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Vermilion Cliffs National Monument

Feb 13, 2012; 8:07 AM ET

Carry a lawn chair and a sunshade-plenty of water too-onto the sage flats just south of Arizona's Highway 89A, near the mouth of Badger Canyon. Point the chair north, toward Utah, and take a seat. Behind you, the Colorado River is trenching a deep meander from the Glen Canyon Dam toward the Grand Canyon. Directly in front of you rises a chaos of rock vaulting nearly 3,000 feet-the Vermilion Cliffs. The cliffs can hardly be said to have a face. They have innumerable faces, fractured and serrated, crosshatched and slumped. You can feel the inertia in their colossal vertical fissures. Along the lower wedding cake tiers, rubble piles resemble the sand in the bottom of an hourglass.

Miniature lakes reflect the sky in White Pocket, one of the geological spectacles on the Paria Plateau. Over the eons, groundwater has leached the color out of the Navajo sandstone here, and the weather has broken its surface into irregular polygons.

©Richard Barnes/National Geographic

And now the question: How long would you have to wait until the Vermilion Cliffs calved a boulder the size of a school bus, say? The answer: It could happen the day you sit down. But it's likelier that your descendants' descendants would still be sitting in that chair, many hundreds of generations later, waiting for the cliffs to crumble a little more. The rock is ancient, and so are the traces of erosion.

Millions of years ago, the spot where you're sitting would have been buried under the exposed layering of the present-day cliffs, under strata now called Moenkopi, Chinle, Moenave, Kayenta, and Navajo, each striation differing in color and resistance to erosion. The Paria Plateau has been retreating northwestward for eons, and these vivid cliffs mark its progress to date.

In the Coyote Buttes, a natural column of rock called a hoodoo and nicknamed the Totem Pole towers against star tracks, revealing the passing of time along its banded length like the rings of a tree.

©Richard Barnes/National Geographic

It's hard to believe that a national monument girded by towering cliffs-their color burning through the spectrum as the day advances-could be so little known. Yet few people have heard of the place, apart from one or two of its famous features. One reason is that Vermilion Cliffs National Monument is upstaged by its neighbors, which include some of the most famous national parks and monuments in the United States: Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon, and more.

Sinuous lines of color swirl through the Wave, the monument's most famous landform. Flash floods carved this passage through petrified sand dunes, exposing the iron-rich bands.

©Richard Barnes/National Geographic

Another reason is the ruggedness of the terrain. Though located only a few miles from Lake Powell and its legions of pleasure craft, the 300,000 acres encompassed by the monument are no place for the fainthearted or unprepared. "Exit the car, enter the food chain," quipped one official with the Bureau of Land Management, which administers the monument. The predators here are sun, heat, thirst, ignorance, and isolation. (Also rattlesnakes and scorpions.) There are almost no marked trails, only a few signposts, and none of the assurances, warnings, or rangers found in national parks. Here your cell phone doesn't work, you camp where you can, and the only water is what you carry.

Continue the story on National Geographic Magazine. The story and photos can be found in the February 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.

By Verlyn Klinkenborg, Photograph by Richard Barnes

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