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SCENE
FROM ABOVE -
Aerial Views of the Colorado
Plateau
by Thomas Wiewandt
NOTE: this exhibit
appeared in September 2001. Click
here to visit the current
showcase.
All other
exhibits: Click
here to access
Please
click on one of the following thumbnails to see a larger
image. Use the Back button in your browser to return to this
screen and select another image.
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Shiprock,
New Mexico
Jutting 1,800 feet (550 m) above the plains of
northwestern New Mexico, Shiprock dominates the
landscape for miles around. What we see today is an
ancient plug of lava that once filled the throat of
a volcano. In Navajo legend, Shiprock is
Sa-bit-tai-e, the rock with wings, a great bird
that brought people to this land from the north. In
another version, the Twin War Gods, great heroes of
the Navajo, killed giants that inhabited the area
long ago; Shiprock is the proof&emdash;the
congealed blood of those giants.
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Volcanic
Dike + Shiprock, New Mexico
A five-mile-long (8-km) wall of volcanic
rock&emdash;a dike&emdash;extends from Shiprock.
When Shiprock Volcano was alive, the force of
explosive eruptions fractured the surrounding
bedrock; and radiating fissures filled with molten
lava. Their exposed remains cut vertically through
horizontal layers of rock, like a knife stuck in a
layer cake. Because the volcanic rock was harder
than the soft shale that once encased it, these
mysterious features have remained standing long
after the rest has worn away.
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Sunset
Crater Volcano, Arizona
This giant cinder cone is the centerpiece of Sunset
Crater Volcano National Monument. In A.D.1064,
earthquakes rumbled on the east side of San
Francisco Mountain in northern Arizona. Then, one
morning, the ground split apart. Native Americans
fled the area as fiery rocks shot into the air and
sluggish streams of lava crept over the land.
Sunset Crater Volcano gradually took shape. It may
have taken less than ten years to form the colorful
thousand-foot-tall (300-m) cinder cone we see
today. And when the eruption ended, the people
returned to rebuild their homes on top of the
cinders. Cinders rich in oxidized iron and sulfur
give the cone its permanent "sunset" glow.
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"Meteor"
Crater, Arizona
When large chunks of extraterrestrial rock slam
into the Earth, meteorite craters are born; and
Arizona’s was the world’s first to be
identified as an impact crater. Though small
compared to some craters, the depression is vast
enough to accommodate 20 football fields.
Scientists calculate that a 63,000-ton nickel-iron
rock the size of a small house crashed here about
50,000 years ago; and its main mass vaporized on
impact. Rocks from space that reach the ground are
called meteorites; those that burn up in the
atmosphere as they fall are meteors. Meteors
brighten the night sky for a brief moment as
"falling stars," and most are tiny, about the size
of a grain of sand. To Chumash tribes of southern
California, a meteor was a person's soul on its way
to the after-life.
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Edge of the
Moenkopi Plateau, Northern Arizona.
Golden and pink-hued sandstones, widespread across
the Colorado Plateau, are ancient dunes that tell
of a time when the region was even more arid than
today, similar perhaps to the Sahara Desert. About
170 million years ago, these dunes were buried and
cemented into place by solutions of minerals that
percolated down between the sand grains. Today,
weathering releases ancient quartz sand from these
petrified dunes to be reworked and sculpted by the
wind.
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Winter
Morning, Monument Valley, Arizona/Utah
Scenic mesas, buttes, and pinnacles abound in
Monument Valley, seemingly fixed and perfected; but
geologically no landscape will ever be
“finished.” Plateaus&emdash;vast,
elevated expanses of land bordered on at least one
side by steep cliffs&emdash;erode away to become
mesas, discrete flat-topped landforms that rise
above the surrounding plain or valley floor. They
maintain this shape because a mesa's tabletop, the
cap rock, is more resistant to erosion than the
rocks beneath. But mesas do weaken around the
edges, and through undercutting, rock fractures and
falls. As erosion continues, a mesa will eventually
reach the proportions of a butte, when it becomes
narrower than it is tall. As it shrinks further,
often all that remains is a slender stone monument,
a spire, a pinnacle. These stone sentinels, too,
will crumble someday and join the rippling red sand
on the valley floor.
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Broken
Shadow, Monument Valley, Arizona.
About 10 years ago, I was invited by colleague
Walter Arnell to assist as second cameraman in the
completion of a film&emdash;BALCONY IN THE
SKY&emdash;which features hot air balloon
adventures on three continents: Europe, Africa, and
North America. With permission from the Navajo
Nation, our team launched several balloons near
John Ford’s Point (by Mitchell Mesa and the
Three Sisters pinnacles) in Monument Valley. This
was my first time aloft in a balloon, and floating
within this exquisite earth-scene was beyond
compare. Our photography was choreographed by the
Wind God, fickle and often unreceptive to our
wishes. And as we discovered during one difficult
landing, when wind takes command, a touch-down
quite literally becomes a drag, transforming the
passenger basket into a sand scoop.
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“Indian
Blanket,” the Raplee Anticline, Utah
North of Monument Valley near Mexican Hat, layers
of up-folded, twisted rock form Raplee Anticline.
Even solid rock&emdash;under slow, steady
pressure&emdash;can bend and fold like taffy.
Locals call this colorful tapestry the “Indian
Blanket,” and sandstone layers that have
eroded into chevron
patterns&emdash;flatirons&emdash;suggest those
primitive appliances used by early pioneer
women.
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Rainbow
Bridge, Utah
Natural bridges span watercourses&emdash;they are
carved by running streams or intermittent runoff.
Rainbow Bridge, the world's largest, stretches 275
feet (84 m) and soars 290 feet (88 m) above the
canyon floor in Utah's Rainbow Bridge National
Monument. This park shares boundaries with Glen
Canyon National Recreation Area and the Navajo
Nation and can be easily accessed by boat across
Lake Powell.
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Lake Powell,
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
Mostly in Utah, this wonderland of colorful
sandstone cradles Lake Powell, the second largest
man-made lake in America, formed in 1964 with the
completion of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado
River. Glen Canyon Dam is only one of 16 major dams
and 50 smaller dams engineered to detain and divert
water from the Colorado River and its tributaries.
None of the dams is a permanent feature of the
landscape however&emdash;no dam is.
Long before people populated the world, great lava
dams in the western end of Grand Canyon blocked the
flow of the Colorado River. Through 27 years of
study, geologists at Brigham Young University
determined that the largest lava blockade created a
lake larger than Lake Powell and Lake Mead
combined. The gargantuan waterfall that spilled
over the dam was more than 12 times higher than
Niagara Falls and five times higher than
Africa’s Victoria Falls. Erosion and the
accumulation of silt behind the dam destroyed it in
just a few thousand years; and it’s unlikely
that Glen Canyon Dam will survive in its original
form for more than a few hundred years.
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Goosenecks,
Utah
At Goosenecks State Park, near Mexican Hat, Utah,
narrow "necks" of land separate tight bends in the
San Juan River as it meanders in graceful loops
towards the Colorado River and Lake Powell. Here
the San Juan has carved a 1,000-foot-deep (300-m)
gorge and flows for nearly 6 mi (10 km) to cover
just one straight mile as the crow flies.
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Waterpocket
Fold, Utah
This enormous step-like fold in the Earth’s
crust&emdash;a sinuous 100-mile-long (160-km)
monocline&emdash;forms the backbone of Capitol Reef
National Park. Such formidable obstacles to
cross-country travel were called reefs by early
European settlers, harking back to their seafaring
days. The name waterpocket comes from the countless
potholes scoured in its sandstone terrain; the
really big potholes, known as “tanks,”
may hold water year-round.
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Waterpocket
Fold, Utah
Detail from the eastern flank of Waterpocket Fold,
Capitol Reef National Park, Utah.
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Canyon
Diablo, Northern Arizona
The shapes of canyons and gorges are determined by
the types of bedrock in which they form. Chiseled
by the Rio Diablo, a tributary of the Little
Colorado River, this V-shaped cut resulted from
erosion through relatively soft sediments,
producing gently sloping sides. In contrast, river
cuts through more solid rock, as seen in Canyon de
Chelly, for example, form U-shaped canyons with
vertical walls. In the Grand Canyon and many other
canyons on the Colorado Plateau, erosion of
alternating layers of harder and softer bedrock
creates a stair-step effect. The harder rock layers
erode into cliffs, and soft layers into slopes,
forming, in the case of the Grand Canyon, one of
the finest stair-step canyons in the
world
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Grand
Canyon, Arizona.
The Grand Canyon is a place of awesome proportions,
defying simple description. The Hualapai Indians,
who live on the canyon's south rim, tell of a great
flood that once covered the Earth, and that to
drain away the flood, a mythical hero beat the
ground with a knife and club, creating the canyon's
chasm. On seeing the Grand Canyon for the first
time, most visitors suppose that the Colorado River
must once have been far larger than it is today,
perhaps as wide as the canyon itself. Not so, but
how did this great gorge, a mile deep and roughly
11 miles (18 km) wide, come to be?
Water and gravity are the main forces that have
carved the Grand Canyon. As earth movements forced
the Colorado Plateau to rise to its present
elevation, the Colorado River began slicing into
its cracked and faulted surface. The young river
wore away a narrow strip scarcely wider than
itself. Over the past 10 million years, right up to
the present, the canyon has been widening by the
countless tributaries and gullies that form on its
sides. Cliff walls gradually crumble and fall,
accelerated by freezing and thawing&emdash;when
water freezes in crevices, it expands, forcing
rocks apart. As heavy rains wash this rocky debris
into the river, it is then carried downstream.
Shortly before Glen Canyon Dam was completed in
1964, the Colorado River carried nearly
half-a-million tons of sediment and rocky debris
through the Grand Canyon every day. Put another
way, large (five-ton) dump trucks filled with this
same debris would be speeding by at a rate of one
per second.
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Havasu
Canyon, Arizona
For about 700 years, in this remote canyon, the
Havasupai&emdash;people of the blue-green
water&emdash;have made their home beside an
enchanting creek that drains into the Grand Canyon.
This is a place of mysterious beauty, a wonderland
of mineral dams and draperies, waterfalls, and
hanging gardens that nourish body and soul. In this
photograph, Mooney Falls can be seen in the
foreground and Havasu Falls behind. The Native
American village of Supai lies two miles farther
upstream.
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Note:
For best viewing, set your monitor to High Color or True
Color (Thousands or Millions of Colors on MacOS) and
1024x768 pixels. These images have been carefully prepared
with a Gamma of 2.2 using the BruceRGB color space. This
should work well with high-quality Windows monitors. If you
are a MacOS user, set your Adobe Gamma control panel to
"Windows Default" or, at the last resort, choose the sRGB
calibrated profile in the Color section of your Monitors
control panel.
Please
note: All images and text featured in the "SCENE FROM
ABOVE &endash; Aerial Views of the Colorado Plateau."
showcase are Copyright © 2001 Thomas Wiewandt, all
rights reserved. This visual and written material is
protected by U.S. and international copyright laws and may
not be used or reproduced without permission. For licensing
and usage information, please contact Thomas Wiewandt at
tom@wildhorizons.com.
To see
more of this artist's work visit www.wildhorizons.com
About
the Photographer: Thomas Wiewandt
Photographer
and ecologist Thomas Wiewandt blends art and science to
reveal the mystery, beauty, and complexity of the natural
world. His films for the National Geographic Society and the
BBC have earned him an Emmy Nomination in cinematography, a
Gold Apple Award, and four Cine Golden Eagles; and his
children's book Hidden Life of the Desert (Random
House/Crown, 1990) made the John Burroughs List of
Outstanding Nature Books for Young Readers. His work has
also been featured in many books, calendars, and magazines
worldwide, including Audubon, Arizona Highways,
Smithsonian, National Wildlife, Geo, and publications by
the National Geographic Society.
Tom Wiewandt holds degrees in zoology and ecology (MS,
University of Arizona; PhD, Cornell), and serves on the IUCN
Species Survival Commission for endangered iguanas. He lives
in the desert foothills west of Tucson. His new book, THE
SOUTHWEST INSIDE OUT, grew from more than a decade of
leading photographic workshops and natural history tours in
the Southwest.
To
view more of his images, please visit Thomas
Wiewandt Gallery
at www.wildhorizons.com
Find photos of the
Colorado Plateau in Land
of the Canyons,
the Photo Trip USA landscape photography guide book.
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