But that also means we live with a certain amount of fear. This is good in the sense of allowing the society to prepare. But fear can also be manipulated.

I can imagine a shaman or other kind of leader of the Sinagua threatening his or her people with the return of the legendary fire gods of the volcano to achieve some nefarious end. Can we imagine anyone who would be tempted to manipulate scientific knowledge into a fear of volcanoes (can you say "SUPERVOLCANO" nice and loud?) or earthquakes (can you say CASCADIA?) to achieve influence and power?

Source: http://www.cosmostv.org/2014/08/yellowstone-super-volcanoresent-rumors.html (actually, this is good article)

Nah, I'm sure no one would fan the flames of fear in modern society...the internet and other mass media has brought knowledge and wisdom to us all.

Dreams of Summer: If there's a Little Colorado River, is there a Little Grand Canyon?

In the last post, I noted that there is a lot more to the Colorado Plateau than the Grand Canyon. The Canyon (it just has to be capitalized) is more than 200 miles long, but it cuts through just a part of the Colorado Plateau Province, a vast region encompassing 130,000 square miles (337,000 sq km), and containing 27 national parks and monuments. The Grand Canyon is a starting point, a jumping-off place so to speak, for learning the complex geological story of the American West. Our field studies course would eventually include five states beyond California.

As we left Grand Canyon National Park, we followed Highway 64 east onto Navajo Reservation lands near Cameron. The geographic region is known as the Navajo Section, and is generally lower than the high plateau that contains the Grand Canyon. For the most part the section contains flat barren badlands, although parts are very colorful (this area is sometimes called the Painted Desert). There is an exception to the flatness, where the Little Colorado River approaches the Grand Canyon. That was our next stop.

The Little Colorado River is by watershed area one of the most important tributaries of the Colorado River, but the area it drains is so arid that the river contributes little overall to the discharge of the main river. The smaller river is actually dry along most sections for most of the year. The exceptions are during the spring runoff, and during the summer monsoons. Flash floods on the small river can be monstrous. Our local river back home, the Tuolumne, is considered a fair-sized river (by California standards). It reaches flood stage at a discharge of 9,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). The highest flow ever recorded on the Tuolumne was around 70,000 cfs. During a flood in 1923, the Little Colorado River recorded 120,000 cubic feet per second!

So, as I asked in the title, if there is a Little Colorado River, is there a little Grand Canyon? In a manner of speaking, the answer is certainly yes. The lower part of the Little Colorado where it approaches the main river is a stupendous gorge 3,000 feet deep. If the Grand Canyon didn't exist, the canyon of the Little Colorado River would probably be a national park all its own. That said, the gorge of the Little Colorado River wouldn't exist without the Grand Canyon nearby. It was the rapid downcutting of the Grand Canyon that caused the gradient of the Little Colorado River to increase and carve downwards. The nature of the river canyon tells us it once flowed over a relatively flat floodplain. The evidence lies in the presence of entrenched river meanders.

Goosenecks of the San Juan River in southern Utah

Meanders are the characteristic loops and bends of a river flowing over a relatively flat surface. They are very common on rivers like the Mississippi. If the land rises, the river speeds up and starts to erode the channel downward while maintaining the shape of the meander. Eventually the river erodes a deep canyon that has intricate loops. The lower reaches of the Little Colorado has a lot of them. The San Juan River in southern Utah has also done the same thing, and a spot called the Goosenecks provides a bird's-eye view. I've included a shot of the Goosenecks above.

A distant view of the canyon of the Little Colorado River from Highway 64

If the Grand Canyon is awesome by virtual of distance and open space (a yawning chasm a mile deep and 10-15 miles wide), the canyon of the Little Colorado River is awesome by intimacy, in an odd way. The canyon where we visited had vertical walls a thousand feet (~300 meters) high, but was almost narrow enough to fling a pebble across (it least it looks that way). When you stand at certain points, you are looking straight down on the the river, as can be seen in the picture below. There aren't a lot of places where one can do this sort of thing.
It had been years since I had seen water flowing in the Little Colorado River, but last summer was remarkable in terms of the monsoons. They began early and produced a number of flash floods throughout the region. When we arrived, the river was flowing, although the term "river" barely applied to the viscous mixture of mud and silt in the canyon below.

Mouth of the Little Colorado River in Grand Canyon

The mud certainly influences the Colorado River. The Little Colorado River may not provide prodigious amounts of water to the system, but it is one of only two major sources of sediment to the river now that Glen Canyon Dam prevents mud from flowing downstream of the reservoir. When we rafted to the mouth of the Little Colorado in 2013, the main river was almost clear, but silt was pouring from the tributary. For a short distance, the river was bi-colored, but within a mile or so the water and silt were thoroughly mixed and remained that way for the remainder of our trip, another nine days!

Two rivers in one, the green Colorado, and the brown Little Colorado

The Little Colorado River is a fascinating part of the plateau country. It gets lost in the broader scenery at times, but is well worth the bit of effort to explore a few of its secrets.

Dreams of Summer and Southwest Travels: Grand Stories Exposed in a Canyon

No one place on Earth can ever tell the whole story of the Earth. But there are lots of places that tell part of the story. That's the fact that makes geology one of the most fascinating sciences there is. It's an incredible detective story that must be pieced together from disparate bits and fragments that must be correlated and organized into a coherent narrative. Some places tell more of the story than others, and some places do it in a fashion that is awe-inspiring. Grand Canyon is one of those places. It is one of the greatest places on the entire planet to teach the basic principles of geology. The geology is in your face, exposed perfectly, largely free of soil and vegetation, and yet the canyon is still a place of mystery and unsolved questions.

We are in the depths of winter this week, so I've been traveling back through the photo archives for a look at warmer times, our field studies trip to the Colorado Plateau last summer. We spent two days on the South Rim of Grand Canyon, which barely gave us time to scratch the surface of the fascinating place.

For me, a nice moment came while staring into the depths of the canyon from Lipan Point. The view, seen in the first picture, reveals a labyrinth of tributary canyons, but the Colorado River is visible in the center of the photo. I zoomed in (photo two). What's remarkable about this one spot is that it is one of very few flat open areas on the floor of the Grand Canyon. It's called the Unkar Delta, and I have wonderful memories of an exploration there two years ago.

The "delta" (really kind of an alluvial fan) formed as debris poured onto the canyon floor from Unkar Creek. It is one of the few arable spots in the depths of the canyon, and the Ancestral Puebloan people utilized the soils to grow food there for more than three hundred years, from about 850 to 1200 AD. We stopped there during my one and only rafting trip down the Colorado River 813 years later in 2013. I wrote about the spot in my blog series "Into the Great Unknown". It was around 112 degrees as I explored the ruins that dot the delta, while the rafters scouted Unkar Rapid. The rapid is one of the first of the big rapids one encounters in the canyon, rated as high as 7 out of 10 on the difficulty scale (we made it through without incident other than getting wet, which was a relief in the sweltering heat).

The deep maroon color of the canyon walls at Unkar Delta reveals an interesting period of the Earth's history. The rock is part of a layer called the Dox Formation, which was deposited in estuaries, tidal flats, and deltas during the Mesoproterozoic era, just over 1.1 billion years ago. The rock is mostly composed of easily eroded shale and siltstone, which explains the open aspect of this part of the canyon. The Dox also contains fossils.

Life existed on Earth a billion years ago, but it was only of the simplest forms, algae and bacteria. The algae grew on pebbles in tidal flats, and as the tides ebbed and flowed, mud stuck to the algae-covered surfaces eventually forming layered structures called stromatolites. The stromatolites seen in parts of the Dox formation are among the oldest fossils found in the American west.

The Dox is part of a larger sequence of tilted layers in the Grand Canyon called the Grand Canyon Supergroup. The Supergroup is upwards of 12,000 feet thick, more than twice the depth of the canyon itself. How do the rocks fit in the canyon? They've been tilted and subsequently eroded. The exposures can be followed for a number of miles along the river in the depths of the canyon, but they have otherwise been covered by 4,000 feet of later (Paleozoic) sediments deposited between 540 and 250 million years ago. The rocks are fascinating to study, but the only way to do it is to hike to the bottom of the canyon, or raft the river (I've had the privilege of doing both). They can easily be seen from viewpoints in the eastern part of the canyon on both the north and south rims.

The Grand Canyon region exposes more than sedimentary rocks. There are numerous faults and folds throughout, including the unique monoclines, folds that are draped over step faults. One can be seen as the dark ridge in the middle of the photograph below.  Volcanism is a part of the story of the Grand Canyon as well. The peaks on the skyline in the same picture are the San Francisco Peaks, a group of cinder cones and a very large stratovolcano. Humphreys Peak, the high point on the rim, is the highest mountain in Arizona at 12,633 feet (3,851 meters). Prior to extensive erosion, the peaks may have exceeded 16,000 feet. The origin of the this massive volcano is somewhat enigmatic. The volcanic field is youngest on the eastern side, suggesting a possible origin as a hot spot in the mantle.

The volcanoes are more easily explained in the western Grand Canyon, far away from the tourist haunts. Crustal stretching has caused extensional faults to form (normal faults), allowing magma to rise from the underlying magma. Some of the lava flows spilled over the rim into the canyon, forming gigantic lava dams that produced giant lakes that extended hundreds of miles upstream.

The Paleozoic rocks (541-251 million years) of the Grand Canyon are mostly horizontal layers, and include limestone, sandstone, siltstone, and shale recording the transgression and regression of shallow seas across the region. A mountain-building episode took place in the region around 300 million years ago. The bright red and brown sediments of the Supai Group record the erosion of the Ancestral Rocky Mountains, and deposition in floodplains and deltas in the Grand Canyon region.

The origin of the canyon itself, and the carving of the rocks by the Colorado River perhaps are the biggest mystery for those who study the geology of the region. The river carved the canyon, but it's not entirely clear which Colorado River did the work! Different parts of the river system formed at different times, some many tens of millions of years ago, and other parts only 4 million years ago. It's a complex story, far beyond the scope of this short post, but I highly recommend the book by Wayne Ranney on the subject, available here: https://www.grandcanyon.org/shop/online-store/geology/carving-grand-canyon-evidence-theories-and-mystery-2nd-edition-wayne.

We took a break at Desert View at the east end of the canyon, and headed down the highway. There was a lot more to the Colorado Plateau than the Grand Canyon, as spectacular as it is.